Last week we looked at V&V books 2003 (Death Duel) and 2004 (Doctor Apocalypse), so this week we look at 2005 (F.O.R.C.E.) and 2006 (Assassin!) by Thomas Dowd. Which is just a little weird because there is a three-year gap between FORCE and Assassin!, in which a lot of other books came out (including Dawn of DNA, which we discussed 2 weeks back). Something was clearly up there....
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This two-parter has a very different style than the last one in that it is not intended to be played one right after the other, but instead for years to have passed between the two modules (maybe the delay was intentional! naaaah....)
First up, are these individually or collectively good for NSR style play? Ummmm....no.
F.O.R.C.E. is a bit of a mess design wise - the information needed for the GM to understand things is scattered around the book, and there's an elaborate plot structure that feel a bit Rube Goldberg.
The main villain, Franklin Orscar Randolph Charles Emerson (so twee!), is a wealthy industrialist who had his personality transplanted into a highly human android body to avoid a debilitating nerve disease, but the android brain brought with it both messianic delusions and a hyper-charisma psionics power, taking the name "Force". Now, we discussed Charisma at length earlier and this character is an interesting worked example of how that works, and Dowd goes into some detail of how and when Force uses his super charisma. When he really turns on the power Force gets a +9 on reactions, so a roll of 10+ makes someone very enthusiastic. That in turn gives a +3 on the Loyalty roll, and Force will use this repeatedly to get someone to the Enthusiastic permanent follower level. (I find it wonderful Force doesn't have Heightened Charisma B to take him to 46 Charisma, but has a psionic power to get there; it's not just a great example of how you can tailor your roll set in V&V to get the kind of powers you want, but also how the description of the power can do EXACTLY what you want it to do. However, it's also a way to get the Reaction modifier to apply for more than one roll.)
As an android Force has used inventing points to get a highly limited disguise power where he can change his height, face, eyes, and hair to look like other people, so he has three identities in the first adventure: Force the super villain terrorist James Bond villain, Emerson the industrialist, and Hieronymus Kinkaid the cult leader. The whole makes it clear that while Doctor Apocalypse dominates with brute power, Force is the Charisma/plotting/the law says you can't touch me/always has an escape hatch (he has back up bodies he transmits to if this one is caught) designed to frustrate the players. It's a classic archetype that comes right up against the "This is the GMs favorite NPC" issue.
Somehow Force has stolen (either with his terrorist group The Force or through an agent created from Kinkade's cult) a nasty bio-weapon - and here we have problem one because the bio-weapon is so nasty that it circumvents the PCs super powers and kills them anyway if exposed, presumably to raise tension but mostly the writer undercutting the players abilities - and hidden it somewhere with a mid sized nuke (that they also presumably stole? and the bio weapon can survive being at ground zero of a nuclear explosion to be disseminated?) to blackmail the US government for $500 million in diamonds. Sure, it's comics, run with it, but we don't get an explanation as to why they want or need this, how they plan to move the diamonds, etc. Bio-Nuke Armageddon in 10 days unless the PCs do something (the threat is a secret, so the PCs have to have some way of finding this out via government contacts).
"Several days before the final ransom deadline, after days of fruitless investigation" - and here's problem two because there's no way to predict the PCs powers or capabilities to say that they are stymied for a week - we have what should be the cold open of a journalist investigating the cult dying in the PCs arms with a croaked warning - problem three, even if you revive the journalist he's still brain dead because how dare you keep Revivification as a power and mess up my plot - that gives them reason to tie Kinkaid's cult to the Force, and specifically a yacht off Long Island Sound. It would be so much better to frame this as "here's the way of last resort", or "this guy dying at your feet is what brings you into this scenario to begin with, the government contacting you after you stick your nose in".
If the PCs instead recommend paying the ransom and trailing the pick up, they discover the pick up is done by a teleporter (named Teleporter) and the Force's not stupid strategies on how to avoid being followed. Still, there's nothing that says the PCs clever plans (like shrinking down and riding along with the diamonds or the pick up guy, shape shifting into the briefcase holding the diamonds, reading Teleporters mind, etc.
Still, everything from here is "here is the route of the yacht and how it defends against PC action/ here's (another) Caribbean island used as the Force's base and how it defends itself, here's the Kansas commune and how it defends itself" that is highly reminiscent of Doctor Apocalypse and at least stands as a "The Heroes take the initiative, the villains react" style of play that sort of works from an NSR sense. It's just a shame that these spaces are presented in such a map-heavy manner. Every room is detailed as much as if it were an OSR dungeon. How to present these things differently is something I have to think about, because super heroes isn't dungeon crawling, but the GM still need some detail to put in front of open ended PC exploration.
I did want to stop and look at the concept of Consequential Play in scenarios like this because the stakes in these modules are just so apocalyptic: the heroes are always trying to save the world. Yes, it's comics, but there needs to be some thought as to what happens if they screw up. There will be another blog post on this eventually.
No matter how things play out the PCs won't be able to permanently capture Force because of his unknown at the start transmit to new body trick, but they can stop his plan, destroy his base, expose Kincaid's cult as being connected to the Force, and generally mess him up.
The next module, Assassin! doesn't even advertise itself as a sequel to F.O.R.C.E., with the PCs being called by their government handler to protect a senator/presidential candidate from an assassin (code named "the Assassin"... must be Teleporter's cousin or something). The people hiring the assassin have nothing to do with nothing, the Assassin himself is unstoppable for plot reasons, and all of it is a set up to reveal that the Senator had replaced with an android! (dun dun duuuuunnnn!) There's only ONE CLUE to follow to find out where the android came from, the most knowledgeable scientist on the topic, and it leads the PCs to a mistaken identity fight with a 4 member superhuman security team at the company.
OK, its classic in the comics but it's totally railroading the PCs into looking like shmucks, and makes the company look suspicious as hell. What small tech company in Flagstaff, Arizona has that much security?! But it turns out that the guy no longer works there, he's living in a small cabin in the Rocky Mountains (that somehow the government minder knew nothing about despite tax and property records?) and points the PCs there, where this is ONE CLUE sending them to a Florida Keys yacht club, where there is ONE CLUE to send them to the (fictitious) Central American country of Chinilaya, which is ostensibly self supporting, wisely governed, and cold war neutral (like I said, fictitious in 1985).
Their government minder will push for an immediate assault, driving the PCs into a fight with the Chinilayan military, who all come from central casting. If they win there is ONE TRAIL to the President's house; if they lose they are captured and brought to the Presidents house. There's ONE TRAIL from there to the Force's hidden base, because with the loss of his Kincaid identity, Force changed up his disguises to replace the second in command of Chinilaya, and maneuver things to become it's benevolent charismatic genius leader. Who also has a salvaged rebuilt Soviet nuclear sub that he's about to use to blackmail the US for a billion dollars in gold because the PCs have interrupted his plans to make the android president.
The module then ends with a) a cut scene of where Force has escaped to and mentioning his next plan, which is never revealed, and b) a mini-adventure where the GMs actual favorite NPC, one of the villains from F.O.R.C.E., has struck out on his own and gets a chance to make the heroes look stupid.
The whole module is written not just as a railroad, but as a "and then the players look stupid or have to do dumb things" railroad, where the identity of the villain is hidden from the Gamemaster until the end of the module like it's a novel. I give full points for the various environments and challenges, and trying to hit various tropes, but it's just a mess for any sort of player driven play. It's even more of a James Bond adventure than the others we've seen, and since it's 150% as long as F.O.R.C.E. there's a lot of space for problems.
I ran F.O.R.C.E. as a kid and it went pretty well, and I ended up doing several things with the organization, specifically the Church of Divine Harmony cult, over the course of the game that ended up mirroring some things in Assassin!, but I didn't get a copy of the latter until well after college and never ran it. I really don't know how well it was distributed. To make the whole thing work in an NSR sense the Force would need to be detailed as an organization book, with the several different plots and plans Force has, his various bolt holes and identities, his minions etc., and how he interacts with each of the times the players disrupt one of them.
It's possible to integrate these into a New Salem game just by having a) having the journalist's collapse in F.O.R.C.E. be the PCs entry to the scenario and finding out what's happening, and the yacht leaving from New Salem, and then b) in Assassin! it's Reverend Greene who arranges the assassination attempt as a way to nudge the PCs into dealing with Force for him. But as said, Assassin needs to be completely rewritten.
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