Villains for the Family

While I'm waiting for the player to respond, let's think in general terms about villains.

I'm going to use Strange City as a setting, and I've established that villains exist in about a twenty:one ratio with heroes. While I think arch-villains should probably be specific to the hero and so I'm not going to create them yet, I can list a couple of tropes that I want to use or subvert.

The villain K-Osprey already exists and functions as my Joker analogue. I doubt he's specific to the OG hero, but certainly Adult Sidekick will know of K-Osprey aka Chaos-Prey aka KOS-Pray.

I probably want to do something with reformed villains, both those who have failed to reform and those who succeeded. Actually, making the Police Commissioner a former villain might be interesting. Because that isn't common knowledge (I only just thought of it), I could slide it in as ancient history or have it as ad adventure thread in itself.

(It might be an adventure thread: I'm sure that Revived Mystery Man would think that the reformed villain is only faking and should be put to death.)

The villain who has lapsed again... maybe someone with a kind of telekinesis such that locks can't actually stay shut around him or her? Bullet-proof, but regardless of intention, nothing stays locked if the character touches it. But the character is guilty of looking wrong and so gets arrested on a regular basis. And, of course, even if he or she works for a company, he or she cannot work late and lock up. Just can't; the lock comes undone.

Given that, how do you make money? Well, if money problems come along, you steal it. More accurately, you reach into the bin and take it because they've forgotten tho latch the ATM ((again). (Heh. A real job for that person involves working in an area without any actual cash, like in an investment firm.)

Idea for the triptych one-on-one campaign

I have not felt creative in weeks, but the other day I decided to revisit the idea of a single-player superhero game but with the person playing three different heroes...a “hero family” if you will.

Now, the actual fact is I asked a friend if he wanted to try it, and he said yes, and offered me a Mutants and Masterminds character as the nucleus. I don't have his permission to name him or the character, so I'll be a little evasive. For now, we'll call them the Solo family, but suffice it to say that they're all insect themed.

The original character is a transformed hero (actually transformed by the Silver Storm, I believe, in an abortive campaign that collapsed after two episodes). This hero is PL10 and I am helpfully informed that the character is consciously a legacy hero, named after an in-game hero from the 1970s.

So after thinking a bit, here's what I came up with.

Remember that the core idea is three characters, and in the M&M game system it makes sense for the characters to be different power levels. I picked PL10, PL12, and PL8.

The 1970s is like forty or fifty years ago, now, but it makes sense for the OG hero to have had a sidekick who is now grown up. I don't actually want to deal with an ex-hero, so my choices here are someone who ages slowly, some kind of construct or person with the sidekick's memories, or maybe an armored hero, where the armor handles the natural degradation due to age. (I'm sure there are other possibilities: the child of the OG hero, for instance, or the OG hero and some kind of time travel.)

What I proposed is a grown-up sidekick, some kind of mutant who ages slowly (she's now in her fifties and finally looks twenty; I imagine the antagathic effect kicked in at puberty and it has taken her 45 years to get from 12 to 20 in appearance. She has sidekick to a number of heroes (well, sometimes leading from behind. "Uh, that skylight's a pretty obvious trap, Green Alpaca. Maybe going through the window?") and is ready to strike out on her own. (And face it, having to ride the storms of adolescence for forty years is kinda painful.) She inherited the OG hero's wealth, so she has a place that, while not ostentatious, is large enough and well-situated.

But...PL8 makes me think of mystery men and high school students, so I went with the time travel aspect and mystery men. The PL8 hero I'm thinking of is some 1930s mystery man (or woman; we're assuming a full body costume) who has been caught in a Groundhog Day thing for nearly a hundred years. The hero has a good right hook, insect venom weaponized in a number of ways (sleep! paralysis! Death! Binding! Whatever!) and a cavalier attitude about what should happen to "the guilty."

And it makes sense for the sidekick to have taken that character in during the adjustment. In fact, the house might be a revolving door for various down-on-their-luck heroes.

Now, supporting cast.

The house needs a staff, and one that can be trusted. So there's a cook and a cleaning person and probably a maintenance person. Haven't but a lot of thought into them, but they need to be there.

The Golden Age mystery man needs a descendent of some kind, or the child of someone who was important to them back in the day. That person will be ancient because they're just normal.

The current hero has been defined as homeless, so I figure the plot of Annie will come up at some point.

That's what I've proposed. Once I have those nailed down, we can create arch- and recurring foes.

Improbable Tales Reviews: Dr. Warp

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Obligatory Warning

If you are spoiler-wary, this entry and this series is full of spoilers for a six-year-old product. If you don't want to know what's in one of Fainting Goat's first eleven Improbable Tales adventures, well, don't read this. Okay?

Okay.

Today (after a long hiatus) we'll talk about the fifth adventure in the Improbable Tales series, Dr. Warp and his Golden Robots, written by Dan Houser, with art by Dan Houser.

I ran portions of this one on Roll20 a couple of years ago, incorporated into a different adventure. As usual, I kept parts of the body and changed the soul.

Precis

Dr. Warp comes from the groovy 1960s with his female-appearing robots (by accident, but that's backstory). He decides to threaten to launch a missile or two in the quest for world peace. He has a captive (Electric Dervish) and a pinnacle robotic achievement with her own agenda: threatening to end the world is not enough; she's like a Nike product and wants to just do it.

Comments

It's a nice self-contained adventure. There are pieces of a larger world right there to be picked up if you want to, or you can slot it into something bigger.

If you don't want to have time travel possible in your game, even by accident (I'm tempted to say, “What's wrong with you?” but everybody gets to choose), then Dr. Warp can be cryogenically frozen by accident: how he gets to the present is not as important as the idea that he gets here and for him, no time has passed.

As I said, I have swiped a number of things from this adventure. It probably counts as one of the most-stolen-from in my collection.

Likes

A grab-bag of items:

• Not that I don't like PATRIOT, but here the US military is involved, and it's quite reasonable, (it's their missile base, after all).
• Fully detailed missile base. You can use this again and again.
• An NPC hero who doesn't hog the spotlight.
• We have Dan Houser's unpatented Gluon technology to play with in the future.

I've gotten a lot of use out of this adventure. Even if you don't run it as written, there are a nice selection of parts to scavenge and re-purpose.

Dislikes

Editorially, the adventure feels like it goes on a bit about making this a groovy experience (with cake). In practice, that's only a paragraph or two and it's set aside so you could ignore the sidebar. That's a pretty small nitpick.

Changes and Consequences

One of the things I did was tie it into the Terrible Terror-Pin: Dr. Warp and he had been rivals for the same woman (the one the robots are modeled after, for the extra dose of creepiness). (It occurs to me the standard Dr. Warp robots can certainly be re-used elsewhere. If the plans became available on the Internet, no doubt every supervillain with buckets of money and even more megalomania would have them.) She married our professor instead of Dr. Warp, but Warp's reappearance and the looks of the robots push him over the edge and he dusts off the old unsafe tech to create a rival and destroy that Dr. Warp once and for all!

I should have done something with Platinum there (the ultimate villain of the piece), but I did throw in muck monsters (based on a cut-down of a writeup I did of Swamp Thing) to show that gluon technology had some disadvantages.

Assembled Updates

Part of the drill is that Invulnerability becomes Damage Resistance; Life Drain becomes Energy Drain; Wizardry becomes Magic or Gadgets.

Platinum Bombshell

Powers

Invulnerability becomes Damage Resistance; Wizardry becomes Gadgets; Blinding becomes Dazzle

Specialties

Computers, Electronics, and Mechanics all get folded into Technology Master.

Qualities

The seven challenges become three Qualities; my suggestions are:

• Clearly a robot (includes possibility of deactivation code)
• Eradicate humankind to bring about world peace!
• Weakness to EMP & electrical attacks shut down by EMP or a Major Success with electrical attacks.

Electric Dervish

Powers

Elemental Control (Electrical) becomes Electrical Control, with the base power of blast (the EMP pulse), and the extras Aura and Nullify (Limit: solid-state electronics only).

Specialties

The Computers and Electronics specialties become Technology.

Qualities

My suggestions are:

• “Electro-Magnificent!”
• Repair technician for the FBI
• Water! Why did it have to be water?

Dr. Warp

Specialties

Electronics, Computers, and Mechanics become Technology; the slightly higher mechanics we'll handle by invoking a Quality.

Qualities

My suggestions are:

• Mad Robotics Genius!
• Validate me and my creations!
• My beloved creations will help you

Golden Gyno-Droid

Specialties

Computers becomes Technology.

Qualities

My suggestions:

• Robot!
• Weakness to EMP & electrical attacks shut down by EMP or a Major Success with electrical attacks.
• Protect and obey Dr. Warp

General Franklin “Pitbull” Potter

Qualities

Only the Qualities need to be updated to Assembled. There are so many nice character bits, but we'll try these:

• General in US Army
• Hates superhumans of all kinds
• Gruff and Angry

Conclusion

I'd give this one an A. If you're not going to pick up the collection, you should certainly pick up this adventure.

Idea du jour: Family Business

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Idea du jour

Because we're all locked up, I suspect there are more one-on-one campaigns happening. This popped into my head.

The premise is that the player is playing one of the three heroes in the city. (Well, the player plays all three — one for each tier of play — but usually not concurrently.)

My current thinking is a family or pseudo-family; we're either talking three generations (or you can finesse it to two), or three siblings, something like that, one for each tier of play: Premier, Champion and Backup. For example:

• The eldest is the Premier hero. Although technically seventy years old, some doubletalk has kept this hero young, whether it was being frozen for fifty-five years, alien antagathic treatments, mutant metabolism, or a magic spell.
• The middle character is the Backup hero. He or she is rebelling against the absent parent and deliberately chose to do work at the local level instead of on the national or global stage.
• The Champion hero is the child of the Backup hero, or the grown-up sidekick. This character is ready to step out on the big stage, now.

The GM creates a supervillain for each one, but I'd produce it commercially with that setup in mind. Some of the universe creation stuff is already there (the villainous organization SKULL; the Association for Parareal Technology; the Sisters of the Sigilant; and so on) so the GM doesn't have to come up with it.

Provide character hooks galore, and the player characters are intertwined: Grandad just came out of suspended animation, Mom's taken over her husband's hero role because she thinks he's dead and has re-married, Junior is angry at Mom for betraying Dad's memory and ignoring Grandad, who seems cool, and is struggling with some romantic interest.

Provide half a dozen adventures and villains lightly sketched out, and provide twice as many seed.

Three campaign models immediately suggest themselves to me:

• You can play as the presented family or sub in your own characters for them
• Play as superhero rivals to them
• Play as their arch-foes and do a Romeo and Juliet thing

Silver Age weirdness

Any

Someone on Facebook was looking for Silver Age weirdness, like Batman and Robin on a giant typewriter or Superman going back in time and dating Marilyn Monroe on Krypton or something. (I think those are the examples he gave.)

So I put too much thought into this.

Adventures like that span both the Golden and Silver Ages, and to me it seems like they derive from a few things:

• First, they're mostly a DC thing, probably because Marvel was mostly doing monster and romance comics in the fifties. You can still find weirdness at every publisher, but we remember the DC ones.
• Apes and motorcycles always sold well; put them on the cover!
• They kind of come out of the idea that there aren't consequences. The audience for the stories is presumed to turn over in four years or less, so you don't get tied down in continuity. That's how you get some of those guano-crazy Bob Haney scripts, where Batman sells his soul to the devil or that Haney created Wonder Girl because he didn't realize that Kanigher had created Wonder Girl as the adventures of Wonder Girl when she was a teen.
• Some of it was just for the convenience of the artists. Giant props? They added visual interest while being things that might well be around the house, so it was easy for the artist to get it. None of this Harvey Kurtzman "No, Jack, the sulfa goes to the left of the gauze pad" business here.
• The comics were still trying to be “hip” and relevant to the kids today, so they would sprinkle in stuff like JFK or Marilyn Monroe, but often with slight changes to avoid legal problems.
• They weren't winking at the audience, who were presumably kids. If Superman fell in love with Lerilynlon-Roe on Krypton, he really did fall in love. The emotions were real, even if shallow, because the audience wasn't presumed to be ironic or sarcastic. They were kids.

Given all of that, you had to have what Orson Scott Card calls "event" stories and what Robin Laws calls "iconic" heroes. The characters didn't change because the characters couldn't change — you couldn't guarantee that a kid was going to get next month's issue or had bought last month's issue. (I've got a collected edition of Supergirl from the 1960s that's starting to get some continuity but in no way is it necessary for the stories...sometimes Supergirl uses something from another comic, and some things happen over two or three issues, but the changes are rarely permanent or are rarely personal.

Instead, you have more of a problem, attempt to solve, complication kind of structure.

Anyway, the original poster wanted some way of recreating the goofiness, and what occurred to me eventually was random tables. So we start with our premise, which is:

"An A gets powers but has to be pursued because he/she/it B, causing conflict, and there's this complication: D.

Use the appropriate die for each one; I'm just knocking this off, so I'm not striving for 6 or 10 or 20 of any of these.

A: the problem (apply 1. Giant or 2. Miniature if necessary)

#	This thing
1	Ape
2	A pet (cat, dog, something)
3	Insect
4	Robot/alien invader
5	Close friend of hero
6	Rival of the love interest

Changes in some way (gets powers, falls sick, is mutated, arrives on earth) but the heroes have to engage because it has:

1	Secret, like nuclear launch codes
2	Disease cure
3	Hero’s secret ID
4	Celebrity
5	Hero’s love/hate
6	Is actually a transformed friend of hero

So there's conflict. But there's a complication, which is part of what makes the story goofy.

Goofy complication

1	Hero is shrunk
2	Hero is grown
3	At place that makes giant working props
4	At historical period or mythical place of interest to readers
5	At historical period of interest to hero (Krypton, Crime Alley, etc)
6	Hero is altered some way (powerless, gender-swapped, obese, has head of ant, traded with subject of problem)

That gets you Superboy shrinking into a small engine (a Julie Schwarz joint, written by Kurt Busiek!), various Krypton adventures, probably goofy things with Atlantis, most Jimmy Olsen adventures... Get a motorcycle in there and you might be good.

Adventures versus fiction

I just noticed an interesting thing about roleplaying adventures versus fiction. They require different kinds of specificity.

What brought it to mind is that I'm writing a story built on the idea that an escape room gets suborned by a supervillain and the heroes have to solve the puzzles and defeat the supervillain while still hiding their secret identities.

In a roleplaying adventure, you probably have to come up with every puzzle in the escape room. Players can either solve the puzzles or bypass them, but the puzzles have to be there so that the players can choose whether or not to engage with them. The other stuff — the stuff about secret identities and figuring out the supervillain's plan and who (if anyone) is also a superhero in secret identity, and if there are others, who is the supervillain really after? That stuff gets set up but it emerges in play.

Like, if a player says, "Fuck it, I'm Hyperman!" that's a valid player choice. It's not in the spirit of the problem I put forth, but it's a valid choice.

In a story, however, the puzzles of the escape room are secondary — they're explained only to further some other concept, either showing who's really clever in the group, or that so-and-so really knows about locks, or whatever. The relationships turn out to be the important thing. So-and-so is a villain, or is probably a hero, or hates the person who makes their powers happen so didn't show up with that person tonight.

I have begun to think of this as putting a bathroom on the U. S. S. Enterprise:

In a story, it's not relevant to what you're doing. In a roleplaying adventure it has to be there. Someone might come up with a clever idea to fool the Klingons using the vanity mirror or something. Some player is going to ask about it, and having it helps their immersion.

Hope you're all taking care of yourselves

I'm not ignoring you, but I have to admit that right now I'm having a hard time forcing myself back to the computer when work hours are over. (Not that I don't spend too long obsessing over news from tweets and Facebook, but I'm trying to cut that down too.)

Game publishers are feeling the crunch, too. If you can, buy something from them; I just purchased one of the new adventures from Green Ronin for Mutants & Masterminds and one of the two missing Icons adventures from Ad Infinitum.

Be good to yourselves.

From Batman (1989)

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The 1989 Batman is on TV tonight, and I started wondering about it as a roleplaying session.

TL;DR: Not very good except as designed: for a single hero.

But let's try and figure it out anyway.

Structurally, it revolves around several people, but alas, for roleplaying we are primarily concerned about the scenes with the player(s). That makes it much shorter.

I missed the beginning of the movie (forgive me) and came in just after Joker kills Grissom. Still, let's try to piece it together. Some of this is from memory, so forgive me if it's not right.

• I missed the beginning but we get to have a sequence where the player gets to test out the system by beating up a mook.
• The next time that Batman shows up is at Ace Chemicals, where we get a fight sequence. Jack Napier then dies and Joker gets created.

Then Batman disappears from the story for quite a long time as we follow Jack Napier, Alexander Knox, and Vicki Vale. Now, that might be a good opportunity if you have some kind of a plot in mind, but it's got to be player-centric.

• Eventually we get to Bruce observing the Joker kill the mob boss. There's the seed of a good problem there: how do the players keep wanton murder from happening at the courthouse?
• The Smilex poison situation is a fine puzzle, but it could be resolved with a pyramid test as they try to find out the combinations of products.
• The encounter in the museum, rescuing Vicki Vale and the subsequent chase, relies heavily on Batman being outnumbered. Might not be true for a group of heroes.
• The encounter with the Joker in Vale's apartment is inconclusive, and is primarily a roleplaying event, with the realization of who Jack Napier is; don't know offhand how you'd make that sort of thing personal without knowing the heroes.
• Then there's the poison gas from the parade balloons. Batman just happens to have the equipment to deal with it (he blew a determination point or his Gadgets applies to the bat-thing as well), but a lot of people still die. (Bats gets lots of leeway because he is apparently the first person to dress up in a costume and fight crime.)
• And then the sequence in the church bell tower. Again, that's really a fight that's mano a mano, so it doesn't translate for a group of heroes.

That's not a bad number of encounters for an evening's adventure, so let's spitball for a moment.

We kinda want the villain created in the adventure. You could do a Fantastic Four or Challengers of the Unknown thing here, and have a group created.

Let's go over those encounters again, but try and make them really broad descriptions. Maybe we can pull enough out that they'd be good for a group.

1. Announcement that the heroes are there, and minion encounter.
2. Big fight that's really to trigger the creation of the villains.
3. The puzzle as the villains unleash some kind of crime.
4. The heroes and the bad guys meet in order to rescue someone who is the object of the villains' attentions (OotVA).
5. There's some encounter involving the OotVA which lets the heroes connect the villains to something personal.
6. The villains launch their Big Scheme and the heroes deal with it.
7. Final boss fight.

Okay, that's actually not a bad structure. Of course, putting flesh on that skeleton is the tough part.

I think we really need to hold to the idea that these are the first heroes, or the first in decades. That way, we have a reason that the heroes don't immediately march to the local branch of Heroes Anonymous and demand to be let in.

The heroes can be of any type, but they got their powers at the same event: the event triggered the mutation (for Birthright), transformed, caused the need for training, and so on.

The group of villains would heavily depend on what your player characters are. For our purposes we'll make all of the villains some kind of Transformed. And a chemical plant is not a bad place for the accident, so we'll keep that.

We could combine the first two, actually: the big Ace Chemical fight is mostly against minions anyway.

Characters for Egg of Monsters

The Egg of Monsters

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Oh, I threw up a story (an apt way of putting it, I suppose), but I didn't put up the character write-ups for Icons.

• Mr. Verity Already written up; follow the link.
• Dr. Tavor
• Nora Stern of the CDC
• Dracula
• Various feral dogs standing in for wolves, where I just used the Wolf characteristics from the Icons Assembled rulebook.
• The Egg of the Moors I handle as a plot device; it has a Supreme (10) Alteration Ray (Dimensional Travel to pocket dimension) and a fussy ritual.

Doctor Tavor, or Dr. Acula

Doctor Wilhelm Tavor is a parahuman with vampire-like powers, and who suffers from occasional breaks in reality where he believes that he is actually Dracula, Lord of the vampires.

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
5	5	7	5	5	7	10
Specialties		Medicine, Mental Resistance, Athletics Master (+3)
Powers		Good Energy Drain (5) Extra:: Life Drain Extra: Ability Resistance Amazing Life Support (8) Mind Control Extra: Burst (Limit: Animals only) Limit: Hypnosis (Humans only) Extra: Regeneration Limit: Source (Energy Drain) Poor Gliding (2) Average Super--senses (3) (Darksight, +1 vision, +1 hearing)
Qualities:		Thinks he's Dracula in the wrong body Accepts vampiric weaknesses Can't recover Stamina except through Energy Drain

 

Nora Stern, CDC

Nora was a field operative for the CDC, investigating outbreaks of vampires, werewolves, and zombies.

Unfortunately, during a recent case, she was bitten by Dracula and became his thrall. She managed to hide it, and acted as though the subsequent banishment of Dracula meant that she was cured.

She began plotting to reverse the banishment and bring back her lord and master. It was a long and bloody campaign in which she was almost entirely successful, except for the part where Mynah showed up.

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
3	4	3	4	4	4	7
Specialties		Driving, Investigation, Martial Arts Expert (+2), Medicine, Occult
Equipment		Taser, hand crossbow, phone, pistol
Qualities		Dracula's thrall (wounds on neck never heal) Field operative Sly and devious

 

Dracula

Don't get excited: this is the Super Villain Handbook version of Dracula cut down to represent extreme hunger and fatigue.

CDC (Supernatural Threats)

If you've done the math, you might realize that vampires are extremely contagious. Worst case, they double in numbers every mumble-mumble days. Even if it takes three bites and vampires only feed every week, that's doubling every month. It's the population of the earth in about three years.

Obviously, we're not hip-deep in undead, and part of that reason is the CDC. (And part of it is that these threats are not 100% contagious, though they're still bad.)

A small group in the CDC works with its counterparts in other nations to prevent certain kinds of contagions—vampires and werewolves primarily—and some memetic infections. They don't deal with cryptids or extraterrestrials; they wouldn't handle the invasion of the body snatchers...but they'd know who to call.

Temp! (The temp)

SYSTEM: ICONS

Meet Temp (Tom Asamot). In some ways, he's just a worker in the gig economy—he temps for all sorts of office organizations. He's really good at accounting and Microsoft Office (and he can really organize files). He's fairly bright and he's quick, and he has his truck and limousine licenses.

Also, he has some superpowers.

So he temps for superhero groups and supervillain groups when they need a bit of muscle. He temps for both. (What, you think there are so many vacancies on hero groups that he can get make a living at it?)

Powers? Well, he heals like crazy and he can fly a little bit (but not so fast that taking the car or train isn't usually a better option). It's hard to read his mind. Oh, yeah, he can be crazy strong for about ten rounds.

He sometimes works for SuperUber, the hero transport company, so the heroes might run across him if they call a SuperUber to the crime scene, or he might be temping in the villain hideout. Or he could escape the raid on the villain hideout and then be hired in the hero hideout.

The two things to remember about Tom are that he knows everybody because he's been around and that he's strict about not spilling anybody's secrets. So even if he does know where the villain hideout is, he's not going to tell, because he might need a job from them someday.

That could be a scenario subplot: the heroes need some information, and Tom is the guy who knows. How do they get it from him?

TEMP (Tom Asamot - Birthright)
PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
6	6	4	4	5	5	9
Specialties		Business (+1), Drive (+1), Mental Resistance Expert (+2)
Powers		Great (6) Regeneration Average (3) Flight Supreme (10) Strength Increase Limit: Temporary
Qualities		Still a fill-in Works both sides of the street Knows everybody