An experiment with a TiddlyWiki

Icons, M&M

As an experiment, I have started putting the Strange City background in a TiddlyWiki, at: http://jhmcmullen.tiddlyspot.com/. Feel free to look at it there, although you can't get it in a neat package.

I want to use the setting for something on-going (The Flea Family), and the PDF article just got outdated too quickly as I added things. So I'm trying this.

If that's not the correct address, it might be http://jhmcmullen.tiddlyspot.com/index.html.

TiddlySpot is not up-to-date with the latest version of TiddlyWiki, nor is it secure, but it should be adequate for a small personal wiki.

If you can't see it, or if there's a problem, let me know so that I can try to fix it or go looking for a different answer.

EDIT: Alas, the tiddlyspot.com site suffered a catastrophic failure. At this point, one cannot update any information there, so that has paused. It might disappear; these things depend of the vagaries of the software gods.

Concept

D&D

So I'm doing the RPG Adventure Writer course in July (I'm about five days behind, thank you very much) and it costs money if you want to do something other than D&D5E and DM's Guild, so that's what I'm doing.

The concept is, uh, weird, but it might make a nice one-shot.

You're a group of first-level characters and you've just come back from the wars or hanging around with military service; the point is, you're back or conceivably new to the area.

And a tavern owner approaches you; the tavern owner is definitely just back, and he has discovered what I'm about to tell you, and doesn't know where to turn. His tavern has been overrun with Mysterious Strangers, who have sent everyone of an adventuring nature off to far-off lands. He's got no regulars, his bar staff have disappeared and replaced with simpletons, and they won't let him in.

Various avenues of investigation, but the PCs eventually learn that the Mysterious Strangers are members of a hive organism and they've taken over the tavern. Deep under the tavern, the queen is churning out Mysterious Strangers, workers (who look like barmaids), and owls (drones). Deeper down there are warriors, wizard-like things, and so on. They look like people, but they're something else....

Having found this out, the PCs must go in, possibly to rescue the tavern keeper and his family.

Followup about characters and roles

Any superhero

Later: Other thoughts

Thinking about it, and possibly this is too much about fiction and not about roleplaying, every character fulfils at least one role:

• plot, where they provide a necessary service, item, or obstacle
• setting, where they reinforce some aspect of the environment; this tends to be more about your choice of characters — you choose to use a cowboy to emphasize that the adventure takes place in rural Texas, or a hipster to display that we're in the trendy subcultures of New York
• emotional, where they draw out some emotional aspect of the character or conflict — someone who will be directly affected by the villain's evil plan, for example
• pacing, which is closely related to "emotional," above, but I admit that sometimes I have put in a character who will just be funny or tear-jerking or whatever just to change the mood at the table and speed things up or slow things down

(I've also thrown characters in because I've just had too much fun roleplaying them, like a certain character's mother kept showing up. Sometimes it pays off; she turned out to have had a dalliance with the Joker, and the hero turned out to be the Joker's kid, but it came from me having fun having her complain about his (at that point unnamed) father.)

Every character has this mechanical function, which is a union of one or more of those roles, often summarized with a job title, and a relationship to each character. Sometimes the relationship is really nebulous: "person in the crowd" or "bystander." Sometimes it's stronger and should inform the PC's actions: "love interest" or "arch-foe" or "guy who thinks he's the arch-foe but he really isn't."

Maybe you can more quickly define characters by specifying the mechanical role and the relationship. If you say a character is a "tech guru" and "friend" you've just opened up two sets of possibilities: One is that there's a place to go for plot coupons ("Where are we going to find a chronosynclastic infundibulator?" "Jeanine might have one!"), and the other is that range of story possibilities opened by the friend role: hostage, used as leverage by villains, possible betrayal for good or bad reasons, the friend comes to them because of blackmail (I'm sure it's deepfake ransomware), and so on.

I'll have to think about that one some more to see if it's a useful distinction or not. (I frequently make distinctions that aren't actually useful at the table.)

Tropes for superhero campaigns

Any Superhero

I'm in the process of assembling a campaign in M&M which will be a bog-standard superhero campaign. And part of it is that I have to come up with a metric fecal tonne of NPCs and their relationships to the characters....and I'm only coming up with the starting NPCs; the rest will be developed in play. The non-standard part here is that there are three different campaign levels because it's troupe play. So for each player there are three circles for them to move in: low-level, mid-level, and high. Because I'm starting with M&M, you can think of them as PL8, PL10, and PL12, but you could also think of it as neighbourhood, city, and global level.

Obviously, the characters can cross over. In my head, I think of it as writing the Batman family: some adventures deal with Robin; others deal with Nightwing or Batgirl; and yet others deal with Batman in either city mode or godglobal mode.

That's a fair bit to come up with, even if the troupe characters can mix and match.

So I asked the fine people at the Facebook group World of Supers for their favourite NPCs or tropes, and I'm hoping to use them directly or reverse-engineer them into classes that I can then use to build an instance of a campaign.

Some comic book things won't translate. This is a group activity, after all, and a set of stories about the brooding loner who's all alone and doesn't have anyone (and did I mention loner?) won't really work. But there are a lot of useful bits we can use, harvested from comics and campaigns.

Because of where my head is at these days, I'm thinking of them more in terms of what story possibilities they open up. That's not the only way to look at them, and in fact it's not a way I've looked at it in the past. But essentially, this is my version of Polti's 36 Dramatic Situations for superhero campaigns. (If you want the Polti list, Wikipedia has a reasonable summary.)

Obviously, in comics, characters can fill several roles, but I'm just starting to think of it this way, so I'm not going to stress if I only pick one.

In a sense, I'm looking for plot engines: roles that generate stories.

A role for each identity

A character who has one attitude to the public identity and another to the secret identity. Lois Lane for much of her history disdained Clark Kent but adored Superman; Aunt May loved Peter Parker but was afraid of Spider-Man. I feel like this is not so much a role you'd give an NPC but a layer you'd add to them, because really this is a way of pointing up the Secret ID. Examples: Lois Lane, Flash Thompson

Aide & assistant

Providing necessary assistance for lots of different things, and occasional counselling. Steve Kenson suggested Icons A to Z: Support, which has a number of roles around the headquarters, such as Handyman, Mechanic, and Pilot. They are more specialized versions of this (well, maybe not Handyman). Mechanically, they provide aid in some way; in a story sense, they usually provide commentary, such as "Go get'em" or "Are you sure this is a good thing to do?" or subtle nudging, such as "Perhaps if you investigated the Senator's parents; I find that evil is a fruit that does not often stray far from the root." Examples: Alfred, Jarvis, Wintergreen

Attractive crook

Love interest who does bad things but not too bad Examples: Catwoman, Black Cat

Crook who might not be reformed

The crook who looks like he's gone straight, but there's some question about it. Examples: Most "reformed" Batman villains; Lex Luthor; Norman Osborne after leaving the asylum (again)

Crook trying to go straight

This is slightly different: a crook with a good heart but he's always in danger of relapsing. In one case, we know that the heart is good but the situation might be bad; in the other we don't know the heart. And of course many crooks pass through this until we know that their motives are good. Examples: Sandman in Spider-Man

Cross Purposes

Usually someone acting against the hero but for good reasons; the character might act for the hero if convinced Examples: Amanda Waller

Demanding Overlord

The character who expects actions of the hero that interfere with hero-ing, such as the boss or sometimes the insistent love-interest. Though some characters have this written right into their role (when JJJ became Peter's market, it happened) it can also be something you layer on to an existing NPC Examples: J. Jonah Jameson, Gwen Stacy, Perry White

Duelling love interests

There are situations where the hero has one love interest in hero identity and another in secret identity and this challenges fidelity or obligations. Examples: Spider-Man with Mary Jane and the Black Cat

Friend on the inside

Someone in a position to help the hero, but who might be forced to act against them. Examples: Commissioner Gordon

Hostage

Unlike the millstone, this character is associated with the hero identity, so is often used by villains to blackmail the hero in hero identity. Examples: Robin, Rick Jones

Mad Inventor

Generally a source of things to fight, where we deal with his or her latest scheme gone wrong. Good intentions, bad follow-through. Examples: Emil Hamilton

Millstone

Your traditional dependant NPC, such as Aunt May, who provides a responsibility but no obvious benefits; the millstone is usually associated with the private/normal identity. If a character has obligations to someone but no apparent benefit, you probably have a millstone (most love interests as written are millstones). In these cases the benefit is just notional — "Oh, the shock will kill Aunt May" or "She's my fiancee!" You alleviate this by giving them some kind of benefit to the hero, either emotionally or tactically. Often you can do this by revealing the secret identity to them. Examples: Aunt May, Julie Madison

Nosy parker

Mostly obsolete now, but a staple in the Silver Age: the character whose investigations threaten to expose the hero's secret Examples: Lois Lane, Vicki Vale

Rival

The character who is competing with our hero, in either identity; a beginning or inept character is more often a Wannabe Examples: Various reporters

Villain with a Problem

This is the character who is really a nice (or acceptable) person, but when something happens, they become a villain. Examples: Man-Bat, the Lizard, Carol Ferris

Wannabe Hero

Like a rival, but less effective or sometimes even a supervillain/problem of the week. Examples: Frog-man, Man-Bat

Other ideas?

An odd idea

Any

There's an eruv bounding about four square miles of Manhattan. If I understand correctly (and I might not; apologies if I don't), it's a thin wire that symbolically separates "public" from "private" for Orthodox Jews, so that they can behave more or less normally on the Sabbath. That means that they can do things that would normally be considered work...like carrying things.

But it's not just Manhattan...other cities have eruvim. Cities like St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, and more.

New York has rules, such as the maximum thickness of the wire is a quarter-inch, and it must be at least fifteen feet above the ground.

It's inspected by rabbis every Thursday night, presumably so they have daylight Friday to fix it, if necessary. And Manhattan's costs about $100,000 a year to maintain.

Do they ever get broken in superhero fights? Especially fights on a Friday night? Are there Orthodox Jewish superheroes who protect the eruv because keeping all those people inside on the Sabbath has economic consequences? Do tech whiz superheroes invent stronger materials to compose the eruv? If it costs too much for the eruv to be replaced, do they quit?

Thoughts on a Wednesday afternoon. I have no answers, but you could probably make a scenario out of bad consequences.

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

Icons

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

Icons

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.