Setting and campaign idea

Icons

A whole campaign or set of stories occurred to me in the course of defending bad guy of the week campaigns, where there is no overarching evil bad guy...by giving me an overarching evil bad guy.

For now, let's call it Intro City. Better names are possible, but I'm scrambling to get this down before I forget (and before I have to rake the lawn). Intro City is a small city with a university and the main employer is the tech sector. The second-highest employer is probably the university itself. For some reason, I think Ithaca, New York, but that might be totally false because I know very little about Ithaca except that there's a university there.

Two heroes in mind that tie into this setting: Generic Hero and Bubblegumshoe. We'll start with Bubblegumshoe first.

She's at the university, though she's fifteen. Smart. Thinks of herself primarily as a detective because she was heavily influenced by Nancy Drew books of the 1930s (not the revised versions since then). Why did she have access to them? Her dad is high up in the city and her mom in the university. From a supers persepective, she's probably a gadgeteer of some kind. Less Adam Strange and more Tom Swift (also perferred the 1930s version of Stratemeyer Syndicate books).

Intro City has a superhero, the self-deprecatingly named Generic Hero. He's handsome, he's a flying brick, he's secretly six months old. He's a test tube child, produced by secret labs of...oh, we don't want to call them CADMUS but that's clearly the inspiration. Call it Myrmidon, Inc, a company that is transforming illegal clones into super-powered individuals. The process is not without its problems...

Now, I don't want to recapitulate the Superboy/Young Justice storyline, so we're not going to make Generic Hero a clone of somebody. (We'll call him Jason something or other, just to give us a bit more of a tie-in to Cadmus and the dragon's teeth.) No, he's his own person, but he has escaped from the secret labs of Myrmidon...or has he?

That will be one of his Qualities: that he doesn't actually know if he's doing things of his own free will or that he's been programmed to do them.

Our first adventure starts with Generic Hero already accepted by the citizens of Intro City; maybe at this point he's still working for Myrmidon, and it's his association with Bubblegumshoe (she's not particularly girly in civilian life, so she has gone all out on the pink bubblegum themes as a superhero, to divert attention) that makes him split from the organization. Maybe the first couple of adventures are him being sent out to recapture the latest mistake, and because there are superheroes, the citizens of the city take it in stride.

Bubblegumshoe's dad is actually working hard to secure benefits and bonuses for Myrmidon, because they're a major employer in town. "Do you know how many people would be out of work if they pulled up stakes?" Her mom is helping Myrmidon in another way, because they give people a place to work after graduation.

And eventually you can get into Generic Hero's liberation, and a big showdown where they have to deal with Myrmidon in a more definitive way.

So that gives you an arc that grows out of the concepts of the first adventure, and an excuse for a number of initial bad guys.

• Look, they've got to have some kind of mental-implanting thing to put the fake memories in. Let's say it's a machine—and it's essentially a telepathy/mind control machine. What if one of the techs has gotten in too deep in gambling? Convincing a bunch of bank tellers or bookies to transfer him money might seem like a way out, until Bubblegumshoe figures out what's being done and tries to stop it, with Generic Hero's help.
• At some point, they must have tried giving an adult superpowers. Did it work? Did it work but appear to fail because the powers don't actually show up until the next generation of cell replication? So someone cut loose from experimental programs at Myrmidon — maybe a student who volunteered for the “experiment” as a way of getting cash — starts to develop powers. Maybe they're good powers, maybe they're not...maybe the powers do out of control, or they have a tendency to flame out...but it's been months, so there's no obvious connection to Myrmidon.
• The current subject was in the creche with Jason; maybe they have a relationship. But the problem is that the power mimicry ability that showed up actually mimics the ability to give powers from the equipment. It's not really good to have an artificial life form that can give powers wandering around. Of course they locked her up, but something has gone wrong, and she's free....and everyone she touches gets powers briefly.

Just some ideas.

Adventure idea: the coyote’s after you

Icons

Based on ideas in a Facebook Mutants & Masterminds group...

The same nuclear testing that gave rise to the mighty Saguaro and Gila-Master also mutated a coyote and roadrunner. The roadrunner has speed 6 (extra: surface Movement, Phasing) and probability control 6 and the extra good luck.

The coyote is wily: he has Intellect 8, gadgets, Immortality 10 and maybe regeneration as an extra.

In his mind, the road runner is some avatar of the trickster god, who has taken from him what should be a coyote’s. However the roadrunner always wins because he has the essence of being a trickster (the probability control and the Quality); this is how he manages to make the coyote levitate until he sees that he should be falling and how he makes the gadgets misfire.

So the actual adventure is, the coyote has decided on a different tack, and is attacking other speedsters instead because they are symbolically linked to the Road Runner. By catching them he can catch the roadrunner and get back the trickster quality.

First your players laugh. And then the coyote’s gadgets work, and keep working....

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
4	6	3	8	4	8	11
Specialties		Technology (+1)
Powers		Amazing (8) Gadgets Supreme (10) Immortality Good (5) Regeneration
Qualities		Supergenius Get back the quality “Trickster” Planner

And his perpetual foe, who doesn't appear in this adventure except as backstory...

PRW	CRD	STR	INT	AWR	WIL	Stamina
5	4	2	4	5	4	6
Specialties		Stealth (+1)
Powers		Great (6) Super-Speed Surface Movement Phasing Great (6) Probability Control Extra: Both Good & Bad Limit: Bad only versus the bigger opponent
Qualities		Unconcerned Trickster Always punches up

Edit after the fact: Actually, I'd probably get rid of Phasing and just make all occurrences of things like turning a painted tunnel into a real one or a train coming through be stunts invoked with the "Trickster" Quality.

Product idea

Icons

You should never produce a product without some idea of the market. However, I don't know if there's a market, so I'll just describe it here.

Most online gaming modules are done lovely PDF documents, with layout and page design and all of that. Expensive but fun to do. I can't do them well, but I can appreciate the work that goes into choosing the page layout, the background image, the font, the size, whether there are columns, the artwork, and all of that.

I can appreciate it, but I can't do it. Not that good.

So I'm willing to lean into the fact that I buy far more gaming supplements than I can actually play. I mine them for ideas.

With that in mind, a series of adventures and campaign modules for superhero games done as ebooks. They're in ePub format, they're searchable, they reformat when you change size, you can alter the text, and you can link them out the wazoo. Most phones have an ePub reader (or a .mobi reader) of some kind.

Yeah, there are still maps but they come in a sketch format so you can see where the important things are, and the rest is up to you. Because, dude, it's going to be on your phone. It's something you'll read when you have spare minutes.

And, yes, you could totally run a game off one of these if you wanted. Structurally, they'd steal a lot from the Ars Ludi discussions with a “Here's a summary, here's the basic setup, here's each scene complete with the interesting schticks you could do.”

And there's still artwork: the cover has to be nice, and there are still portraits of individuals, usually head and a bit of torso.

There'd be room for some kind of story in the back if you wanted.

Plus there should also be accommodation if you want to run it solitaire.

And, having said that, now I'll do some desultory market research.

This week’s supervillain: Palimpsest

Any supers

“So Count Crisis, he hires a lotta guys, right? And I got this bum leg but I'm pretty good at electronics and computers and stuff, so I'm working the Conquer Center when the Justice Four show up, right?

“Now I know that the Justice Four are bad news for guys like us, but Count Crisis, he doesn't want to hear it. I mean, he killed Lenny for suggesting maybe the Count shouldn't kill the guys on the beach by setting off the Rho Bomb. So when I saw that the Four had made it past the Rho Bomb and the Interrobanger, I booked it. Took the escape capsule, so later Count Crisis was kinda surprised it wasn't there when he went to escape. Anyway.

“The capsule doesn't go up, like I expected. It goes down. Down into a second secret base, one we didn't know about. I mean, it was guarded by that shape-changer lady, but I got the drop on her while she was being a cat. She's in the neural neutralizer room and mostly she's fine, but the Count wasn't big on labelling things so sometimes I hit the wrong button. I found a labeller so mostly that's fixed.

“There's a lotta stuff here, Ethan. I mean, a lot.

“Anyway, I'm making this offer. You get, what, eight other guys. We figure out enough of this stuff for a couple o' heists, enough so there's ten million for each of us. We pop it into secure bank accounts and live off the interest.

“Big score, but I gotta remind you: The stuff isn't labelled. We're probably gonna have some casualties before we do the heists. Still, we stick to a hundred million total, that's an annual of five hundred thousand each. I dunno about you but I could do a lot with five hundred thousand a year.

“Whadda ya say?”

Creating a cult?

Any superhero

A confluence of two things (needing to create background for Strange City, the four-part Friends of Jackson Elias podcast on cults, which I recommend) has me thinking about cults.

Now, from a story point of view, cults are often used to create hordes of nameless mooks who fight to the incapacitation. That's fine, but there could be other stories or other uses. For instance, in a superhero game you might want to have a significant NPC fall into the clutches of a cult, or you might want the Hunted to be a cult, or you might want the super-powered villain to be granted powers by a cult. But to do that, your cults need to be a little more nuanced.

What do cults do (narratively)?

Okay. So what do cults do, from a story point of view?

• They provide disposable mooks, as mentioned.
• They can pursue relentlessly (because it's their sense of self being threatened).
• They take members away from the characters.
• They enable the entrance of villains.

There might be more, but those are the ones that strike me immediately. Let's concentrate on that third one, because that one has the most to do with the cult.

Is there magic in this cult?

So the first thing I think of is, “Does the cult have real access or fake access to the supernatural?”

In most superhero game environments, there really is some kind of access to evil demons, spirits, other-dimensional entities, trapped gods, and so on. So: Does the cult have access to one of those? (And you can ring changes there, like this is the aftercult after the demon was exiled, this was a fake cult until the amnesiac joined who was actually the exiled demon Nialliv, or whatever.)

• If the cult has real access, then at some point, the players have to see it. The adventure is building to fighting the evil thing or stopping the ritual. The evil thing might be a bunch of misguided supers or maybe a freed demon or some kind of world-altering magic, but it exists.
• If the cult doesn't have access, then you have to decide what the real goal of the cult is. The adventure is building to freeing someone(s) from the cult. You can still introduce super-powered beings; most game worlds have those available for hire. But the cult as it is isn't about freeing Cthulhu or Ba'al or even Christ.

(Or not defeating the evil thing or not freeing the person. But you knew that, so I'm not going to mention that sort of thing again.)

This decision affects your adventure, not the design of the cult, but since this is a tool to an adventure, we do it now.

What do they say they want?

Look, relatively few people join a cult whose avowed goal is "release the evil world-destroying demon.' Even the Rapture fans who want to bring about Armageddon are doing it because they're sure that they will be on the side of good. (This is, I suppose, the equivalent of voting for the Leopards Eating Faces party, because you're sure that your face is safe.)

Whatever the thing is, that's what people are joining for. People tend to join at a time of confusion or uncertainty, and that's your goal. The supporting character wants protection from these eeeevil mentalists? The cult is an organization teaching useful mental protection techniques.

Real world things that have been used (and this isn't all of them, by a long shot, just a sampler).

• Tolerance and inclusivity (go ahead, look up Jim Jones)
• Ecological help
• Self-control
• Personal improvement generally
• Improve your money situation (this tends to be part of multilevel marketing scams instead, but "don't have financial worries" has certainly been used)
• A supportive community
• Personal fulfilment

What does the cult really want?

You probably want to specify this in two ways:

• The vague general goal, which could be “Make me money!” or “Free the voice in that book so it can give me money!”
• The specific, actionable goal, that your heroes are going to interfere with

I mean, if you only come up with one goal, great, but if it doesn't lead to a plan by the bad guys, then the good guys can't interfere. And if it's too specific, the cult doesn't return after your heroes interrupt the summoning. Now, sometimes that's okay, but sometimes you want the cult to hang around. “Oh, the Wave of Shimmering Light...those guys are bad news.”

(It occurs to me that you can use the same general step for creating an evil villain-based multi-level marketing campaign, too, but I digress.)

How do the heroes get involved?

So you have a vague idea of what the bad cult is doing, and you know why Feckless NPC joined. What does Feckless have to do that leads the heroes to the specific goal? Do the heroes find out about it because they're just researching the cult to find out if it's safe for Feckless? Or does Feckless have enough extradimensional energies in the body from various superhero-adjacent romps that it's specifically Feckless who has to be sacrificed for the incantation at midnight to work?

From those things, you should be able to generate a cult, have some idea of what they're doing as a recruiting tactic, and how the heroes get involved.

Nitrogen Transmutation

Any SHRPG

I've been thinking about nitrogen blooms and transmutation over the past few days, so here are some results.

I was reading about corn and nitrogen fixing (because what's lunchtime without thinking about where the tortilla came from?) and I suddenly realized that someone whose power is specific to nitrogen would be...powerful. Those algal blooms in rivers and ponds? Usually caused by excess nitrogen from fertilizer (there's also a phosphate problem but we'll set that aside). One river mouth had a de-oxygenated area the size of New Jersey, just from algae. So someone with control over nitrogen could just be cleaning up.

In a more traditional superhero setting, proteins require nitrogen...which means that your nitrogen controller can weaken the muscles instantly (or, controlled very specifically, cause erections: the effect of a nitrogen oxide on vascular tissues is used in erectile dysfunction drugs). Turn all the oxygen in an area into nitrous or nitric oxide, and they can't breathe and I believe one of those is acidic.

(This is almost as good as the ability to control poop (I cannot find the cartoon at the moment).)

Imagine somebody with transmutation at range...point at the battlesuit character with life support and turn all the oxygen inside to, oh, helium. Or just carbon monoxide. Suddenly, the character is choking and has a certain number of strength rolls to maintain consciousness.

At least one version of Firestorm tried to lessen the deity-level power by requiring Ronnie to know the chemical formula being changed, but there's still an awful lot that can be done with simple one, two, and three-molecule structures. All the oxygen in the air becomes carbon, and suddenly it's CH₂ looking for something to fill the extra two bonds. Not only does the person have serious problems if it happens in their body (hint: primary component of blood is H₂O), but I believe that the reaction of C-H₂ joining to whatever is available is exothermic (real chemists can correct me, because I haven't studied chemistry since 1982).

I was thinking about nitrogen-fixing the other day. A lot of pollution and anaerobic zones in rivers and ponds are from an oversupply of nitrogen in the water, from fertilizer. What if the character is an element transmuter, and the default unconscious thing is turning nitrogen to oxygen? The air has lots of nitrogen, so low-level conversion makes the air “better” and more interesting. This in turn might make other people want to be around the hero, just because they feel better. Of course, it’s visible to anybody tracking superpowers in action, and oxygen just feeds fires, so bad character to have around wildfires...or sparks of any kind.

Even limited to triatomic-or-less molecules to something else, transmuters can be vastly effective. Carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide is lethal; oxygen to nitrogen knocks out and eventually kills that opponent in the life-support suit. Oxygen in the blood to nitrogen in the blood could give the bends to someone even if they’re invulnerable. Water vapour in the air to nitrous oxide would be a way of throwing off the aim.

Element transmuters are sooo powerful. I never feel like I could do them justice.

Oh, the old evil duplicates thing

Any superhero RPG

So for various reasons I was thinking about evil duplicates, including an evil duplicates adventure I wrote but that never saw light. (Possibly the publisher was just being kind to buy it; I was exceedingly desperate. On the other hand, "kindness" to me tops out at fifty bucks. So probably it was shakeups and then the adventure wasn't useful. I digress.)

Evil duplicates are a lovely way to point up the differences between the characters and the bad guys: they are the characters who made different choices. So, with that in mind as an overall reason, here are as many ideas for evil duplicates that I can think of after too many beers.

(I will try to organize these so less specific terms come after more specific terms.)

1. Look, It's Just A Costume Get a bunch of people with roughly the same powers, dress'em in the heroes' costumes, and call them duplicates. It can be kind of interesting to see the changes that can be wrung on various powers. “What, being superb at throwing things makes you a pretty good archer?” (During Bendis' New Avengers run.)
2. The Imperfect Clone On the one hand, this can give you Bizarro. On the other, it can be a pretty deep look into what makes the heroes tick.
3. Bad Robot! These are robot duplicates but they've been programmed for EEEE-vil.
4. Mirror Image Some magic device makes copies of the heroes, but evil copies.
5. One Bad Day The Bad Heroes are from an alternate timeline where where the awful origin event was twisted, or from an alternate future where Something Bad has happened (Lois Love Interest died, for example).
6. From The Bad Place. The duplicates are from the alternate dimension where everyone is the same, but the switch is turned to EVIL. (Earth 3 and the Crime Syndicate is the first one that comes to mind, but it's been done elsewhere, like the episode of Star Trek called “Mirror Image”.)
7. Tweedledum, Tweedledee If all the heroes got their powers in the same incident, it's possible to have an alternate incident where things didn't go so well. I think of this as Batma and the Wrath writ for a group.

A slightly different version: Now I Have The Power The bad guy can take the hero's powers (or heroes' powers) and put them in someone else. This is technically power theft but maybe it just copies the powers, through Amazo's special doubletalk.

Happy anniversary to my wife!

Any Superhero

With today being my 30th wedding anniversary, I'm inspired to provide some adventure seeds (or, where there's a bit more, adventure sprouts) related to anniversaries. So, a quick d6 worth:

1. A bad supervillain has escaped from prison and the heroes have to find him. Why today of all days? It's a significant wedding anniversary. Now, maybe it's sweet: one of them is dying and this is the last time (significant) time they can be together. Maybe it's sour: they're divorced, and this is the time when he wants her to remember him, and that he has power over her. But either way, the heroes figure it out and have to decide what side they're on.
2. One of the heroes has an anniversary today, and intends to get to his/her/their/its spouse, but things keep interfering: an earthquake, which traps some miners, and causes a prison break, and there are fires, and... Maybe other heroes try to help so that the hero can have just some time. Or maybe one of the escaped prisoners is an archfoe who knows all the heroes' secrets and makes a beeline for the spouse.
3. One hero (maybe a PC) is getting married, so it's time for the bachelor or bachelorette party. A superhero event like this? There will probably be shenanigans (tip of the hat to Gail Simone for that term and the idea!)

   How do the other heroes in the party deal with or even prevent the shenanigans while helping the chauffeur, whose wedding anniversary it is, but he/she/they has to work. The shenanigans probably involve a villain who wants to profess love, because that's thematically appropriate, so maybe the heroes have to face off the bad guy who wants to confess that he's always loved the bride, or the villain coming out of the closet and he's always loved the groom, or some villain who is re-enacting another villain's plan to show the object-of-obsession that it can be done right.

4. The heroes might think everything's on the up-and-up as they prepare for their own anniversaries, but details slowly start to reveal that their true love, retirement, and marriages are all part of a mental illusion. (Tip of the hat to Alan Moore, because this is mostly "For The Man Who Has Everything.")
5. The North Star is a fabulous gem and Rick Harper is going to give it to his wife as part of their anniversary. The North Star only comes out of the vault on special occasions like this, so several people have lined up crews to steal it...and there's a possibility that Harper hired at least one of them in order to commit insurance fraud.

6. "Twoo wuv..." can bring the dead back to life, if their love was pure. As zombies, I'm afraid.

   A candidate for the title of Earth's Eldritchiest has brought someone back to life (because they were only mostly dead), but the knock on effect of the spell travels throughout the world: Anyone whose love was pure is dragged from death so that they can be with their loved ones.

   • If you've only been dead half an hour, it works fine.
   • If you've been dead months or years, you are a reanimated shambling monster with one goal: to kill your beloved so they can join you in death.

   The heroes most likely notice it because one of them is dating a widow or widower, and the zombie is noticeable.

   I know, you're thinking, "Shoot'em in the head!" But disassembling the zombie doesn't work; they just put themselves back together and try again. No, the spell has to be reversed, which means finding out which candidate cast it, and convincing them to undo it...which might well kill the person they resurrected in the first place.

Gah.

Okay, the recent format change has made this platform very difficult to use. Back to Dreamwidth it is. (Can you have multiple blogs under one account there, or do you need a separate account for each blog?)

A one-shot for ICONS

Icons

My wife is out of town for the night, so I was going to run a one-shot of Icons but that fell through. Still, here's the rough outline of what I would have run.

Design goals: It's a one-shot, it's simple, it uses minions for the first fight so that new players have something to try, and it uses only villains from Icons: The Assembled Edition.

Because of that, if you want to run it in another implied universe, you'll have to either create Ultra-Mind, Warbride, and Speed Demon or fill in the roles with an equivalent.

Usual caveat: I've never run this, I haven't tried it, it's never met actual players.

The Copycat Technology

What's the Premise?

Ultra-Mind wants to make his life-support body also wants to include powers so that he might properly subjugate people as part of his plan to make more evolved humans. Superheroes keep stopping him, so he clearly needs more abilities. He needs to get supers in place to copy and then put the copied powers in machines. So he has set up the copying technology in banks and has arranged for bank robberies. Clues lead to a second location, where robots with copied powers are waiting.

1: Bank Shots

For each player, there is a bank robbery. The robberies are simultaneous and are being committed by teams of five: four henchmen in each bank (use the Henchman archetype, pg 191), commanded by a boss (use the Soldier archetype, pg 192), wearing a bomb vest. In each case, the plan is this: two stand guard over hostages, one fetches actual money, and the Boss and a henchman take the manager into the safety deposit room, to get one particular safety deposit box’s contents.

For the henchmen, use the Minion rule (pg 42), but the boss is treated like normal.

If you have an ongoing campaign, each boss can have a personal agenda and can double-cross the mysterious stranger who hired him, but for a one-shot, that just adds time. Let each player have the confrontation with the boss, but for a one-shot, move to the investigation afterwards.

Start with the heroes on the scene. There are a couple of ways they might be there:

• They’re actually hostages.
• They have been monitoring the police.
• They have been asked by the police.
• They were in the area.

As a GM, rotate through each player in turn, but they’re all in different banks. When things go pear-shaped, the henchmen will first threaten the hostages, then the boss will threaten to blow up the place with the vest.

Although the bullets in the guns are real, the bomb in the vest is fake (PCs can’t easily tell; X-Ray vision won’t show it but Super-Smell might). The vest kills whomever is wearing it but probably no one else.

2: Investigation

Players investigating can discover the following:

• The henchmen’s boss was hired by a “mysterious stranger” but convinced of bona fides. Time and date were dictated but so long as they provided the papers in the safety deposit boxes, they could keep everything else. (If a PC uses Telepathy or Postcognition on the boss character, they could learn about the mysterious stranger. A character might recognize Warbride, but the action is out of character for Warbride; perhaps she is working for someone else?)
• The safety deposit boxes each contain papers that reveal shell corporations. (Bonus if someone has the Law or Business specialties.)
• Each bank had just had a new security system installed by JomCross Security Inc, a new company that had convinced various banks to try out their security system for free.
  • Some characters will be aware that Jommy Cross is the main character in the A. E. Van Vogt novel SLAN.
• If someone investigates the “new security system” it clearly scans the interior of the bank and sends the information somewhere. (Pyramid test to figure out where; insert tech doubletalk if needed, but it’s the JomCross Security office.)

The address for the shell corporations and JomCross Security is the same, and it’s in town.

Troubleshooting

If the player characters lose to the henchmen and don’t see the shell corporation papers and don’t discover about the security system, the bank manager reveals to the hero involved that “it was a mistake putting in the new security system! It didn’t neutralize their guns at all!”

3: In The Office

The office of JomCross Security is on the second-highest floor of a skyscraper. It takes up the entire floor.

(If they investigate, the top floor is owned by Evolution Investments, a private company about which little is known. It is also a front for Ultra-Mind.)

The secretary at the front desk is a gum-snapping 1940s stereotype come to life. She answers the phone, types desultorily on her keyboard, and stares at her cellphone. As if she’s waiting for something. A sign on the door behind her says M. O'Graf.

She is polite to the heroes. She knows nothing but is willing to summon Mr. O’Graf from his office. She does want to know the character names, so she can tell Mr. O’Graf who he’s going to see. She tries very hard to get names, but will eventually acquiesce if the players don’t want to give names.

Robots come out of O'Graf's office, one for each PC. The robots are dressed like the PCs, and by the time the players look back at the secretary, they see her standing outside the office, revealed as Warbride. She touches her cellphone, and metal walls slide over the glass office front.

If the players do something that makes it difficult to put her out of the office, either give a Determination point, or have her not leave: she stays in the office. Her job now is to keep the players in the fight: if they leave, they have to deal with her, and dealing with her takes long enough that the robot duplicates will catch up.

Again, the PCs will probably have to fight, but it isn't essential; for example, a power like Teleport (portal) will certainly get them out. If that happens, you'll have to wing it.

The robot duplicates have copies of their powers, including Extras and Limitations. They do not have copies of Qualities, or secret information about the heroes, or copies of specialties.

• If the heroes win, the back office contains an elevator to the upstairs office.
• If the heroes lose, they regain consciousness upstairs so that Ultra-Mind can gloat at them.

4: End-Game

Now that he has proved the viability of his power-copying technology and its ultracells, he plans to move the cells into his life-support body and be physically evolved as well as mentally evolved.

If the PCs defeated or escaped the robot duplicates...

Ultra-Mind monologues about what he was doing. Clearly (he says) the PCs have some other edge he has not taken into account&mdash/he must start again. In the meantime, Warbride will deal with them while he escapes!

Speed Demon appears. “You need to be transported?”

Warbride says, “This activates the clause where you pay me double.”

Big fight.

If the PCs lost to the robot duplicates...

The PCs wake in the offices of “Evolution Investments” without powers. They are wearing “power suckers” that neutralize their powers, rather than copy them. The power suckers are locked; it’s a difficulty 10 task to unlock and remove your own power sucker but only a difficulty 8 task to unlock someone else’s power sucker. (Ultra-Mind doesn’t worry much about locks; All-Star never used locks!)

In this case, Speed Demon probably doesn’t get called, but Ultra-Mind has the powers of one PC because the ultracells have been installed. (Pick a PC or roll randomly.)

Big fight, I presume.