Superpowers as a reproductive strategy

I was reading up on the Strepsiptera after encountering them in a blog post, and they are fascinating parasitoids. Let me talk about them for just a moment and then we'll relate them to superhumans.(If you want a bit more, go here.)

They are obligate parasitoids with a noted sexual dimorphism. The males are more visible and look like flies, but the front pair of wings is turned into twisted stick-like things (instead of the back pair, in true flies). As a larva, the male finds a host, and pupates. After he emerges, he lives only a few hours as an adult, and bites his way out of the host to look for a female. The female larva finds a host and then never leaves; it sticks its sexual organs outside the host for the male and then withdraws them; the eggs hatch inside the female and eventually leave through the breeding canal.

(Grossed out, yet? Nature can be a horror writer.)

So here's how it might apply to superheroes. I of course think it's more interesting if this applies to all (or most) superhumans, but you're free to have it apply only to some or just to have it as a crazy theory that someone expounds.

Let's posit a parasite that can control its host, as it seems very likely that a number of them do (see discussions of the fact that some Strepsiptera can cause their host to linger on the tips of plant leaves, or of Toxoplasmosis gondii, for example). We'll also say, for the sake of argument, that humans can develop superpowers, because without that, this ain't going anyplace. It's up to you whether that's something in the parasite genome that it gives to its host, or whether it's something in the human genome that's activated by the parasite.

My taxonomic biology is rusty enough that I don't remember if we need to create a new class or order for it; let's just call it Paraplasmosis kalelii.

So my thesis here is that all superhumans are infected with P. kalelii. Superheroes have one sex, supervillains have the other. (Because the sexually active adults are sessile, there's not a lot of difference; I'm not totally sure that you can say "superheroes are one sex, supervillains are the other." There are clear cases of overlap. P. kalelii might in fact be a fungus (there are some compelling cases) that permeates the body, and a team of heroes or villains might just be a colony. I digress.

There are some similarities between the sexes, and just being near another sexually active P. kalelii can force sexual maturity. (In this case, "sexual maturity" results in getting powers. I suspect that there is a subspecies that creates physical perfection and subtly enhances healing; the Bat-family has this kind.) So being near a hero or villain, you can get powers if you're already infected. A stressful event might be enough. There might even be a weird set of gene transfer rules, so that Peter Parker wasn't going to be a spider-man, but the spider bite counted as a traumatic event and there were spider genes in the bite; the P. kalelii in his system used those.

When an infected pair of hosts fight, chemicals are transmitted between the male and the female. In the early encounters, they trade a number of chemicals that can lead to one becoming sensitized to the other: an arch-foe is like a lover in that sense. The chemicals are compatible. In some cases, the two never hit it off, chemically....you have one-off villains who then seek out other heroes, looking for someone appropriate.

The whole business of capturing and holding the hero is programmed: that's when the actual sperm transfer takes place, (in some way that isn't X-rated, you filthy-minded reader). The sperm looks innocuous: it's more like pollen than sperm--you might mistake it for dandruff or dust. All it needs to do is find its way to the mucous membranes, such as the sclera of the eye or inside the lungs or in the mouth. From there, it finds its way to the female.

Eventually the female lays eggs, which are passed out of the host body, probably as sweat, though it might be as exhaled particulates. Like many parasites, there's a complex life cycle, but at the right stage it needs to find a genetically-compatible host.

From a game point of view, that can be anyone; very few of us control what we exhale or excrete to the extent that someone infected can avoid

Now, how can you use this in your game? Well, assuming it's true for some or all of the supers in your world, then there might actually be a biochemical cure for being a super. A rigorous treatment of antibiotics and a regular screening, and you might not be a super any more. (Depending on what happened when the organism activated those genes, you might not have a choice to be a super. It can go both ways.)

It also means that the super-soldier program gets much, much simpler: they infect suitable hosts. The though part is trying to control what powers they get.

The Wish-Fulfillment Tulpa Hero

SYSTEM: ANY

It might be interesting to gradually reveal that a character (presumably one whom the player has crafted so that you have no handles on him) is actually a tulpa, technically a creation of the minds of a small group of Tibetan monks. He can do super-powered things because they believe he can, and as other people come to believe in him, his powers are reinforced. The attachments he so despises (dependents and such) are fictional.

The two obvious things you do with such a character is change his powers because some other group has taken control, or create an opponent who is equally protean. If some small group of terrible Yakuza take over, killing the original Tibetan monks, then only the belief of the public can counter his monk-ey influences to make him evil. Suddenly the player character's hero status is threatened by public opinion.

Or the character is no longer affected by the original monks and the public, which might mean he's gone "real" and needs to be put down by those who protect reality from these incursions. ("I hear you, I feel for you, but we allow one superhero to become real and it's a slippery slope. Next it will be the three headed Arcturan space fungus with wings that wants to eat people. Where do we stop?")

Machines don't evolve?

Just reading an article on the bioethics of CRISPR, and they pointed out that nature--biology--is a vastly complicated mechanism with checks and balances that allow (in an undirected way) responses to many actions.

A mechanical item, such as an old-fashioned watch or a nuclear power plant, has only a limited number of responses to meddling, most of them a little bad (the glass pops off, it runs fast, it runs slow, or it doesn't run) or a lot bad (the nuclear power plant melts down), but "bad" unifies them.

Nature has more responses, most of which we don't notice because the system is so complex. Some are even good (for local values of "good"): this would be evolution in action.

But my sudden thought is, and this thought can be applied to superheroes hence its inclusion on this blog, is that machines don't necessarily have the same mechanism. 

Oh, sapience changes a lot of that if the machines can change themselves (a kind of Lamarckian inheritance, I guess: they make children with the traits that they have found useful), but before sapience, or in the early early stages of sapience, the system is tremendously limited.

There might be an adventure or a story in being the sole intelligent machine and being afraid to mess with your own innards, for fear that you will stop.

An unfocused rambling look at problem powers

SYSTEM: SUPERS! REd

There's a post on the Supers! board about problem powers, and since I can't get to the board from work, I thought I'd pontificate here.

My first thought, deliberately contrarian, is, "What problem powers?"

In one sense, the player chose it and you agreed to it, so there shouldn't be a problem. An attitude of letting everyone be excellent at something goes a long way toward this—everybody playing wants to be cool at some point, and they should. It's a superhero game, not a game of existential failure. So, yeah, in an ideal world, there would be no problem powers, and you see that in games where the powers are purely narrative.

At least, in some games all powers are equally the same amount of problem—the powers can be limited by the fictional reality more than the game mechanics (or the game mechanics refer to the fictional reality, I guess). Marvel Heroic Roleplaying approaches that kind of game, I think. So does Masks.

But it's not an ideal world. For Supers! and ICONS and Mutants & Masterminds and DC Heroes and so on, there can certainly be problem powers.

I think that problem powers are rare, but if you're in a problem situation, it won't seem that way. Problem powers are really a combination of things, because for some groups or some players, these problems aren't problems at all. It's an intersection of player, GM, character, and the way the power is written.

It seems to me, though, that the problems happen when this power wrecks the fun of players (including the GM). Some powers make things too easy in a way that the GM didn't anticipate; some powers destroy niche protection so that no other character is special; some powers have consequences that are just mind-blowing. This was suggested in the Supers! thread: what if a character with time travel wants to pop back in time to the beginning of the fight and change the conditions? I doubt you planned the fight with that in mind.

Off-hand, I can think of the following problem powers, in no particular order.

Time Control. Usually the base form (speed yourself up or slow others down) isn't too bad...it becomes a pain when you introduce time travel into the mix. What if someone wants to pop back two combat rounds and help himself? What a book-keeping pain.

Telepathy. It's really difficult to run any kind of mystery when the character can casually walk in and read minds. "Ah, Ozymandias killed the Comedian. Concentrate your search there."

Wizardry. How do you preserve any kind of niche protection when one character can do anything?

It's true too that some powers are fun-sucking when taken to the logical extreme. There's a lovely piece out there about how control of feces would be an incredible super power. Or the ability to speed up time on others is horrific if you limit it to chemical reactions, or grant them half the power of the Speed Force but not the "protects your body" part, so they rip themselves in two. Those would be problem powers.

The solutions or workarounds that I've heard of or used are:

• The power is off the table. This is the easiest for the GM to use. If the power+player combination is problematic, don't allow it. As Gerry Saracco said in the thread on the Supers! board, just because the power is in the book doesn't mean you have to allow it. This has the advantage that everyone sees it and everyone understands it. The disadvantages are that cool ideas from non-problem players can be dropped on the floor, or that you didn't know that the power was going to be a problem when you okayed the character.
• The power has limitations. This is the opposite tack and it can be applied retroactively. For some reason, the character can't do those game-breaking things. Steve Kenson has explicitly said this about Super-Speed in Mutants & Masterminds—the superfast character doesn't clean up the entire fight before anyone gets there because that's not the way things happen in the comics. It's a genre limitation.
• There are consequences to the action. Look, if the character casually scans minds, he or she is going to learn some unpleasant things about people, like what people really think of the PC or become the target of a shadowy conspiracy by learning something that was best kept hidden. The character is constantly blipping back in time to fix things? The timestream police come near and want to have a talk with the character...and they have specifically made themselves immune to his powers. (They've had eternity to research them.) Though I hate to use game mechanics for an in-game solution, you could take away a disadvantage (and its points) with the claim that it's entirely consistent with the character that he went back and fixed the problem in another timeline. (That last one seems kind of obnoxious to me, so I doubt I'd use it.)

It can be a very effective way to apply limitations by having the player create them. Say, "Using your timeshift power to travel back in time to the beginning of the fight is too tough for us to do. It's okay if you declare you're stunting duplication or something at the beginning of the fight, but suddenly saying, 'I go back and help myself' doesn't really work. What reason is consistent with what's already happened?"

Reasons could be the idea that you can go back in the past, you just can't be seen and change remembered history (he can timeshift, but he has to be careful not to be seen by the characters, so he puts the item they need in the potted plant...it's effectively a retcon, but the story is that he used his time powers), or it's very difficult to go in the past where you are, or the magic doesn't work that way.

Maybe the power only affects a certain mass, or volume, or the effects last only a turn (every power has a wreck-other's-fun rating that determines how long it lasts?) or it has side-effects that only show up a week later. It might not affect blue things, or green, or work in any room but the one where you did it previously.

If the player determines the reason, they're more likely to be happy with it.

In the meta sense, most people will change if you say, "Dude, you're wrecking everybody else's fun. Find a reason why that won't work." In the X-Men comics, Logan complained and complained about being on a team...but he stayed there. There was always a reason.  (If the player is still looking for ways to make you personally miserable after inventing a limitation, well, why are you playing with this person?)

On the bright side for the player, limitations might give the character more spotlight time. This is the Kryptonite rule: Whatever the character's weakness, it starts to show up much more often in the campaign. If your N-ray vision can't penetrate iridium, there's a lot more iridium in the world. Giving the GM a limitation is an invitation to create situations to your character.

As a GM, you have to be wary of the Kryptonite rule. And that leads to the last "workaround." Sometimes, the PC can just do it, because that's not what this adventure is about.

That's one of the big ones: If the character can do something, letting the character do it is fine, because the adventure is frequently about something else. If the character is super-strong, you never complain, "He lifted that car I put there and de-railed the entire adventure!" You put the car there to give him a chance to show off. If you need him not to move the car or rip the vault door open, then the car is attached to a bomb that will kill all the normals in the area if moved, or the vault door is made of Questonite, or something else.

As a GM, you're already used to thinking about when a power is important. My sense of consistency is such that I don't want a power that waffles in its abilities so I try to enforce consistency, but sometimes we hand-wave in order to get to the real story. ("Yeah, you can find rope in this barren warehouse and tie them up. Now the sigils on the floor tell you....")[1]

EDIT: I've gone back to this several times to try and clean up various sentences. Nothing major, but I do struggle to make this clearer. Partly, of course, because it's a jumbled mess of thinking.

1. I think it's Robinson Crusoe where the hero swims naked out to the shipwreck and then stores useful items in his pockets for the swim back. Revision was less common in the eighteenth century.

The Transplant that Ate Schenectady

SYSTEM: ANY

A confluence of things bring me to the idea that shows up in a number of comics. One of them is the podcast Geeks with Beer, specifically the episode where one of them (Frank?) describes the plot of Arkham Knight. Another is an adventure I ran in ICONS involving a certain villain ripping his heart out for his beloved. (He'd done it before. He got better. She was tired of the gesture.)

The idea is that regenerating tissue eventually takes over the body that it's put into. And that might even be true but mostly it's an old horror story trope (see Hands of Orlac or Mad Love--the 1936 movie--or even Eyes of Laura Mars or listen to the episode of Lights Out entitled "The Chicken Heart That Ate the World"--I think; it might have only eaten New York).

All of them hold the idea that the badness is inherent in the tissue itself, not in the recipient. In comics, the organ literally takes over the person, whether it's the Joker's tainted blood or some piece of Bruce Banner that's continually growing inside you (which makes the whole She-Hulk thing particularly nasty to think about: perhaps Jennifer Walters has very little in the way of powers; it's just Hulkness growing in her. Eventually she won't be some zaftig or Junoesque superheroine...she'll just look like Hulk, because he will have taken over).

Really, a lot of stuff in comics works through some kind of sympathetic magic or contagious magic, even though it often has a pseudo-scientific explanation. Superman is perhaps the most constantly scientific of the early heroes and his powers lapse into obsolete theories once in a while (the whole heat vision and X-ray thing seems based on the obsolete theory of sight that we emitted something that we then detected).

Much of the time there's a kind of morality play: when someone gets the heart of a killer in order to tame the urge and put the killer to good use, it's rare that the person succeeds: instead, it's a message that there are Things We Are Not Meant to Know. Heroes are rare and people with powers generally succumb to their darker urges (possibly because you only need one hero, but you need twelve months of villains to fight).

(Side note: I wonder if you could do a small adventure or campaign involving the characters who have decided to actually change the world, and who are inevitably thought of as villains because of that. So the opponents are either lawyers and bureaucrats of the campaign city, or all the heroes who are trying to maintain the status quo. Heck, you could have more than one adventure where the PCs get away because the "heroes" end up fighting each other for the chance to beat them up. I have often been uncomfortable with the knowledge that Batman, one of my favourite heroes, is essentially part of the 1%, and whose work is representative of nobility and monarchy....Superman, though a godlike alien, is closer to a democratic character.)

But let's look at the concept of the transformative transplant. Does someone with regeneration get used as a source of transplants? I remember reading something where the regenerator is essentially going to put himself or herself in the hospital forever so they can take lungs and spleens and whatever. But if you have regeneration, what kind of immune system do you have? Do the transplant recipients need huge quantities of immunosuppressants because the organ will just take over? Does the regenerating organ "know" when to stop? It's being nourished, so does it grow new other things, until the person pops open like rotten fruit and a clone of the donor steps out. (Which is pretty gross.)

Which might be your hook: someone wants that to happen, so they've intercepted the drug manufacturing for the immunosuppressants. Or replaced immunosuppressant B, which normally augments A, with something that suppresses A. And the clones start growing.

We can even throw in another SF trope which is that the clones, like identical twins, have some kind of psychic connection. The donor can control them or even flip between bodies. You do this once so there are thirty or a hundred of the regenerating villain around, and the donor can move between them or summon them, so the character never officially dies.

A Random Supers! Character

SYSTEM: SUPERS! RED

I decided I'd try a session the Mythic way, with no idea where it was going. After listening to the latest BAMF! podcast, I decided to use Supers! even though my character will be nowhere near as cool as the Goblin Ghost.

I'll put up the character first and then at some future date I'll put up an adventure.

Random character:
Origin (2d6): 2,3: Special Training (-3D powers, +2D resistances, +1D Aptitudes)
Resistances (8d6): 1,2,2, 3, 4,4,4,6:  One to add for player's choice, one for competency.
Composure: 3D
Fortitude: 2D
Reaction: 4D
Will: 2D
He's good. And the origin means I get to add 2 more. Let's make him a bit more strong-willed (3D) and increase his Fortitude a lot:
Composure: 3D
Fortitude: 4D
Reaction: 4D
Will: 3D

Aptitudes (5d6): 2. 3, 3, 4, 5--so ranks are 2D, 3D, 2D, and 2D. What are they, exactly? We'll skip the nominal first aptitude.
2,2 Aircraft
2,1 Vehicles
6,6 Survival
3,3 Investigation

Well, clearly he was on an around-the-world tour when his plane crashed and he had to learn how to survive, which made him tough tough tough. Let's say he can fight, for that extra D6 from his origin. If he had streetwise, I'd make it guns, but he clearly wasn't a criminal.

Aircraft: 2D
Fighting: 2D
Investigation: 2D
Survival: 2D
Vehicles: 3D

Power ranks (7d6): 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5
Powers would be
1D 3,6 Telekinesis
1D 3,6 Telekinesis
1D 5,4 Plant Control or Weather Control
3D 5,3 Invulnerability or Life Support
1D 1,1 Absorption

Well, his origin means that I have to get rid of 3D, so I'm dumping the first 3 powers. He has devices that grant him Invulnerability and Absorption. Since they're both devices, I can up each by a die. I think I'll put the 4D of Invulnerability as Piercing, so it's useful against bullets. It's clearly some kind of body armor.

Boosts (2d6): 5,2 both Lingering Effects and Persistent Damage don't really fit. He doesn't have enough dice for me to scarf one up for a Bashing Invulnerability.
Complications (2d6): 3,1 Well, we have devices. And 3,1 is Burnout, which seems appropriate for the Absorption device. So his powers become:
4D: Invulnerability (Device) Piercing
3D: Absorption (Device) Some kind of energy. Haven't thought of what, yet.

Advantages (2d6): 4,1 Attractive or Celebrity; I'll pick Celebrity, because...
Disadvantages (2d6): 4,5 Public ID

So I figure this guy is doing things in public as part of a payback thing: it's his public service. He gets the suit, but he's followed by cameras (and probably wears a body camera to make sure he doesn't do things.) If it's payback, maybe the crime he committed is connected to the vehicles/airplanes aptitudes. Heck, the investigation is probably training he got in order that he doesn't destroy evidence at a crime scene.

Since his vehicles and aircraft aptitudes are high, he wasn't really a criminal criminal; it wasn't his life's work (or he'd have streetwise). No, something like a DUI and wanton property destruction. And the judge, who has a sense of humor, sentenced him to public works. As a superhero. So the armor is painted in the city colors and has probably been tagged by graffiti artists.

He needs a municipal kind of name, or a name from the graffiti tag on his chest. Maybe he's officially known as Community Repayment Individual Municipal (pronounced CRIM), but people have taken to calling him Bad Boy, because that's one of the graffitos. Yes, Bad Boy is a good guy.

Bad Boy ID: Karl Shiner
Resistances
Composure: 3D
Fortitude: 4D
Reaction: 4D
Will: 3D
Aptitudes
Aircraft: 2D
Fighting: 2D
Investigation: 2D
Survival: 2D
Vehicles: 3D

Powers

3D Invulnerability (Device) Piercing
3D: Absorption (Device) Some kind of energy. Haven't thought of what, yet.

Advantages

Celebrity

Disadvantages

Public ID

Sentinels of the Multiverse revisited: Aiding Others

SYSTEM: ICONS

FIgured out how to do Legacy's aiding power in ICONS. My first thought was rather complicated: Probability Control (good luck), Extra: Affects Others, Limit: Others Only, Extra: Duration of Level, Limit: Extra Effort Only.  In play, you'd also want some kind of recharge extra, and he has (say) 4 ranks so he grants it to each of his teammates. So each teammate gets extra effort on each roll for (rank) panels. 

But you can get almost the same effect with Probability Control (bad luck) applied to the villains and their minions. That one is Probability Control (bad luck), Extra: Duration of Level, Limit: never for actions against him alone.

Or you invent a new Aid or Improve Others power, based on some combination of this and Healing. 

(I know that Certain People always like new powers, so this is for them.)

Adventure Seeds on a Theme

I have no ideas today, so we're going to take something and I'll riff on it, and see if we can produce one or more adventure seeds that way. This might be a bountiful harvest of ideas or it might be awful; if I edit this, it will be for presentation or spelling, not for content.

American Thanksgiving is coming up, but my (Canadian) Thanksgiving was last month. So, being between Thanksgivings, I'll take that as my theme.

Thanksgiving is traditionally a time of family togetherness. What if some big bad villain escaped from detention but it's actually so that he or she can spend the holidays with the family? Maybe Dad is dying or something, and this might well be the last Thanksgiving they spend together. The villain can't get out without the help of some others, so there's a whole group there (some of whom don't care about the holiday, so they're happy to loot or whatever, and when caught, they point the finger at Villain's family house. It might look like this:

The PCs are looking forward to their own festivities when the Midnight Throne escapes from his maximum security prison, with the help of several supervillain associates (past villains from your campaign or perhaps Dark Silver, Chicle, Solar Flare, and Limpet, to invent some names). Limpet and Chicle are easy enough to catch because they're busy hijacking a teleporter to get out of the nation, and they eventually point to a quiet suburban home, where the Midnight Throne is having Thanksgiving dinner with his two associates and his family. The ensuing fight puts Throne's father in the hospital--will the PCs let Throne go there to say goodbye?

Mind, there might be some juice to be gotten from avoiding a family get-together as well.

Lots of the team is off enjoying Thanksgiving but several people have volunteered to be on watch duty. They don't actually want to go home. The problem is that even the crooks seem to have taken today off. The PCs respond to an environmental emergency, and that's good, but there's still nothing. Else. To do. They're about to break out the D&D books (and really, don't you want to roleplay your heroes roleplaying D&D?) when the alarms go off. Someone is inside the base!

Now, it could be a story where their companions have decided to bring them some turkey and pie, or even one where the villains bring the food, but in the tradition of Kitty Pryde's Christmas, I'd rather it were other-dimensional invaders. The bad news is, there are a lot of mooks. The good news is, the interdimensional gateway has opened in the hallway on the same for as the Disaster Dungeon, where the team does its training. If they can't beat the invading force directly, maybe the Disaster Dungeon can do it (once they disable the safeties).

And I'm out of lunchtime, so there you go.

Sex and the Single Superhero

SYSTEM: Any

This is my smut entry. I'll try to keep it fairly clean in terms of words but we'll be talking about some adult stuff, so if you want to skip this, now would be a good time.

Still here?

I was thinking about sex and superheroes this morning on the drive in. Most comics just ignore it and that's a perfectly fine genre convention to keep.

If you want to go all hardcore (so to speak), go off and read Larry Niven's famous essay, Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. (The Wikipedia article is here, and a probably illegal copy of the text is here. No guarantees that either link will be good even a second after I post this.) I'm proposing something a little gentler.

For starters, let's ignore all the trained and gimmick-laden humans. They have no physical problems. (Maybe mental ones, but that's outside my purview right now.) We can probably not worry about lots of mutants: if your mutation is that you have wings or horns but everything else is standard equipment, you don't have a problem except maybe socially.

That leaves us the folks with powers that make things difficult or who aren't actually human: your super-strong or invulnerable types, your rapid regenerators, your superfast speedsters, or your aliens. It's not clear if Metamorpho even has genitalia any more, though he can probably produce something suitable.

The super-strong or the invulnerable might be in danger of hurting their partners or of, er, not being accessible. If regenerators happen to be capable of regenerating and there's a noticeable hymen, that might be a problem. Speedsters probably have a problem syncing up with their partners.

The obvious solution, and one that might feed nicely into any campaign that features any kind of super/non-super stratification, is that supers of that sexually-isolating kind only date other supers.

There's something terribly lonely about the woman with the permanent force field who can only date the person who nullifies force fields, whether a hero or not. The Obelisk might pine for Nancy Normal, but can only be intimate with Suzy Strength.  The Zipper might remember her old boyfriend fondly but the foreplay takes so damned long  (hours by her standards, even though he's known as Quick-Draw locally). And Quirk the being from Planet Z doesn't even find humans attractive, but dolphins work.

There's a subclass of supers who can only have relations with other supers, because they're afraid of hurting a normal partner. (I suppose there's a subsubsubclass of those that doesn't care about hurting a normal partner, but I prefer not to think about that.) So what kind of things are you going to see developing because of that?

MetaDate is the online dating service for metahumans. The customers (with exceptions, obviously) have a higher tolerance for unusual appearances. Gender categories include male, female, trans, neuter, and fluid. The profile form includes relevant powers, but they never ask which side of the law you're on.

The Underground is a dating club for metahumans. It can be classified as either a place for a date or a pickup bar, depending on what section you're in. The Underground is, well, underground: under an embassy of a country without an extradition treaty. In fact, it has an agreement with the embassy: activities on its soil are not considered to be bound by the laws of the host country, and while they might be technically illegal in the embassy's country, there is no access between the Underground and the embassy. The embassy's staff practices "don't ask, don't tell." The Underground is not a place for actual assignations; the staff is quite strong and there are other staff members who handle some of the more outre abilities. (There is a member of staff normally immune to suggestion or mind control, for instance.)

Dimension X has nothing so abstruse legally...it's just a place for aliens. It started small, and is gradually growing to fill the warehouse block where it exists. There are a number of small rooms, each of which attempts to mimic "home" for some alien species. Most of the rooms can handle a number of environments, but the number isn't infinite, and there are some things it can't handle at all. They used to have a problem with theft (supervillains kept stealing their gravity repulsor technology or their red sun filters) but a few retired heroes work there now, and that has lowered the incidence considerably. It is expensive, though the local agency that deals with and controls aliens (the Bureau of Extra Foreign Affairs) supports it.

Uplifted animals have different problems...but that's for a different post.

The care and feeding of secret identities

Secret identities are not particularly in, right now. On shows like Flash and Supergirl they seem to reveal their secret identities at the drop of a hat (mask?). The biggest group, the X-Men, don't really have secret identities, though some of them wear masks in sort a half-witted attempt at hiding their identities. Though the original X-Men wore masks and still do, most of the New Mutants don't when I look at covers. (Really...they're hated and feared. You'd figure they'd wear more disguise, not less.) The lamented Fantastic Four just say who they are, and Tony Stark admits to gallivanting around in armor. Thor has no secret identity, and Hank Pym seems to use his name as often as any of the other identities he has.

And, really, secret identities have a bad rep. It feels in retrospect like there were a bazillion stories where Lois suspected Clark of being Superman, but was foiled because Clark dressed up a robot, or Batman, or pretended to be dead, or used super-ventriloquism (really? I mean, really?) to pretend he was in the next room from Superman.

Not to mention that in the context of most superhero RPGs, your secret identity as Pablo Pinkwater, crusading blogger, doesn't matter except as a way to feed you information or get you in and out of scrapes.

So what's a GM to do with secret identities?

Obviously, you don't need them. It's totally okay if a player is fine with playing Frank, whose public name is Ionic Column, or even just Frank. If that's the game you want to play, great.

But if a character has taken a secret identity--has made a point of saying it--then what do you do with it?

There are, to my mind, three reasons why a player might take a secret identity for his or her character:

1. It makes sense for the character (the sole trained normal in a group of demigods, for instance) but the player doesn't really want to play it. In that case, trying to bring in the character's secret identity is going to be frustrating for both of you: you'll get annoyed that you keep throwing out plot crumbs that get ignored, and the player will get annoyed that you're wasting all this time on unimportant things. A variant of this is the player who is actively trying to keep you from giving them stuff that will distract from what they consider the cool gaming part. You see this in players who are there for the puzzles and game rather than the story. (No knock on either.)
2. It makes sense for the character because they have something to hide from the other characters. I had this in a recent M&M3E game, where one character was the child of villains and was actually working on behalf of the supervillain community. This wasn't underhanded as a game thing: The other players knew the character was like this, but their characters didn't. So we did a fair but of almost-lost-identity stuff that revolved around that.
3. The player likes all the angst and the convoluted solutions to pretend to be other people.

In the first case, both of you should just agree that it's the case. "Do you care about this stuff? I notice you didn't take secret identity as a complication or quality." As a GM, you can avoid certain areas easily.

The second case is really the easiest. The important thing is discovery by the other characters, and if your players like your basic fewmet football, then the other players are going to seize on every opportunity that the character provides.

The third case is the one I'm going to talk about. These ideas can also be applied to the second case.

A secret identity is just a specific case of A Terrible Secret. What matters are the consequences of exposure. Once you have sufficiently high consequences, you can play around with the threat of exposure. If there are no consequences, who cares? Your PC can be Hugh out in the suburbs who gets in the car every day, drives to a secret location, and changes. The super team is no different than, say, your secret government organization as a job.

So what are the consequences of exposure, and how do you make them obvious to the players? What are the consequences of exposure?

Generally, the negative consequences of exposure depend on a couple of things that might or might not be true for a given character;

• The hero isn't indestructible all the time. Similarly, trained guys need some kind of down time. If your hero is vulnerable if attacked in his sleep, suddenly there's a reason not to let people know where he lives.
• The hero's associated aren't indestructible. Your hero might be very tough, but the girlfriend/boss/employee/cousin/paperboy isn't. 
• The hero wants some privacy.
• The hero wants to stay in touch with regular people.

So you make them care about exposure by playing with the things that are true for that character and creating situations that might take them away.

People say one thing about the general case and act differently about the specific. So J. Jonah Jameson is against superheroes and these whackos, but it's different when it's his son who has become the Man-Wolf. Your character's dependents might mention how awful the hero identity is, and might even have a plausible reason for hating him or her, but it might not hold up when it's someone the dependent knows. For instance, Aunt May in the early days repeatedly said things about that awful Spider-Man, which made Peter afraid to let her know. During the period where she did know, it was obviously fine with her. (The Ultimates version of Aunt May knew, and was fine.)

If a PC has some romantic potential partner, having the partner say, "I would never date so-and-so" might well be a partial argument against a reveal.

The PCs can see the results of a public identity generally and vendettas carried out by villains against their friends who don't have secret identities: if papparazzi camp out on the doorstep of team-mate Avalanche, or if the Murky Molemaster attacks the family of Avalanche, well, the player has a reason to figure you'd do the same to his or her PC's relatives or loved ones. So feel free to attack them; it's especially effective against people you can't hurt directly. If no one on the team has a public or semipublic identity, feel free to introduce a hero who is being blackmailed in just that way: maybe Fisher Prince doesn't patrol the Swamp section of town whenever he gets a signal from the Bone Gang. There's a whole adventure there trying to resolve Fisher Prince's problem while showing the characters what might happen to them.

Gossip or hearsay can be a powerful tool. If Joe Random Stranger mutters bad things or even threats against the hero, is it so far-fetched as to think a villain might do bad things? "What's that guy, covering his face? What has he got to hide, huh? I bet he's a criminal. And the guy who does show his face, why, he's got these shifty eyes." Feel free to use any photos that fit, just like a "Separated at Birth" joke.

Secret identities seem to be mostly out of place in modern comics or modern supers RPGs. You can still wring interesting things out of them.