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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The abstract dungeon...er, city

Just ran across this (though it's years old). I wonder if this could be profitably applied to random encounters in a city?

Abstract Dungeoneering (by the Angry GM)

The care and feeding of the cliffhanger

Watching both Supergirl and The Flash this week, I got to thinking about the difference between feeding information on an ongoing plot (Supergirl) and the cliffhanger (The Flash). There will be spoilers ahead, so get out now if you care about that.

(Actually, it's interesting to see where the shows are similar and they differ, because both deal with similar themes and have an overlapping executive. Barry is pretty consistently dealing with father issues, while Kara is dealing with her mother and her aunt. Both of them have collected this surrogate and not so surrogate family. End digression.)

My first thought was to say that one resolves the main plot and one doesn't, and that's certainly a big part of it:  Supergirl beat Reactron, but the Flash didn't beat Zoom.  We could have easily made the Flash episode into not-a-cliffhanger: Barry beats Zoom but pays the price of his powers: we've resolved the main conflict but made the main character pay a price.

Now, not resolving the main story isn't the only way to go. You can resolve the story but the new information about any plot kicks it into high gear. The audience wants to know what happens next.  A twist where they suddenly see things in a different way but where there's nowhere to go is a twist ending. The revelation at the end of The Sixth Sense closes things off, rather than opens them up.

So it's a cliffhanger if they want to know what happens next. When you dole out information about, say, a conspiracy that the Girl Scouts are involved in (thank you, JLU), it remains abstract. [1] But when it's information about a person that the players know, it is much more likely to become a cliffhanger.

Or have the information be a context shift for the character. Barry's words at the close of The Flash are a fine cliffhanger, but the same sentence spoken by, oh, Joe West wouldn't have the same impact.

1. Memo: Find out whose job it is to add fluoride to the water in areas with fluoridated water. That's the guy your supervillain wants to coerce or blackmail in order to poison the city's water supply. Even if the water flows over a bar of stannous fluoride, someone has to put that bar there.

Your superhero puzzle adventure

As I was driving in today, I realized that I don't do a lot with the traditional superhero puzzle game, where you have the nigh-unbeatable villain until you learn his secret (He's vulnerable to cheese!...yes, the lactose-intolerant villain).

In a sense, this is a puzzle adventure: you need to tease out the weakness and then use it. In a non-superhero puzzle adventure, you have other issues, but finding the right kind of stake for the vampire or figuring out the identity of the actual bad guy is the same sort of problem...yet I don't seem to have the same issue when dealing with non-superhero things.

There are a couple or three reasons for this. Most of them are just me avoiding things I'm bad at.

• Superheroes punch.
• Character reuse
• Making it discoverable
• Making the final battle satisfying

Superheroes punch.

Part of it is that in this genre, combat is most of it. Not research, not character interaction, but punching. The superhero solution to a lot of problems is to punch it until it falls down. ("World hunger? What do I punch?") As GMs, there's a tendency to personify problems as particular villains. (This can be kind of tricky; I tend to avoid it.)

So there's a tendency for the adventure to be all about combat. That's certainly where an improvised adventure will go for me.  It doesn't have to be that way, but that's certainly where I'll go. I have to think about the adventure first in order to avoid it.

Character reuse.

Once you have had your players discover the weakness, it's still there. The character is a one-shot, which offends me. Historically there's a precedent for one-shot characters--I do not think that there's really enough attention paid to the fact that comics were (and are) a business. Certainly, the DC model was kids where the audience turned over every four or five years. You tore through a tremendous number of villains, and some of them were pretty awful, just because you had dozens of comics coming out a month, each with two or three stories. They couldn't all be gems. (In fact, I suspect that pressure was part of the reason that Gardner Fox came up with the multiverse idea: he'd written Flash comics in the 1940s, he had a tremendous backlog of characters, so putting Barry in that world might have been easy for him.) This view is also informed by something Alfred Bester once wrote about his time in comics. But for every multiverse, there's The Eraser, who even as a child I thought had a ridiculous getup.

There are ways to bring back a gimmick character.

• The character has fixed whatever weakness the PCs discovered. Usually the fix introduces a new problem, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it heralds a new tougher version of the villain. A lot of supervillain reiventions are like this--the secret of the Moon Mirror is retrieved by some other person, who says, "Hey, his mistake was so-and-so, and I'm not going to make that mistake."
• The character has a new gimmick based on the same theme. I always feel obliged to figure out why the character doesn't just go public with the invention and make money off it, at least until they've made the transition to obsessed-enemy status.
• Sometimes you bring back the character as part of the supporting cast, no longer a villain but a resource. He or she becomes a court-ordered ward of the hero, a stoolie, an inventing assistant, whatever.

Making the weakness discoverable.

This is a mechanical storytelling thing.

It is a genre thing that the obvious weakness isn't appropriate or isn't exploited. The Flash never takes Captain Cold's gun away. (Well, almost never. Side note: I was never a big Flash reader, simply because during the heyday of my comics renaissance, the 1980s, every Flash issue seemed to have something to do with the death of Iris Allen: either his new girlfriend looked just like her or he was off the rails because of her death, or she was in the future. It was like there was no fun in it at that period. I know a lot of people treasure their memories of that run, but to me it just seemed depressing and confusing, and hard to get into. End digression.)  And, when you think about it, there's a difference between a guy with a gun and a villain. The first is a threat until you take away the gun. The second is a threat even if you take away the gun. Maybe that's a touchstone you can use: a guy with a gun is an environmental thing: you don't choose to have a make-out session in Crime Alley because there are bad guys there; however, a villain finds you wherever you're having your makeout session.

Anyway, making the weakness something that players can discover and use is a big thing. I have invented aspects on the fly that can be used, but that always seems like cheating to me. Having laid clues before-hand seems fairer...but I know they can miss it. I know as a player, I totally missed something that I should have caught. I'm thinking of a couple of particular instances, because Jim Gardner is very good at making sure the clues are out there. (The reveal of Hexshark, one of his villains, had clues that were obvious in retrospect, but it was a total surprise to me.)

So when you're thinking about weaknesses, you have to think about how the players will discover them. And when they miss that clue, how will you show it to them?

On an episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff they used an example of monsters who were powerless against silver, and they had all sorts of examples about showing that the monster couldn't affect silver, and I recommend it to you (they were talking about varying monster powers), but the mechanical part of inserting the clues still seems problematic to me. Obviously, the villain picks a crime site without that weakness.

Still, if you're doing a puzzle adventure like this, you kinda have to structure things to lay the clues down. So the structure seems to be something like...

1. Original meeting: villain gets away with everything because the weakness isn't present at the crime scene.
2. Next meeting: the PCs bring their A game and because of that, the fight goes on longer than expected and hints at the weakness.
3. Some kind of research (actual books, talking to informants or scientists) indicates what the weakness might be.
4. PCs bring the weakness, but it doesn't work. Turns out the villain has prepared for it, knowing that's the weakness.
5. PCs undo the protection for the weakness, and use it successfully.

And that is a big hint for dealing with my last problem...

Making the final battle satisfying.

The players still have to have the final battle, and in a storytelling sense it has to feel like it's actually worthwhile. If the PCs show up with insecticide and the villain Katydidn't falls down immediately, that sure sounds like someone made their "Defeat bad guy" roll instead of figuring out what to do.

Sometimes that's appropriate: sometimes the apparent bad guy is just a step on the way to the real bad guy. ("Who turned her into a giant insect?") But if you don't have that in mind, my temptation is to pull powers out of my ass.  I am ashamed to admit that this is the area where I have fudged the most in my GMing career. And that's something I want to fix.

So assuming you want the final battle to be satisfying, I can think of the following approaches.

• The PCs are subtly wrong. They still have all the ingredients, but they try the method they've worked out and it doesn't work...but the battle reveals how it should be done, and they do it.
• Using the weakness is tough. It takes effort and skill to exploit, but it shouldn't be something that can't be done multiple times (or it doesn't require a roll). A spell that can only be cast at midnight and the villain has to be present. Maybe the villain has to hear it, and part of the battle is keeping the villain from covering his/her/its ears, or just leaving. You can't knock him unconscious because he has to be able to process it.
• The villain has taken precautions against this weakness: the battle is really about undoing those precautions so you can use the weakness. I've often wondered why various Kryptonians don't fly around in an articulated lead suit. They're strong enough that it doesn't hinder them, and with all the metric tons of Kryptonite that fell to earth in the Silver Age, you'd think it would be practical. This is really a variation of the last one.
• The weakness is hard to get to. Kryptonite and magic are rare now, and the PCs don't get to them without the bad guy appearing.
• The villain has assistants; he or she is just the final capstone. 

These aren't the only ways of dealing with this, just the ones I thought of in a moment..

There's no I in Team

The first superhero game I played repeatedly was Champions. Champions, like D&D, encourages tactical play, so teams tend to have types: there's the lots-of-damage-melee guy, the damage-at-range guy, the hits-what's-hard-to-hit guy, and the oddball, who either does damage to folks the others can't touch, or has some sensory thing that the others can't duplicate, or works as a support person. Your fighter, your wizard, your rogue, and your cleric, in other words.

And in terms of gaming, that's certainly what I did for years and years and I don't even want to admit how old I am.

But that's not the way that teams work in the comics.

Teams, as I've said elsewhere, exist between one of two poles: the IP parking lot pole and the Peyton Place pole.  An IP parking lot is a place to put characters just to prove that the Intellectual Property is being used; and Peyton Place is a foment of internal passions and discord. In the first, the villain is essential; in the second, the villain is, well, secondary and exists primarily to point out character things. ("This is why our love can never work, Moonsilver: Because you were not horrified when Amy Geddon said she wanted to kill everyone and start over...")

These distinctions are hardly absolute: the deMatteis-Giffen era Justice League tweaked personalities so that the interaction of the characters was primary and the villains were secondary, but it would be hard to find a purer example of an IP parking lot than the Justice League. On the other hand, the freshly-Kickstarted Masks RPG has a set of personalities and powers are almost irrelevant: what's important to the story is how the characters are going to react.

Most traditional games approach it from the tactical end. Each character has a role. In games such as Champions, the role is about what the character does. In games such as Masks, the role is about what the character is or how he/she/it reacts. A game with random character creation is more like an IP parking lot because you have no idea what's going to show up. It might be the burrowing guy with the magic staff, the interstellar cop with the light sabre, the speedster who has trouble hitting Mach 1, and the cosmically powered witch.

I assume that most players want something in the middle. They want something that isn't just tactical, but the idea that the villain is secondary isn't quite their cup of tea either. So how do you fit them together?

If you don't know what characters you're getting, maybe the answer is to take a page from FATE (and sort of Masks): Powers are irrelevant to working together. What they have are Aspects or disadvantages. The Aspects or disadvantages are crafted to make the team work together (or to create friction while making the team work together).

For instance, the X-Men all have the mutant disadvantage. It doesn't just mean that they show up on bioscanners that the bad guys have...it also means that the world hates and fears them, that there are strong social pressures to keep them with the group. Most of the X-Men are young, so they fit into the school setting. That's an example of social pressure holding them in place, and perhaps it could be gamed that way.

Did they ever do the road trip with X-23, Sabretooth, Logan, and his son Daken all trapped in the car for a long journey? Because that's pure comic book: that's four people with essentially the same powers but different ways of reacting.

Maybe you can use something like that instead of saying, "Hey, we need an energy blaster."

Or, like, you can re-roll your character until you get an energy blaster. Whatever works for you.

The Systemless Random Hero Generator

If I were going to do a systemless random supers generator, which I'm not, I'd have them roll for a theme first. The themes would be broad; so would skills be, because it's a trope of the system that "Dr." in front of your name lets you do any science-y thing. I don't know if theme would affect the roll for origin, but it probably determines which disadvantage/quality/aspect chart you pick from/roll on.

I'd use levels something like FUDGE or FATE: everybody starts at average and we're checking the deviation.

Then attributes overall, and give them points depending on how they deviated from "Excellent" because superheroes are gorgeous and wonderful-looking by default. They get to spend the points.

Powers...the biggest default might be a pyramid of powers, maybe like the FATE skill pyramid. (Other choices would be "One-trick pony" and "Broad and shallow"). That gives you a number of powers, so you then roll to see what they are and interpret them according to the theme you already rolled. You get to chose which one is great, which is good, and so on.

Then qualities-qua-disadvantages.

A solo adventure: Gorilla My Dreams

In honour of Solo Gaming Appreciation Month... (revised as of 2020/03/30 because I reread it and had to work hard to figure some things out)

This one will use a character I already have here, Haemophile. She doesn't have any opponents, so I'll look at her Qualities, which provide surprisingly little help...Ah. Idealizes “normal.” The two possibilities that occur to me are that her opponent is Trained in some way and is planning to give everyone superpowers, or the Gorilla Grodd thing of turning everyone into apes. The first sounds more like what I just did, so we'll go with the second, and use the prime Ape X writeup.

I started this as a test of the story point system I was using and quickly abandoned that, though I did use the four stages. Instead, this adventure used the Icons rules and once the Mythic GME. As is typical with solo stuff I write, tense jumps all over the place.

For convenience, we'll put both characters here. I've slightly modified them for solo play.

Haemophile

Name		Haemophile (Chloe Grace — Birthright)
PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STA	DP
5	3	5	3	3	5	10	3
Specialties		Martial Arts (+1), Stealth (+1)
Powers		Good (5) Invisibility Great (6) Slashing Secondary effect: Incredible (7) Affliction
Qualities		Idealizes “normal” because she’s a mutant Mid-level assassin for a shadowy government agency Only she is immune to her poison

Ape X

Name		Ape X (Transformed)
PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STA
5	4	6	7	4	7	13
Specialties		Athletics (+1), Mental Resistance Expert (+2), Technology Master (+3), Wrestling (+1)
Powers		Ape senses: Poor (2) Super-senses (Enhanced Hearing, Enhanced Smell) Incredible (7) Telepathy Extra: Mental Blast
Qualities		Genius gorilla Hatred of Humans I will do what’s necessary even if my people hate me for it

Every once in a while I'll put in a status summary, like this:

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
10	3	None	13	None

Stage 1: Threat

Chloe is all about the normal, and the most mundane thing I can think of is sorting your clothes at the laundromat. So we'll start there.

The laundromat was a slice of normalcy for Chloe: it and the library were the things that kept the rich filling of weirdness from dripping and staining her... She couldn't figure out what the end of the metaphor should be, except that life was truly a weirdness sandwich. She found that last bra and threw it in the washing machine, then carefully counted out the quarters. She looked at the remainder and counted them. She wouldn't have enough to dry everything. She turned to the woman at the counter—

Everyone turned into a gorilla.

Chloe checked her arm—not hairy.

So everyone had turned into a gorilla except Chloe.

And they didn't notice. The woman (woman-gorilla) at the counter was still flipping through her tabloid.

Chloe looked around. One of the gorillas noticed her and the eyes started to widen—

And then the change flickered off. Everyone was human. The woman rubbed her eyes and went back to chatting with her friend.

And except for Chloe, no one seemed to notice.

This was something beyond her ken: either insanity or a plot. She stepped outside to a private place to make two calls. The first was to Dr. Jessop, her government psychologist. (Killing was hard for Chloe, even though it was her job.) Chloe felt out Dr. Jessop to find out if she—Chloe—was due for hallucinations.

“I think we'd better see you this afternoon. I can stay late tonight.” Dr. Jessop had a warm voice, like honey, and Chloe agreed. After that call, she tapped the phone against her thigh. Then she called her agency handler.

“Go head.” His voice was scratchy and high.

“Everyone just turned into a gorilla,” she said, without preamble. “I already called Dr. Jessop. So if I'm not crazy?”

“I didn't notice anything,” he said.

“No one did.”

He paused a moment and then gave her a name—Dr. Timothy Coop—and an address. “He does all that Kirbytech stuff for the university. He has clearance. You can talk to him.”

Chloe went to the counter. “I'm sorry, but I have to get my kid from the sitter,” she lied. “He's throwing up. My basket's right there. If someone needs the machine, I don't mind if they put the clothes in the basket.” The woman waved her hand without looking up from her tabloid.

She looked better as a gorilla, Chloe thought.

Thus endeth the threat stage. Though I introduced a couple of people the big thing the problem. So points are not as important in this stage, I think.

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
10	3	None	13	None

Stage 2. Investigation

Dr. Coop's office was cluttered, decorated with tall piles of books and printouts, and a few dusty pictures of the family. Dr. Coop was sitting at his desk between two pillars of paper and putting away a small flask.

I'm just randomly associating things with characters so that they have motivations to be involved later, if I need them.

Chloe introduced herself, using the cover name that the agency had given her. “What do you know about gorillas?”

He looked straight in her eyes. She could smell the booze. “Nothing,” he said slowly. “Biology was my wife's area.”

“Because earlier today, I saw everyone change into a gorilla.”

His shoulders sagged. “Thank god. I thought I was the only one. You're a mutant, right?”

“No, of course not,” she lied reflexively. “Why would you think that?” Chloe had known she was a mutant since she turned invisible at thirteen. The claws and the poisonous venom had only reinforced that.

“You must be latent. That's okay.” He looked behind her. “Shut the door.” She did. “I'm a mutant,” he told her. “It's a knack for technology. Put something in front of me, and let me touch it, and sooner or later I'll understand it.” He smiled tightly. “Makes me good at my field. But I was teaching a bunch of first-years today, and they all turned into gorillas.”

“So I'm not crazy.”

“Moreau ray. Obscure, but used by a villain in the early 1960s. His only affected one individual, though, and required a tremendous energy input. He stored lightning in capacitors— I digress. You haven't manifested your power?”

“I have...claws,” she admitted. The claws were itching to come out. Side effect of feeling threatened. She slid them out, and then back. Her claws looked small, no longer than the last knuckles of her fingers.

“That's not a lot.” She shrugged. “Okay. Where were you when it happened?”

“South side.”

“Then it looks like it affected at least the city, perhaps more.”

Chloe nodded and pulled out her phone again. “Can you cancel my appointment with Dr. Jessop? I'm not crazy. It looks like at least this city turned into gorillas. Check farther afield.” She put her phone down. “If the area is big enough, it's not my problem.”

“That seems rather un-hero-like.”

Chloe snorted. “Trust me, I am not a superhero.”

A light started to flash. “It's the vault,” said Dr. Coop. “I store high tech items for study, and someone's breaking into it.”

“The police—?”

“They'll be too late. Come on!”

# # #

They ran to the vault—and found a huge gorilla tearing the door from its hinges.

-I'll find it easier to look at the contents without that door,- rumbled the gorilla. They “heard” him but his lips didn't move. He glanced at both of them, and they froze, as if a force had paralyzed their bodies.

Mind Control 7 vs Willpower 5. Major success, so she's controlled for 7 pages. It's a massive success against Dr. Coop.

He left the vault with something the size of a shoebox that had a blue gem fastened on top.

-I can't risk you breaking the power source. You'll stay like that for an hour. That should be enough time.- He looked them up and down. -Interesting. You remember everyone else changing. Well. We'll have to hunt you down once I'm done.-

Chloe is going to use a Quality to try and remove the Controlled condition he has put on her. She'll use her urge to be normal, and it costs a Determination point. Fails. She'll recover in a minute, but he'll get away.

About a minute after he left, Chloe tumbled to the floor. She helped Dr. Coop and then phoned her handler again.

“No, really,” she said. “Now I have the need to know. Tell me everything in your files about the telepathic gorilla.”

# # #

They were sitting in Dr. Coop's office. She had made tea for both of them, and she pressed against the sides of her mug to keep her hands from shaking. “They claim they don't know where he came from, but he represents a troop of hyperintelligent simians.” She saw his hand tremble as he reached for his tea. “You feeling better?”

Dr. Coop grimaced. “It's still an effort to move anything. Thank you for the tea.”

She shrugged. “We were paralyzed by a telepathic gorilla. A cup of tea can't hurt. Hell, I'd drink if there were booze handy.”

Dr. Coop reached into his desk and held out the silver flask. She waved it away.

“I think I have to be alert. What was the box thing he took?”

“I don't know yet. It came out of a crashed spaceship during the Kootlismik invasion. He, the ape, implied that it was a power source, and that's probably correct—I just haven't got to it yet because I have other things with more urgent deadlines.”

“It takes you time? I thought you just, you know, understood things.”

“I always check. I'm afraid that I'll interpret my understanding wrong because I lack the background. A radio is a radio, but if you don't know about radio waves, it's a murder weapon: you drop it in the bathtub with someone and it kills them.”

Chloe nodded. “But you think this thing is a power source?”

Dr. Coop said, “I think he burned out his previous power source. Check for standard power sources. See if any of them went dead.” Chloe just looked at him. “Can't you—?”

“I barely graduated high school,” she lied again. She had never graduated high school, and a GED wasn't really useful for an assassin.

“Right.” He sat down at his computer. “My theory is that he's using some variant of the Moreau ray. Mutants like me—like us—aren't affected because the Moreau ray affects a specific allele, a marker. His ray triggers certain biological changes. Our allele is different...that's why it's a marker.”

“He's making everyone into mutant apes?”

“Sort of.” He scanned the results on his computer. “He tapped into the power mains for the army base.”

“How much more powerful is the thing he took?”

“Assuming it is a power source?”

“He thinks it is.”

“Granted. The weapon it came from vaporized the entire hull of a tank in less than a second.” He scribbled for a second. “Assuming that it does the same number of kilojoules with the same losses for efficiency... I think he could make the change permanent for the seaboard. Possibly the nation.”

She chewed her lip. “Man, we definitely need real superheroes here.”

“Mine is not really a fighting power.”

“Mine is only a fighting power.” Claws flickered out of her fingertips and then she withdrew them. “I hate it.” She sighed. “Where is he now?”

“Who knows? Now he's freed from the need to tap into the power grid.”

“But his lab had to be hooked up originally. The machine, the ray generator, is there. He's smart but he's not super fast.”

“Mechanical lab space, not necessarily official lab space, where he can hook into the army base generators.” Coop got a fadeaway look.

“That's going to be in or near the army base. They won't have lain cable outside the base.”

“Then he's in the vehicle maintenance building or in the underground lab.”

“The underground lab?”

“They have an underground lab. My wife—my ex-wife. She worked there.”

“Of course they have an underground lab.” She rolled her eyes. “It's that simple? Surely someone else has noticed this.”

“Well, you have to have clearance and know about the underground lab.” He printed off a map. “I don't know where the entrance is—I was blindfolded the only time I went there.”

“Super.” She looked at the map. “You're sure no other superheroes have responded to this?”

“They would come to ask me—I am the expert on rays that turn people into gorillas.”

“I guess.” She sighed. “I guess I'm going to an army base.”

# # #

Stage 3: Challenge

It was so easy to get into the army base while invisible that she wondered why they didn't have protection against invisible assassins. Really, she couldn't be the only one.

The blow was entirely unexpected and sent her sprawling along the ground.

Whoops. We suddenly need another character. Fortunately, generating a character in Icons is pretty fast. Let's roll some dice. I'm already assuming that this is whatever the military does to protect against superfolk, so it's a Trained or Gimmick origin, and if Super-Senses doesn't show up, it'll have to be an extra.

Name		APHID: Armor for Parahuman Intrusion and Detection (Gimmick)
PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	STA
3	4	5	3	4	3	10
Specialties		Military (+1), Weapons (Guns) (+1)
Powers		Exoskeleton: Fair (4) Damage Reduction Glue Gun: Good (5) Binding Taser-light: Average (3) Stunning Sense Array: Average (3) Super-senses (IR vision, Radar sense, Telescopic vision)
Qualities		Military hierarchy Just a guy in a suit Minion (or something else if we need an individual, but we'll start with minion)

Chloe rolled out of the blow, her claws already out. She heard, “Infiltrator, female, invisible to normal sight. Trying plan 51 for guards.” She didn't actually want to know what plan 51 was. She could feel the claws unsheathe.

She spun, staying on the concrete of the side walk. The man wore a light patchwork of armor, a helmet, goggles, and a bulky backpack with a hose that led to a three-barrelled gun. His pistol looked high-tech,too.

The venom trickled from her fingertips.

Haemophile			APHID
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
5	3	None	10	None

Her invisibility had been her only defense, and they saw through it. Now there was nothing left but to go on the offense.

She unsheathed her claws and attacked, aiming for a weak spot in the kevlar coverings.

Seven vs six, so she hits with a moderate hit. Still, it's 6 damage vs his Damage Resistance of 4, and the possibility of Affliction besides. The Affliction doesn't need a roll to hit (it's a secondary effect of the slash), so we test Affliction 7 vs Strength 5. (We could make an argument for Strength 3, but we're just going to go with the easy numbers.) That's a success, 10 vs 8. He loses 7 Stamina.

Haemophile			APHID
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
5	3	None	3	None

He backed away and pulled the trigger on his odd gun. Some kind of gooey fluid gushed out and caught Chloe squarely in the chest. It quickly foamed up and swelled fast, immobilizing her.

But next phase he fails the Affliction test again (6 vs 11), so he falls over unconscious. He will die (good thing help is coming). She has no problem getting her claws into the foam (material hardness 5) but it will take her several panels to cut free.

A question for Mythic: Are there more APHID suits active (yes)? No, so the suits are expensive: they have one per shift per base. I presume they can scramble the other two, but it will take a few minutes.

She became invisible again as she cut herself free. At a glance, it would look like she had freed herself and knocked him out.

Then he shuddered and his chest heaved. She knew he was dying, but she was only free from the waist up. She rocked herself until she fell over, and called into his radio. She hoped it was transmitting. “He's down. Need medical care--full tox kit.” She didn't want an innocent life on her conscience.

She didn't quite have her legs free when the first guards showed up. They quickly formed a circle around the fallen figure, trapping her.

Almost as if they had been trained.

Okay, the military does have ways to deal with invisible assassins.

# # #

Chloe had a couple of thoughts as they led her into one of the buildings. She was handcuffed and surrounded.

She's used a Determination point to recover, so she has only 2 Determination but full Stamina. The Guards are Soldiers from the Icons main rulebook, with the specialties Military and Weapons (Guns): they have a Prowess of 4, a Stamina of 7, and a Strength of 4. If she attacks, I'm going to put her Prowess one lower if she tries to use her claws.

What was with the handcuffs? Didn't they know that all the trendy Hollywood types dictated zip ties now? She knew how to break zip ties. She couldn't break handcuffs. And while she had picked handcuffs once during training, she needed a paperclip or lockpicks, and she'd left the lockpicks back at her apartment.

In her own defence, she had been doing laundry.

And where was the secret lab? How did you get to it? They hadn't conveniently put signs up saying “This Way To Underground Lab.” If she were doing it, she'd put the entrance by the washrooms, so everyone had an excuse for being there. Maybe in the mess hall…everyone went to the mess hall.

Well, she was not going to the mess hall. She was going to the stockade, or the brig, or whatever the Army called it. The soldiers led her into an elevator and three guards squeezed in with her. All of them were wearing night vision goggles presumably so they could see her.

They had guns, but it was a closed space. They couldn't fire. Really, there wasn't going to be a better time. She swivelled at the hips to plant a knee in one gut. Before they could react, she kicked out at another.

She burns another Determination point to get an Advantage that lets her put Burst on her Strike attack, because she's going to attack all three in a flurry of  movement. She hits all three (10 to 5, 10 to 7, and 10 to 6). In terms of slams and stuns, the first is stunned and knocked to zero Stamina, the second and third each get slammed to the floor, and lose 5 Stamina. Since they only have 7, this is bad. (I could do this with them as minions, but I choose not to.)

One was unconscious, and the other two guards were down. They stayed on the floor. Both MPs stay on the ground. They try to grab her ankles to reduce her mobility; both manage marginal successes, so she doesn't get to hit them but she doesn't go down, either.

That sounds like wrestling, and no effect on a marginal success (10:10 and 6:6) She still had the burst stunt up, so they are done in a quick stomp.

As the elevator slowed, she grabbed the handcuff key and freed herself. By the time the door opened, she was invisible. She looked out at the office—or offices, because there were glass windows in the walls. In direct view was a gorilla working at a lab bench. Incongruously, the gorilla wore a lab coat and protective goggles.

Holy crap, she thought. That James Bond stuff about being captured so they'll take you to the boss works. I should have tried it on purpose.

Step 4. Comeback

The gorilla—it had to be the same one as at the university, even though she couldn't distinguish gorillas; you generally meet only one gorilla a day—looked up.

The windows were a clever touch, she thought. He could see you to read your mind, but you couldn't touch him. But, while she was invisible, he couldn't read her mind. She saw the gorilla reach forward to a stud on the wall.

“I've unlocked the doors,” came a man's voice over the loudspeakers, dead of emotion. “Come and get me.” She could see a man near the gorilla mouthing the words. So he used his...minions? Thralls? ...to talk if he could send telepathic messages. The solders and technicians in the room with the gorilla kept working, but the others stayed motionless.

Not for the first time, she wished she could walk through walls.

She got out of the line of sight, grabbed a carbine from a frozen soldier, and fired at the window. The shot was deafening in the room. A filing cabinet behind her in the opposite side of the corridor suddenly dimpled as the bullet entered it. She looked at the window.

A pattern of cracks radiated out, like a starburst, but nothing broke.

“Bulletproof glass,” came the voice over the loudspeaker. “Would you like to come here? Because I'm not going there.”

Great, Chloe thought. She looked around for a shield. The desk wouldn't fit easily inside— Ride one of the wheeled chairs? Ah.

She came up behind a soldier and grabbed him at the belt, holding him in front of her. Sorry about the wedgie, fella. With him as a shield, she moved through the first door.

Once the door had closed behind them, the soldier suddenly moved, drawing his weapon and firing behind himself. He narrowly missed her, but the sudden noise made her drop him.

“See?” came the voice. “They don't want to pass up the improvement that is a simian existence.”

Two punches later the soldier was unconscious, and she quickly stepped away so the gorilla couldn't figure out where she was.

Sorry, guy. Won't do that again, she thought. She didn't risk saying it out loud.

She didn't have to use a shield, she realized: all she had to do was prop open the door. She wriggled along the floor to minimize him seeing her. Dimly she heard the sound of breaking glass, but didn't get up to look. This new room had two doors and some lockers. One door led to a bathroom; the other to a decontamination chamber.

“I'm almost done. Once I flip the switch, you can turn invisible, but you won't be able to hide your hairless self.”

How were people decontaminated? A shower? There were nozzles in the walls and ceiling. She crawled into the decontamination chamber. The gorilla lumbered to the window to look at the room.

The far door didn't open. The voice came over the speaker.

“A safety measure. You can only open one door after the other door is shut. Shall I get that for you?” The open door closed by itself. There were multiple clicks and a hum of electronics.

A fine mist poured out of the nozzles.

“Decontamination,” came the dead voice. “Makes you visible.”

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
10	2	Revealed in outline; Decontamination takes three panels (1)	13	None

-Now I can talk to you directly,- came the voice in her head. -You've done quite well, for a hairless one.-

Chloe hammered at the door handle. It didn't budge.

-What's the worst pain you can remember?- She tried not to remember, but she did: third mission, beaten by terrorists. They had broken her arms and legs, and beaten every inch of her—

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
3	2	Revealed in outline; Decontamination takes three panels (2)	13	None

It's just my imagination!

She spends a Determination point/Advantage to Recover; she gets 5 Stamina back. And because Ape X stunted the Mental Blast, she gets a Determination point for that. (She doesn't get one again during this fight; the Mental Blast stays stunted until the end of the scene or the fight, whichever comes first.)

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
8	2	Revealed in outline; Decontamination takes three panels (2)	13	None

We wash, lather, and repeat for the next panel: she loses 7 from his Mental Blast, gets 5 back by using an Advantage, and then she's in, and invisible.

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
6	1	Revealed in outline Decontamination takes three panels (3)	13	None

She yanked the door open and rolled into the room, the decontamination mist billowing around her and then fading. There was glass on the room floor, in front of every human but Chloe. She didn't have time to think about it; the huge fists of the ape came down where she had been just a moment before.

“I can still find you physically by smell,” came the dead voice of the man, echoed over the loudspeakers in other rooms.

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
6	1	Invisible Smells like disinfectant	13	None

I'm going to give her a +1 (instead of 2) to her Prowess for being partly invisible, plus the 1 for Martial Arts. So he got a 9, she got a 10. He missed her. When she strikes back, it's just even: a 10 vs a 10. That's marginal, so half damage and I'm going to claim that the side effect (venom) doesn't happen. Three points of stamina.

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
6	1	Invisible Smells like disinfectant	10	None

The gorilla gasped. “Ready!” said the man. Every human in the room but Chloe raised a shard of glass, pressed it against his wrist.

Chloe noticed they were going to slice across, as she had done—but she couldn't help thinking about the more effective way to do it.

I will not think of that again. I will not think of that again.

“I will kill every human in this room, unless you reveal yourself to me.” said the loudspeaker.

She burns her last Determination point to recover, for full Stamina.

Chloe looked at them and signed audibly. She placed herself in front of Ape X and flickered into sight, vulnerable to the gorilla's fists.

In fact, this is a tactic: she's making herself vulnerable so that she has an Advantage to use.

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
10	0	Smells like disinfectant has 1 Advantage Trouble: open to a hit	10	None

He smiled in his simian way and brought his arm across her face, snapping her sideways...while Chloe jammed her claws into his belly and let the force of his blow drag her claws through his flesh.

She had an effort of 9 (Prowess+Martial Arts+3 on the die), he got a 6 (Prowess+die). She hit him and used her Advantage for +1 in the power, so that's 7 Stamina. He totally succeeded on the Affliction roll, though.

Haemophile			Ape X
STA	DP	Notes	STA	Notes
10	0	Smells like disinfectant	3	None

“Then they'll die!” said the man, his voice cracking with emotion for the first time. Every human but Chloe slashed across their wrists. “You killed them, hero.”

“I am not a hero,” said Chloe, and slashed the gorilla's throat.

A marginal success, but that's enough: the gorilla falls down, unconscious. He wasn't bothered by her venom this time either.

The gorilla fell, bleeding.

The MPs found her kneeling and weeping beside the one soldier she had been too late to save, holding his bloody hand.

She kept her appointment with Dr. Jessop.

Your random superhero environment

So I was wondering if you could do a random environment—not just an urban encounter table, but a series of tables that build the important part of your city for you. Part of this is inspired by the Stark City world-building rules, but converted to a set of tables so you don't have to do the same thinking. (You still have to think...sorry.)

This tries to straddle a middle ground between simulations or "realism" and narrative. Interesting things come up more often than if we were just extrapolating the reality of the setting, but not to the extent of every roll result being something you have to act on.

Some hasty thoughts jotted down while waiting for a meeting to start. Will come back to this later; expect it to grow.

Mood

First, we match your hero and your city. If your hero already has a mood or theme (Superman is about optimism; Batman is gritty and noir; Spider-Man is about perseverance when things go wrong), well, heck, give it to your city.

But if you feel the need to contrast, or if you have some heroes of different moods, then you can roll d6-d6:

d6 - d6 Roll	Mood
-4, -5	Corruption and nihilism: Hub City in the 1980s Question series
-3, -2	A corrupt city that needs a beacon: Gotham City, or Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen
-1, 0, 1	There are good places and bad places...some are very good and some are very bad
2, 3	Things are pretty good here, though there are still some bad things: any of the DC midwest or western cities
4, 5	Scientific utopia and optimism: Metropolis, Kandor...though there are bad spots, villains are often trying to tear down what's good

Keep the roll in mind; it will be a modifier for other things. (That is, when you roll for a location, a corrupt city might get as much as -5 to the roll, while a city on the hill like Metropolis might get as much as +5. Or for some rolls, I might make it half the modifier, rounded toward zero: -5 or -4 is -2, 5 or 4 is 2, and so on in between.)

Scale

Again, if your hero already defines a scale, go with that. Your flying hero can cover more area than the guy who only swings, or has to take a bus. Still, if you're willing to give your hero a car, plane, transporter, or spaceship, add 1 to the d6 roll. If your hero does not have any fancy method of travelling high speeds, subtract 1. Use the Mood modifier to determine suburb or inner city.

d6 Roll	Scale
0	Neighbourhood/Ghetto/Village
1	Town/Borough
2	Inner City (if Mood is negative) or Suburb (if Mood is positive)
3	City
4	State
5	Nation
6	World
7	Solar system, cosmic, or interdimensional

When you start a new scene and randomly generate "a new location" it can mean something appropriate to the scale, though of course you can always choose to go wild ("Suddenly, Batman finds a clue that leads him to Fictistan!"):

• A different room or apartment or building
• A different section of town
• A different borough
• A different city
• A different state or province
• A different country
• A different world

Weather

A chart to provide weather isn't a bad idea; I'm totally on board with the sympathetic fallacy, and weather can provide interesting challenges for your hero. Pick or roll for the season. If you get a 6 (special occasion), roll again and check on the last column.

d6 Roll	Season	Special Occasion (also a D6 roll)
1	Winter	Christmas
2	Fall	Hallowe'en
3	Summer	Independence Day
4	Spring	Equinox
5	Spring	Eclipse
6	Special Occasion	Birthday, anniversary: something personal

Remember that it's always bad weather in noir stories, so add half the mood (you end up subtracting if it's negative and adding half if it's positive):

d6 Roll	Weather events
1 and below	Blackouts: Snowstorms or thunderstorms, howling winds
2	Extreme temperatures.
3	Precipitation and maybe fog.
4	Mixed seasonal: cloudy, clear, maybe rain, maybe not. Unsettled.
5	Clear.
6	Great weather for the season.

Time of Day

Some heroes are nocturnal...usually they're your grim-n-gritty noir heroes. Nocturnal is more common (possibly because heroes have jobs, too). Still, if you don't know what time of day it is, roll and add half the mood modifier.

d6 Roll	Time of day
1 and below	Night and all right-thinking people are asleep.
2	Night, but most folks are still awake.
3	Dusk (if Mood is negative) or dawn (if Mood is positive)
4	Early morning or late afternoon.
5	Mid-morning or mid-afternoon.
6	Broad noon.

So you know when it is.

Murder Hobos: The game

Someone must have done this.

For a one night adventure, it might (emphasis on might) be interesting to run actual murder hobos, possibly as the PCs, possibly as the villains (depending on where you stand).

Say, set it during the Great Depression, about 1933. The PCs are a set of hobos who are awakened to their greater purpose, which is to whack the evil dudes, and they know who the evil dudes are...the wealthy, of course. The corporate fat cats who are still doing well while they are out of work. (Fantasy dressing: the characters know they are the reincarnation of some mythic hero, just as they know the villains are reincarnations of something or other.)

First, the murder hobos need weapons. No sweat: there's a cache of weapons in a nearby dungeon (well, the basement of a university). They can get to it through a sewer system, and they know about the sewer system because some guys hide there.

After killing only a few people (who must be the reincarnation of bad guys, too), they have ancient weapons befitting their original souls.

If you're playing as the murder hobos, well, this is all straightforward: the assault on the bad guy is an assault on his mansion.

Otherwise, you might be doing this as a kind of Call of Cthulhu thing, and the good guys are actually the local cops, who have been cast as "lawful evil" antipaladins or something.

Either way, you could play it in a way that makes the player characters (whichever they are) in the right. You just have to decide which way things are before you start.

You'd want a fantasy system that's easy to use and learn; you'd want the characters to be mid-level if you had a levelled system. Call of Cthulhu could do it. PIG's Iron Gauntlets might work. It's based on the Impresa system, and I think you can find guns and stuff as well as the fantasy equipment. Maybe CORPS, if you want something lethal. I think the equipment is around for BASH, too. Heck, you can probably do it with Unknown Armies or Over The Edge, too.

Gaming and GMing

I think I have to admit that, with this schedule, I can't game on Wednesday nights until this job is done...which could be a while. I have to be in bed by nine, and asleep by ten, preferably asleep by nine. That leaves me a whole half-hour to game. Doesn't really work.

So I think that I'll do two things (as I struggle to try and manage my time correctly):

• I'm going to look for something I can do on the weekend. (If you have a superhero game on Saturday or Sunday, and you're in driving distance of Kitchener, Ontario--say, Guelph or even a monthly jaunt to London or Hamilton, and you'd be willing to have me, let's try each other out.) The something might be online gaming.
• I'm going to fashion some kind of survey for my regular gang to try and figure out what I need to improve for them, when I'm GMing next. 

Just to expand on that last point. Even when I've tried newer-style games, I notice I fall back on the same habits (I'm deathly afraid of the whole "you lose until I say you win" structure which I think I can fall into). I want to fix those problems...but I also want to fix problems that individual players have.

For instance, Viktor posted here saying that he prefers a more puzzle-oriented style, and that's not what I do by default--again, I have a tendency to get railroady if I do it: either my solution is the only solution, or I can be convinced as a wishy-washy guy that the offered solution will work.

I also don't want him or anyone to feel unsatisfied. We're all at the table to have fun. My fun doesn't take priority over his fun, just as his fun doesn't take priority over mine.

So if I can figure out some kind of useful survey, that might give me some answers and I can use the enforced free time to try and make my style more appropriate for that group. Yes, apparently I have drunk the Continuous Improvement Kool-Aid. At a guess, two of them are more puzzle oriented, two are more character oriented, and one is, I think, more story oriented. But I'm only guessing; I would never have pegged Viktor as a puzzle guy, though in hindsight it makes perfect sense.

Those things will go on the back burner pile of Things To Do, I'm afraid, as there are other things that take priority. But still...I want to do them.