Hey You Know What's Fun That You Did Not Know Was Fun?

It was with trepidation that I opened Deadly Fusion. What a terrible cover. Unremembered, unloved, seemingly unread and unreviewed, and not even having DC Heroes’ usual snappy trade-dress, that terrible cover-art it looks doubly off-brand. Was this review just going to be a string of jokes?

It was not. Despite everything, Deadly Fusion turns out to be a really interesting module, and I’d hope to see more things like it or inspired by it.

Like TSR did with their Marvel game Mayfair seems to have decided to let their superhero adventure modules be a place where designers got to experiment with mutant formats and ideas. When you look at old fantasy, horror and sci-fi adventures you see the beginnings of things we still see all the time today—normal scene-chains (sometimes expanding into scene webs), and location-based sandboxes. This isn’t one of those. Like Marvel’s Secret Wars and Nightmares of Futures Past, Deadly Fusion spawned no descendants, and that’s a shame.

New adventure formats are rare, and not enough people complain about it.

Deadly Fusion is called a “match play” and what that means is it’s for two people who both take the role of player sometimes and GM sometimes, specifically here:

-Using one of two books, one player GM’s the other player—as Batman—going through some scenes in Gotham City investigating a plot which eventually leads to the Joker.

-These scenes alternate (every two or three) with the Batman player acting as GM (using the other book) to get Superman through some scenes in Metropolis investigating a plot which eventually leads to Lex Luthor.

-That's most of the adventure. But then for the last section both players then stop and begin reading: the two separate books become separate Choose Your Own Adventure style books with paragraphs ending in choices for their respective characters—you go to the numbered paragraph and read the next thing—with the possibility of skill checks and fights along the way.

-Then the characters (and their players) re-unite fight or talk or both, and then make some decisions together, then finish the Choose Your Own Adventure thing to see what happens.

It’s super weird, and not perfect—especially the end—but surprisingly well-done. The whole thing is enabled by a few interesting techniques:

-First: limiting information. The two-book format, the investigation structure, plus the fact that the two investigations are separate for most of the game gets rid of the problem of the GM-player’s metaknowledge getting in the way of being fair. The Batman character doesn’t have enough information to figure out anything about Batman’s mystery while reading Superman’s and vice versa. The game doesn’t quite stick the landing at the end but it offers some intriguing tools which could’ve probably been leveraged to do it, which we’ll see below.

-Using superheroes. Superheroes don’t much sandbox: if Lois is in trouble, you go save Lois. This allows the GM to be sure that if the PC survives, they’re going to get to the next scene eventually without too many railroad nurses or nudges. 

-Using specific characters: Both of these scenarios wouldn’t work if you had a PC with telepathy, but, no: you have Superman, you have Batman. This allows the creation of very specific scenes and challenges and for the game designer to anticipate—with a fair degree of certainty—the range of outcomes. It also has some fun side-effects, as we’ll see.

You can start to see right away some of the barriers to this kind of adventure catching on, the main one being: this isn’t the kind of writing that can arise organically from normal RPG play. Unlike a typical adventure module or even a ruleset, this kind of match-play requires one person to set it up—including dropping in hidden information for both sides—and then to hand it over to two other people and not participate at all in the resulting game. It has to be a product. It isn’t the kind of thing that’s just an extension of what a GM might make at home for their own campaign.

Also: it’s not re-usable. You play once and pretty much it’s used up. And it requires two GMs. I think in the internet era, however, this could be a very good fit for, say, two RPG internet friends to play on Zoom.

So, the details:

Good

-Great scene: Batman has to interrogate a pawn shop guy behind bullet-proof glass named Gus Rogers. Gus isn’t especially crooked but he thinks Batman’s an idiot and makes fun of him, which seems like a fun thing to roleplay. When the scene gets to the breaking point, Gus runs off, if Batman pursues him he ends up in Crime Alley and has to deal with a My Parents Are Dead flashback. This is the kind of thing you can only do if you are playing an established character and the module really plays it for all it’s worth.

-When Batman gets to the docks ““straddling the littered sidewalks, overweight sailors seasoned with equal parts saltwater and rum, stagger about and decry their sorry plights” then ask batman for a drink. If he gets rough he has to fight

lol

-Because he actually isn’t the villain behind everything, when Batman meets the Joker the Joker’s confused and thinks he’s been drugged and taken to the Batcave. This is a good way to make the Batman player interact with the Joker instead of just immediately punch him.

-The real villain in the end is Brainiac—who wants to blow up Metropolis and Gotham. In the final scenes, if Batman or Superman loses their fight to Luthor or the Joker, then the player takes over Luthor or the Joker and they have to foil Brainiac, because their city is at risk, too—I love that.

Bad

-After explaining the format, both the “Batman” and “Superman” books start with a fake article about getting energy from cold fusion and shouldn’t. There’s no reason the GM needs this information and I can see it spoiling some surprises and challenges for them when they take on the player role—I wonder if someone higher-up asked for this to be put in at the last minute to make it easier to understand the technological plot points that come up later

-They also have a page up front saying what the hero knows about the other hero and about The Joker and Lex Luthor. Like the fake article, I don’t think this serves much purpose except to tip the module’s hand as to who the villains are, but y’know, LotFP hadn’t invented profit-share-modules yet so a freelancer’s gotta hit that word count. (The author's read Dark Knight Returns--Batman thinks Superman’s “patriotism prevents him from making the most of his abilities”.)

-There’s also a place to “Use this section to (secretly) mark your answer to the offer made to you by the Joker/Luthor during Encounter Eight” —to keep it secret from the other player/GM. Nice idea, it shouldn’t be in this part of the book because, again, tipping the module’s hand. You don’t need to know you;ll meet the Joker or Luthor this early.

-A lot of indulging in that mainstream RPG vice: endless statblocks for normal people. Lois Lane has an Aura of 2. Did you know that? I like this bit 

Most notable about Lois are the conflicting aspects of her remarkably resourceful intelligence and her unerring ability to fall directly into deadly criminal schemes.

 Fair.

Also I don’t completely remember what "Aura" is but it has something to do with personality and mystical oomph I am 100% sure Lois has more of it than fucking Jimmy Olsen. Also featured: Cat Grant (who I, who have read almost all comic books, barely have heard of), Margaret Sawyer (who I have never heard of) and Officer William Henderson (ditto). They each get a column of descriptions to themselves but no picture at all, which seems like the opposite of what you’d want had anyone but the writer given a fuck about this module. A lot of the personality information they’re trying to get across so the GM could role-play them could’ve been gotten across in one picture or—better yet—a comic panel where they’re saying some characteristic catch-phrase

-They do some railroading they could very easily have avoided. They basically offer nursing and nudging options to get PCs to move to the next scene, but since DC Heroes offers xp for all kinds of things, the module could easily make it like “If the player correctly follows the clue, they get Hero Points, if Jimmy Olsen has to point it out to them, they don’t”. You lose something for not solving the challenge, but it doesn’t affect the module’s ability to take you to one of the next scenes. Since this is primarily a superhero game (so about role-playing and fights) rather than a detective game (about the convolutions of solving or not solving various riddles on time), and it obviously requires the two players to submit to the unusual format in order to be playable, I think this is a good compromise. Also: Hero Points are a spendable xp stat, so if you don’t solve shit yourself, it does legitimately affect your game later, which is nice, without having to write an endlessly branching octopus module to account for every twist the story might take.

-The Choose-Your-Own Adventure doesn’t quite work. Obviously it’s less fun to have the two friends, after having been talking to each other throughout the game, have to go off separately and do homework—and, more than that, the choices they have to make don’t really offer an interesting range of options or involvement with the mechanics. However, it really seems like some of what they did with each player having information the other didn’t could have been used in another way to make a more interesting and surprising climax. The cover shows Superman and Batman about to fight—which they probably won’t—but I think it would’ve been worth railroading the heroes into fighting if they could’ve made it into an interesting wargame with some secret info on both sides. Or, better yet, ended with them both fighting something that has pre-programmed surprise moves like "In round three, whoever last interacted with Brainiac gets their brain transferred into a pig" etc.

Weird

-In Batman’s endless statblock, perhaps as a deliberate choice, Batman is not carrying “omnigadgets” as he is in the normal DC Heroes rules from this era. Omni-gadgets are a (great) catch-all rule which allow gadgeteering characters to pull out until-then-unexpected pieces of equipment like shark repellent, which is pretty true to the genre. It makes sense that for this adventure, what Batman’s carrying is standardized, like: this is what you have to work with on this day in Gotham. There are also traces of DC Heroes designer Ray Winninger’s maniacal “quantify fucking everything in rules terms” ethos with Batman’s miniature camera described as having the “Recall” power at 3 with the limitation “Only Recalls visual information” instead of just saying it’s a fucking camera. The cassette recorder has Recall: 10 for some reason.

This is clearly a Batman influenced by the Dark Knight Returns era, described as “…a callous and obsessive veteran of a dark and malignant war”. 

-Superman’s statblock: No super-ventriloquism it’s a cover-up. 

-Information on what Superman knows about the Joker, Luthor and Batman (“as ruthless and violent as any proclaimed hero to have ever lived” which seems a little extreme considering Superman lives in a world where Lobo and Brainiac’s son have had their own comic book for a year, but whatever).

-Joker— Motivation: Psychopath. Occupation: Psychopath

-Commisioner Gordon is only one point tougher than Jimmy Olsen I call bullshit.

-Now the adventure begins with the Superman player GMing the Batman player as Bruce Wayne in the mansion: You see the bat-signal but also, to let you know about a separate incident, Alfred tells you that he saw one of the alert buttons blinking while he was dusting the Batcave. Is that really how that works? 

-The map of Gotham City (above) does not look like any map of Gotham City I’ve ever seen.

The current canonical map—which looks like Manhattan only fat and drunk—was drawn, I think, by Eliot R Brown (the guy who did the technical drawings in DC Who’s Who and Marvel’s OHOTMU as well as all those Punisher comic pages where it’s just pictures and technical specs of his guns) for the No Man’s Land storyline.

The current canonical Metropolis looks like Manhattan sideways and, likewise, does not look like the Metropolis in this book.

-The read-aloud text is very purple.

Superman: “The city is a beacon of hope to the teeming millions, representing all that is good and true of the American dream.”

Batman: ““Every single inhabitant of this decaying borough at once envies your strength and hates you for it.” “The store itself reeks of a mingled stench of aged sweat and gun oil.”

I’m going to say something strange: I think the read-aloud text is good in this module. I usually hate read-aloud text but a thing like this where you and a friend pretend to be Batman and Superman is probably best played in a spirit of slightly ironic indulgence (after all, if you play too seriously you just have Batman just call the rest of the Justice League as soon as he sees trouble). Ham it up, read to each other. You don’t have 4 people waiting to start arguing about how to cross the orc moat—I could see it working.

-There’s a minisystem for computer hacking where basically different levels of security have more digits and the better you roll the more of those digits you get for free and the rest you have to guess. It’s a nice idea but the game doesn’t really show why having to brute force the remaining numbers is bad. In theory it’s a time-sink but since, unlike a typical dungeon, the game has no random encounter there’s no particular reason not to say “Ok, I try every digit starting with 1, then every digit starting with 2…”. It would’ve worked fine if they’d put a ticking clock in there.

Now I've said already "Someone should make one of these" and, fine, in writing this I twisted my arm.

I'm getting to work writing and drawing one now. More later.

I Am The Weapon (you can have it)

Once upon a time I was commissioned to write a superhero game and I called it I Am The Weapon. 

Basically, someone saw the draft rules for Demon City and was like "Hey do you think a superhero game could work like this?" I explained that since Demon City was basically written for a power scale where humans are 1-5 and bad supernatural things are up in 6-10 it'd need some tweaking, but that most of the underlying ideas seemed to translate pretty well.

Instead of using tarot cards, like in Demon City, I came up with a system where different power levels use different dice, but the most fun part was putting together the character generation system:

The basic problem was that because superhero systems are characterized by the wild variety of their abilities, most superhero RPGs had disappointing character generation. You either have systems where you imagine a character and then bang on the system until it spits that character out--which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't really get the system participating in helping to make the character more interesting, or give you new ideas--or systems where character generation is so random it results in characters that don't really feel like "real" superheroes.

My solution was to take the parts of character generation systems that were fun--you see something interesting within reach, you go for it, you pay for it by adding a twist onto the character you didn't see coming that, in turn, makes the character feel more real--and making the whole system about that. I also drew webs of overlapping "clusters" of superpowers that tended to be thematically tied together and built in options to make those available once you'd gotten a power "nearby" so that nobody was forced into making Rollerskating Ramhorn Man. Character generation in I Am The Weapon involves a lot of random rolls, but the rolls lead to choices, and I made an effort to make the choices the kind that had something for everyone.

It seemed to work out.

I ran playtests in random teams, usually three vs three, first with just my friends and then with people recruited off my discord. It was popular. The biggest fan was Fiona Geist--aka FM Geist aka coilingoracle--I told her "Fiona, whenever you can get five other people to agree to play over videochat all at the same time, I'll run a playtest". Everybody wanted in.

Inside baseball: Since it was discord, a lot of the playtesters were part of the 4channy clique surrounding Shoe Skogen, Emmy Allen / Cavegirl that Chris McDowall brought in through his OSR server, and all those people, who turned out to be basically sociopaths once my ex went insane--Fiona herself very much included. It might've explained why they all had so much time on their hands, I don't know. Anyway, it was very weird--people who'd cheerfully showed up for weeks on end to play supergames, roll dice and trade X-Men jokes with me were, less than a week later, suddenly patting each other on the back for spouting fascist rhetoric and explaining that "facts" and "evidence" were outdated pre-internet concepts and anyone accused was always guilty. Good times.

Anyway the point is:  it wasn't just my friends who liked it--the worst people in the world had to admit it was a pretty good game, and kept coming back for more.

I never got to finish it or do the pictures--the publisher decided it was pointless to release anything once the harassment campaign kicked off--but I did get a lot on paper. I Am The Weapon not only had complete rules and every super-power anybody ever managed to think up from superspeed to whatever the fuck B'Wana Beast does to animals to rules for those guys who just are the world's best at boomerangs, it had rules for superscience inventions and occult rituals (surprisingly similar in comics, actually), sample PCs (instead of making up a fake superhero mythology for the characters, I made up a fake publication history--so there was a psychedelic '60s eurocomics version of The Fashionista and a postmodern pseudo-Vertigo one), every table I could imagine wanting to improvise superhero stuff during a game, from random star-tyrants to crime-bosses, and even some alternate universes:

The Transparent Earth (28th Century)

Possible Future

In the so-called “Transparent Earth” future, 99% of humanity lives in the Polystructure—a tightly-packed lattice of clear, spherical, plastic pods approximately the size of a modern apartment, extending off the surface of the planet-proper in every direction, like layers of bubble wrap around a marble. The concept of privacy no longer exists and collective life mostly consists of conceiving of-, and carrying out-, various schemes for optimizing the flow of various forms of nourishment and pleasure from one part of The Polystructure to the other and dealing with occasional “hookworms” (a catch-all term for people and organizations scheming to disrupt this flow). The Transparent Earth first appeared in Trajectory #1 as the future from which the near-omniscient heroine and her gravity-shifting engines—depicted as a common and convenient piece of technology for moving through The Polystructure—originated.

Problems In The Polystructure

1. Hazard of unknown origin—possibly alien—has collided with and depopulated 56 layers of 30-North 110-West sector.

2. Nutrient tubes diverted to feed massive sentient bioweapon.

3. Custom sex-clones siphoned off to incorrect sector by pervert hookworm for beyond-regulation-size orgy.

4. Malfunctioning emergency system has shot 8 pods into interplanetary space, the inhabitants must be rescued in the next 24 hours.

5. War cultists insisting that life-or-death conflict is a natural human need performing random acts of sabotage to make enemies.

6. Moralizing sector of population discovers they have been secretly (and blissfully) sequestered from contact with more interesting majority.

First Responders In The Polystructure

1. Targeted Violence Squad in colored and bulky padded life-support suits on hovering disks, carrying plug-rifles, set to stun.

2. Angry locals emerge from their bubbles, waving dangerous multipurpose kitchen and gardening gauntlets.

3. Segmented and worm-limbed security droids that emit stun fields after leaping onto targets.

4. Sprinkler system sprays chemical paralytic.

5. Nothing, but network of gnatlike tracer-drones observes and tracks culprits.

6. Surgical Entrapment Team sends agent disguised as desirable civilian/victim/ally to lure perpetrator into a position more tactically advantageous to the authorities.

Some Notable Pods

1. Zoo pod half-filled with sea water where cat-manatee hybrids romp.

2. Reservoir pod filled with chemical parylitic for use in security system.

3. Dispensary pod filled medical supplies, non-perishable foods, tools, etc in fist-sized hyperdegradable plastic bubbles.

4. Site of recent IED murder—blood paints the inside of the pod.

5. Nonconforming artist has rebuilt pod as a cube.

6. Clone-incubation pod.

Rules And Play In The Transparent Earth

By the time the Polystructure is built, the Earth is so transformed that you’ll need Local Culture/Customs (Polystructure), Local Machines (Polystructure), and Local Weapons  (Polystructure) to fully grasp what’s going on here. The language is also different, though not incomprehensible to modern English speakers.

Anyway, the game will probably never see the light of day now, but I put together a version of all this stuff that was written for the game so that people who were interested could see it and maybe try it out.

So far it works, but with hundreds of interacting superpowers there are probably some things that could be tightened up.

It's 20$ in The Store.

Supporting NPCs In A Superhero Game

from the upcoming game I Am The Weapon...

Casting

While a fun and engaging superhero campaign won’t require you to invent a setting from scratch on the first day out,  it is absolutely vital to begin developing a cast of characters for your heroes to interact with, and to think of these characters not as just a backdrop, but as building blocks from which to assemble all the adventures to come. I would venture to say that for a superhero game to be successful, a good supporting cast is more important than any other kind of effort put into the setting—even if that cast is only two or three NPCs.  These won’t be temporary NPCs that appear once and then are gone, but rather a group of interlinked personalities that help define the campaign's scope and tone.

A good place to start is by thinking about the variety of different and special roles that recurring non-player-characters can play:

The Ordinary Ally: This is the most flexible and therefore useful kind of NPC—for both the hero and the game master. While any PC will have powerful allies controlled by the game’s other players, a loyal friend with no special abilities serves a lot of important functions in a plot—which is why nearly every superhero with their own comic has one.

In terms of plot, they can:

-Come to a hero with a problem to investigate (“While volunteering at the homeless shelter, I keep hearing strange stories of…”)

-Provide technical skills, information or advice (“When I was in the army I saw burns like this…”)

-They can be captured and need rescuing

-They can even (if Network points are spent) rescue the hero.

In terms of flavor they often:

-Give the GM opportunities to build the environment (“Remember that abandoned yacht that Hooks the Octopus climbed onto last week?”)

-Provide comic relief

-Just be someone who’s fun to talk to. 

This kind of ally in comics is usually ordinary and not too skilled in any obviously useful way because, if they also had superpowers or were a master martial-artist, then it would turn into a team book. Likewise, if—in an RPG—you make an NPC that’s both helpful and powerful, you’re essentially just adding a new host-controlled member to the team, which takes the spotlight away from the players. The Ordinary Ally—like all NPCs—is there to make the game interesting, and this means they may have to cause as many problems as they solve.

The Ordinary Ally is often not only connected to the hero but also to the hero’s secret identity—the ally may be a family member, just a friend, the hero’s boss in civilian life—or vice versa—or they may work together in some way. Whether or not the ally knows the connection between the secret identity and the hero will change the kinds of trouble they can get them into and out of. One possibility for the ally who is unaware of their friend’s secret identity is having a totally separate—even antagonistic—relationship to the hero’s civilian identity. Or vice versa: maybe Maximum Max needs to transform back into a mild-mannered librarian in order to get help finding the forgotten mystical text from Dr Howarth Morkwaite—famously skeptical of superheroics.

The Foil: A Foil is someone who offers a contrast to the main character(s). They have a personality, philosophy or point-of-view that’s wildly different from the hero.

In terms of plot, Foils can be used to create obstacles and problems for the heroes that complicate their attempts to straightforwardly deal with enemies and problems (“A fair trial for Pyromite!? He burned 30 people alive! Maybe you’re in cahoots with him, masked man…”)

In terms of flavor, Foils are great for creating dialogue and drama by offering an alternative to the heroes’ principles. If a hero makes a speech, a Foil will take the opposite tack: “Well it’s all fine and good for you to say we should stand up The Trauma Gods, but what about those of use who can’t fly or build an ice shell around ourselves? I say we give them what they want and hope they leave!” 

A Foil can be any kind of character: an irritating civilian, a character with influence and power over a PCs’ secret identity, a fellow hero (or “hero”) with questionable methods or even…

The Villain-Foil: While heroes will likely face many villains during a game, the Villain-Foil has a special role, as they also act as a long-standing philosophical challenge to the heroes’ ideas about right and wrong. If the hero is idealistic, their Villain-Foil will be cruelly pragmatic, if the hero is light-hearted, their Villain-Foil will be brutal, if the hero is grim and serious, their Villain-Foil will be smarmily whimsical, etc.

In terms of both plot and flavor, the Villain-Foil has a similar function to a regular foil—although the problems they create will be bigger.

The most important characteristic of a good Villain-Foil is they keep coming back. Genre expectations in the typical superhero story help enable this: superheroes rarely kill, meaning the Villain-Foil is likely to go to jail and then escape again over and over. Many of them even incorporate this irony in their villainous speeches “Your way doesn’t work, Cursebreaker, you are weak: even if you manage to imprison me, I’ll escape and inflict a tenfold vengeance on you and this cursed city!”

Creating a really good Villain-Foil takes some thought and careful observation—pay attention to how your players make their characters act—what they like about them—and develop villains in response to that.

Romantic Interest (Cute): Saving lives is undeniably sexy, and if you do it long enough someone is bound to notice. The “Cute” here refers to the relationship itself, not necessarily the attractiveness of the NPC—in contrast to the Scary Romantic Interest (see below), The Cute Romantic interest is basically a stable relationship between people who usually get along and see the world in a roughly similar way.

In terms of plot and flavor, a Cute Romantic Interest is nearly identical to the Ordinary Ally (see above): they can introduce or help with problems, they can rescue and need rescuing, they can be fun and funny to talk to. The dramatic ironies of having an ally who feels one way about the hero and a completely different way about their alter ego are doubled when it’s a romantic interest. Also: just like allies, if an NPC Cute Romantic Interest has powers or special abilities, you’re adding another hero Host-controlled hero to the team which somewhat dilutes the excitement of the challenges the PC heroes are meant to face alone, so I’d usually advise against it. 

Romantic Interest (Scary): In contrast to the Cute Romantic Interest, the love of the Scary Romantic Interest comes pre-packaged with some terrible conflict which pits an undeniable attraction against an equally undeniable moral or practical conundrum. The Scary Romantic Interest might be eternally pursued by demons (figuratively or literally) from their past, they might be a villain---secretly or openly--they might have a dark secret—like being blackmailed by a powerful crimelord or being a living tracking device bio-engineered by homicidal aliens, they might be prone to Jekyll-and-Hyde-like episodes of dangerous lunacy or they might just be a drug addict. In any case: the path of desire and the path of common-sense point in opposite directions.

In terms of plot and flavor, a Scary Romantic Interest can offers most of the same opportunities as a Cute Romantic Interest (or an Ordinary Ally) but also introduces some new ones:

Plotwise, a Scary Romantic Interest can…

-…function as a villain, setting up or carrying out schemes the hero must foil

-…function as the focus or adjunct to a villain’s plan: the villain may try to win the Scary Love Interest over to their own side or use them against the hero

-…create a moral dilemma where helping people or defeating enemies might require hurting the Scary Romantic Interest—or never seeing them again

-…deceive the hero in order to protect the hero or themselves from some danger they’ve gotten entangled in

Flavorwise, this kind of character, again, offers the same opportunities as a Cute Romantic Interest though they tend to get a lot more melodramatic, saying things like “There are things about me you can’t know. If you try to understand them they’ll devour you—just like they’re devouring me” also they tend to dress better than Cute Romantic Interests.

Unlike the Cute Interest, the Scary can easily have superpowers or special abilities—they’ll be using them against the hero half the time anyway. They also have a habit of disappearing for weeks on end and not texting, so if they’d be inconvenient to have around for an adventure or two it’s easy to put them on hold.

Tremendous campaign fuel can be generated by giving a PC a Cute Romantic Interest and a Scary Romantic Interest—does Cute know about Scary? Does Scary know about Cute? If the answer to both is “No” how does the hero keep them from finding out? If the answer to either is “Yes” are they scheming against each other? How can the hero prevent this?

The Major Ally: This is a more competent and therefore straightforward character than the Ordinary Ally: this person wants to help the hero and, well, can.

While the Major Ally can perform all the same functions as the Ordinary Ally, the biggest job of the Major Ally isn’t to make things more complicated, but instead to simplify adventures. If the Major Ally is a police officer, they can pick up the villain and cart them off to jail after they’ve been subdued, if the Major Ally is an engineer, they can make sure that the heroes’ battlesuit is in functioning order after a long night of being hammered with ion-distortion beams.

Although they’re good at things and usually upstanding, Major Allies are usually less about helping to invent scenarios as to fill in plot holes—Can we try to stop The Meganaut on the freeway interchange without endangering innocent lives? Yes: Lieutenant Brockwick had the roads blocked off. You don’t want to lean on them too much—they can make challenges so simple that they’re boring. If they do have superpowers, make sure they’re ones that mostly only get used in a support role—for example: a clairvoyant posing as a palm reader might be a good source of plot hooks.

The Eternal Victim: While the Major Ally represents only the upside of an Ordinary Ally, the Eternal Victim represents only the downside. Due to stupidity, terrible luck. or the fact they’re very important, the Eternal Victim is always getting kidnapped or brainwashed or shot at or trapped under collapsed buildings.

In terms of plot, the Eternal Victim’s role is pretty simple—they get captured and the hero has to rescue them.

In terms of flavor, there are a lot of different way to play an Eternal Victim—they can be bumbling comic relief, they can be characters the heroes don’t get along with but feel obliged to protect (a probably-corrupt mayor or the hero’s boyfriend’s irritating parents), they can even be minor villains constantly caught in the machinations of bigger fish. Just because their role is one-dimensional doesn’t mean they can’t be fun.

The Pathetic Monster: Pathetic Monsters combine the functions of villain and victim—they rampage, but unwillingly. A pathetic monster might be suffering from a curse like a vampire or werewolf, or might simply be seething with unwanted power and prone to outbursts of rage.

As far as plot goes, a hero’s job when dealing with a Pathetic Monster is to somehow prevent them from hurting anyone without making their plight worse—the Pathetic Monster may not be served well by the prison system, or may be too powerful to exist within it. The Pathetic Monster tests the heroes’ compassion as well as their bravery and skill.

In terms of flavor, the Pathetic Monster affords a great opportunity for tragic dialogue and imagery “The silver light of the moon burns me, burns my blackening soul, changing me from man to beast yet again…”

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New Toys, New Toys

...it's by Angus Warman and here.

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So I used this to automate the character generation process for the new superhero game I'm making. It'll help me with playtesting and might be fun for y'all to play with

Things to know if you wanna play with it:

-With the first roll you get a choice, and choices are built into the system, that's why this all doesn't run on one button.

-There are rounds to character gen. The first round you hit the first button, then it tells you what to do or gives you a choice. Then you hit a specific button after this "first round" which tells you what to do next. Thereafter you hit the "second and subsequent rounds" button after each time you get a power/gimmick result.

-Ability scores and power levels are rated as die types, so they go like d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 (max human ability score), d20, d20+d4, d20+d6, d20+d8, d20+d10, d20+d12, d20+d20.

-The game has primary and secondary powers: Secondary doesn't necessarily mean less powerful, it just means people who have that power usually also have another one. Like: flight is secondary, even though its pretty good, because most superheroes who can fly can do something else. In character generation, if the first thing you roll is a secondary power it radically increases the chance of getting another power or enhanced stats.

-Likewise power/gimmick generation has two rounds: in the first round you get powers or gimmicks that will help define your character, so a lot of boring utility powers (like "Energy Detection") only show up in the second round. This is so you don't end up with a character who has Energy Detection and nothing else.

-Boosts: Some results say you get a "Boost" that just means you can get 2 extra skills OR reroll a result until you get a different, better result. You can use a boost for either. Once a Boost is spent it's gone. You start character creation with one Boost--so if you roll a power/choice of powers you don't like you can use your Boost to spin again.

-The purpose of the character gen system in the game is to create characters that combine the unexpected emergent properties of random character gen while still making characters that are fun to play and not just completely goofy. Like more interesting than "You want to make a super soldier so you spend points and ta daa now you have one" but easier to be invested in than "Ok, you have superspeed and enhanced smell, now roll skills". This was hard and this is why character gen is kinda complex (not slow, really, but lots of options). So if you try it, see if it spits out a supercharacter you would play.


Playing with it will be a litttttttle janky for y'all for a few reasons:

-A few times where my actual table says like
19-20 Some result
instead of
19 Some result
I just pasted it in to Angus' widget anyway as-is so the odds are a little different than they would be if you rolled it. Ignore the item numbers.

-Some of the powers you'll see the name and be like "What is that?" because they have obscure names--and I didn't rewrite them just for this blog entry.

-Some of the steps in the process might refer to "tags"--these are like just names for power themes. So like Claws are tagged "Animal" (because people with other animal powers often have them) and "Alien" (because people with other alien-body-shape type powers have them). Giving you the list of all the tags would require listing all the powers which would make this page really hard to navigate. But y'all are smart, so if you get "Energy Attack--Flame" I bet you can figure out that one is tagged "Elemental" and then if it tells you "Same Tag Primary Power" you hit the Full Primary Elemental Powers widget. When in doubt, pick the kind of tag you think goes with that power and we should be close enough.

-If you get a "choose" option--like "choose from a list of secondary powers with the same tag", again that would require pasting the whole list of secondary powers with that tag which would make this page hard to use, so if you wanna play with it and you need to choose (say) an "Occult" power, just stab the "Secondary Occult" button until you see ones you like.

-Different powers have different ranges of available starting Levels (so you could have "Energy Attack--Flame: Level D8") and I don't have a widget for randomly determining your power's level because there's hundreds of powers and each has a custom range. So that part we won't know, but the rest you can do.

-Different powers also have, as a separate lever, different ranges (touch, zap, aura, etc) these are chosen after the power. Since different powers have different options, this isn't included.

-Power/gimmick generation is divided into 2

FIRST ROUND

(So this'll give you a choice--usually between 2  powers but possibly slightly more complex, pick one of the choices. The powers this button gives you are "Primary Powers" unless otherwise noted. If you don't know what it means, ask in the comments.)



 

The tables below you probably won't need unless you roll a specific result that tells you to roll on "First round..." etc, chances are it's time to skip down to the Second Round.



Tables you probably don't need:

SECOND ROUND

Every time you get a new ability roll here until  the result tells you to stop

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

These are non-powers that are cool enough to be like powers. Like: Green Arrows arrows ("Various Devices(Gimmick)"), Punisher's guns (Personal Armory)(Gimmick), or Shang Chi's kung fu ("World's Greatest...")
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Powers By Tag

Powers that involve a nonhuman body type
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these


 

Powers that animals have or human-animal hybrid superhumans have
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Powers involving manipulating chemistry and chemicals (narrowly construed)
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Powers involving the 4 classic elements. These will spit out earth, air, fire and water powers so you may wanna hit the button more than once if, say, you have a power that involves fire and want another fire one.
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these.

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these.

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these.

Powers that can only be explained by having your body altered in a crazy way characteristic of pretty much only comic book science, like flying without wings or a rocket or anything else.

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Powers involving magic but also ones that could only be explained by magic. "Sorcery" is the general purpose Dr Strange/ Dr Fate power
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Powers involving altering basic physical laws, narrowly construed. Technically all powers are this, but the idea of tags is "If you have x power, you are likely to also have powers from list y.
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

"Energy" here means the more generic kind like whatever shoots out of Cyclops' face. This is comic book science so those things are different kinda.
Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these



 

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

Head back up to the panda and roll after you get one of these

OCCUPATION

Your job in civilian life. Now go down to stats...

STATS

Stats: (unless you get "Enhanced..." roll them below. Roll "stats" 7 times and rearrange if you want.)
                       

C alm (Sanity + Willpower)
A gility                                                   

P erception                                                 

T oughness (Strength +Health)             

A ppeal (Charisma)                         

I ntellect                                       

N etwork  (Money and/or network of people willing to help you/lend you things)

A score of D6 is average, D12 is the max, if you have a Boost you can reroll a score til it's better.

Now pick skills..

SKILLS

Each skill is one die-type higher than the associated characteristic, so like if your Agility is D12 your Burglary is D20.

You get 3 skills plus whatever you got for your occupation.

The Skills and their associated characteristics are:

Agility

-Burglary

-Driving (it’s assumed you can drive, this is fancy driving, and also general car trivia)

-Exotic Weapon (this includes pre-modern things not covered under melee or firearms like bows, throwing knives, whips, etc. You have to pick one category specifically like “Exotic Weapon: Bows”, but you get it at two Levels higher than your agility)

-Firearms

-Pilot/Drive Other (anything not a car that requires training: motorcycle, boat, helicopter, plane--pick one now)

-Sleight of Hand (any kind of tricky task involving manual dexterity)

-Stealth

Toughness or Agility, whichever is higher

-Athletics (if you pick this, in addition to Athletics at the normal score you also get to choose a specific sport or kind of training: swimming, triathalon, tennis, mountain climbing, etc. and you get that at two Levels higher. Additional specific sports chosen after that are also at Toughness/Agility +two Levels higher. If your sport is wrestling, boxing, etc you have to take Hand To Hand instead—it comes up a lot. Same with target shooting and Firearms, etc.)

-Hand to hand combat (also includes using most simple melee weapons like swords, clubs, brass knuckles, knives, etc)—You use Hand To Hand instead of Agility to hit, grab or avoid being hit or grabbed in close combat. Damage is still based on Toughness, not this skill though.

-Martial Arts—this is like Hand to Hand but better. It costs two skills:

*You use it like Hand to Hand (above), plus…

*You may try to dodge as many incoming melee or missile attacks (physical ones) as you are attacked with in a round.

*Unsuccessful melee attacks on you (ones that miss or that you dodge) allow you to use a special move against whoever missed you on your next action, whether that’s in the same round or the next (except Speed Strike, which applies to the next round). Pick two of the following moves specific to your style when making your PC:

.Wrestling/Hold: Gain an extra die to grab, restrain, or throw that foe on your next action.

.Boxing/Punch: Gain an extra die to land an unarmed blow on that foe on your next action.

.Kick: Gain an extra die when rolling unarmed damage (roll damage twice, pick the highest) against the foe on your next action.

.Precision Strike: No penalty to make a melee called shot against that foe on your next action.

.Weapon Strike: Gain an extra die to damage (roll damage twice, pick the highest) against the foe with a melee weapon on your next action. 

.Speed Strike: Automatically resolve your action before that foe in the next round, no matter how high they roll. Your action must be an attack (not a dodge) against them for this to work.

Toughness

-Berserker (after the first round of a fight you can go into a berserk rage—you ignore the Berserk Level Number of points of damage but will attack the nearest enemy until the fight is over and cannot take any noncombat actions until every enemy is out of your sight (or otherwise undetectable). Afterwards you must rest for d10 rounds and are at minus one Die for d10 minutes.)

Perception

-Occupational (soldier, student, truck driver, etc—this represents the skills necessary to do a job. If one of the job skills is covered by another skill here, the occupational skill doesn’t cover that. So if you had “Occupational: Police Officer” that wouldn’t cover shooting. You’d have to pick up Firearms separately.)

-Outdoor Survival/Tracking

-Streetwise

-Therapy (talking other people down from certain Calm loss incidents, but can also be used to see if someone’s lying, etc)

Appeal

-Animal Handling 

-Deception (this includes both ability to disguise yourself, and acting/lying generally)

-Persuasion (being good at talking—this only includes telling the truth though or advocating for something you want, unlike just Appeal, it doesn’t make you good-looking)

Intellect

-Electronics

-Explosives

-Forensics

-Hacking

-Humanities (if you pick this, in addition to Humanities at Intellect + one Level, you get to choose a specific subject—Literature, Anthropology, History, etc—you get that free, at Intellect+2 Levels. Additional specific Humanities subjects chosen after that are also at Intellect +2 Levels.)

-Invention

-Law

-Local Knowledge (this is for wherever the campaign starts unless you specify otherwise)

-Mechanics

-Other Languages (Pick one at Intellect+2 Levels or a number of languages equal to your Intellect score each ranked at Intellect minus 1 Level)

-Science (if you pick this, in addition to Science at Intellect+1 Level, you get to choose a specific subject—Biology, Chemistry, etc—you get that free at Intellect+2 Level. Additional specific Science subjects chosen after that are also at Intellect +2 Levels.)

-Supernatural Lore

Perception or Intellect, whichever is higher

-Forgery

-Medic

-Research

Intellect or Perception, whichever is highest

-Well-traveled (a successful check means you can add Local Knowledge of a place other than where the campaign began at the skill lLevel minus 1 Level—minimum of 2. You can use this any number of times.)

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