Weekly Book Recommendations (July 26)

This week's reads: 

The Collected Fantasies, Vol 1: The End of the Story by Clark Ashton Smith: I have been wanting to read this for a long time and it finally popped as a birthday present from my denuded Amazon list. So good. From the first sentence of the first story he had published Smith is revealed as a singular voice in weird fiction. Not everything in this is a banger, and there's a decent amount of casual racism in the first half of the 20th century mold (mostly of someone having the distinctive physical characteristics of x or y "race" as a means of personality shorthand) but offhand I (as cis het white guy) didn't see anything too egregious. Yes, the queen of the hidden African tribe immediately falls for the white explorer who enters their confines, but he also falls for her and it does appear to be a love match of equals for their time together so; and yes, he repeats the trope in another story but there the white explorer counts upon his natural superiority to the locals and the women and gets a delightful comeuppance from it. Many of these tales end in the classic Weird Tales fashion of shocking reveal sudden stop, while others come to more traditional endings and even some narrator codas; he switches up perspectives from first to third person, his narrators feel distinct enough to not come to a sense of sameness... it's all solid stuff. Good enough that I'm pulling concepts from it for my upcoming parallel to New Salem: Renaissance view of how to do supers in an ACAB world

The 1983 Annual Worlds Best SF edited by Donald A Wollheim: Earlier this year I read the 1981 volume and there wasn't enough in it for me to recommend it. This one, however, has enough solid stories to justify a recommendation. I'm never sure on these because SF is always as much about the "now" as it is the future or past, and at 1983 it's an almost unbridgeable gulf in zeitgeist - and I lived through it! in this volume the Scourge (James White), Pawn's Gambit (Timothy Zahn) and Swarm (Bruce Sterling) are solid tales of first contact puzzles approached in very different ways; A Letter from the Clearys is a good enough tale from Connie Willis about families post the apocalypse hanging over us all in the 80's that felt a little Eudora Welty to me (compliment!), and Written in Water (Tanith Lee) and Souls (Joanna Russ) are powerfully emotionally evocative, and the latter kept me up much too late so I could finish it before turning off the light. I don't think I've read enough Russ and need to rectify that. Since I only say positive things on this here blog (most days) I'll say the rest are fine to meh, but there's more good than bad in this one. 

Astro City Volume 1 and Volume 2: Potato chips, team. Once you start you have to keep going till there ain't no more. Volume 2, Confession, is just outstanding. And I have a signed issue in that run!

New Salem: Revolution - module retrospective on Marvel Super Heroes modules

I know these aren't connected to V&V, but I feel like I'd be doing this project a disservice if I didn't do a little compare and contrast on what competing products were being published. So here are the three Marvel Super Heroes adventures I have on hand. (I also have some DC Heroes adventures that I'll look at next week.) These are for the Basic version of the game and all came out in 1984. I know I owed the first 5 of the adventures but my copies of Breeder Bombs (for the X-Men) and Murderworld (For the FF) are lost to history. But if memory can be trusted, they don't bring much different to the table. 

Hot Damn do these look pretty, but when you can get John Byrne to do your cover art
in the 1980'syou have hella more resources than FGU...

The three modules are Time Trap (Kang pretends to be Immortus to get the Avengers do undo their own history), Lone Wolves (AIM is planning several attacks on the city and Daredevil/Black Widow/Heroes for Hire stumble on a thread of the threat), and Cat's-Paw (Alpha Flight deal with the Leader's complex plan, and things past that). Each of these is designed to look and feel like the adventures of their target heroes, which since it's MSH is to be expected. I go back and forth on playing existing heroes, but generally if you're playing Marvel Super Heroes of DC Heroes my experience is the game runs better if you're playing existing characters. YMMV

But the question is are these any good? Ehhhhhhh.....

Time Trap is GREAT when it comes to tying in existing Avengers lore. All of the sequences link to certain moments in Avengers history, and in one you can point to the actual damn issue where the PCs are messing with their own timeline. As a comics nerd this is just golden - I used the skeleton of this adventure in my own X-Men game as an "annual" where the current PCs got to team up with the original team where Kang was manipulating them (plus Scarlet Witch, who was on site) into undoing the Avengers. Wonderful, so much fun. 

The module as writ is a straight line railroad of nothing but fights: Immortuls (secretly Kang) shows up, explains a "problem" and sends the PCs off to fight Mimic. Win or lose he whisks them back, and then sends them to fight Drax. Then Super Skrull, Then Grey Gargoyle. The the real Immortus shows up and sends them to get a dohicky to undo this. Then they fight Kang and Dragon Man. Yay. There's no space for the PCs to breathe, no role playing, no detective work, just fight after fight. It's a mess. 

Lone Wolves does feel like a crossover of 2 issues, or two annuals, of the Power Man/Iron Fist and Daredevil (working with Black Widow) of the mid 80's. It's still VERY linear, with AIM/MODOK having hired Kraven to run a field test of their rage-toxin, and Kraven using Sabertooth and Vermin to front line the event. The book acknowledges the heroes have Contacts, and the general data those contacts give, and then a lot of possible clue trails for them. The module sets up how those clue trails lead to Kingpin as the last information source, but that the Punisher is also murderously running this to ground and several places where he and the heroes can fight. The assumption is that the PCs will get Kraven's hideout from Kingpin but you don't have to. I really think it's better if you don't. 

Having used their actual in character skills to get to Kraven the PCs have to break into his predator infested base and defeat him (and Sabertooth and Vermin if either got away) to find out who hired him and created the rage toxin. This gives the name MODOK, and now the PCs have to do a bunch of detective work to find the AIM base, which again loops back to Kingpin and a much more in keeping "I'll tell you where MODOK is if you stop this crime being perpetrated by one of my rivals" quid pro quos that feels VERY 1980's street level Marvel. Once they have AIM's address it's a sneak/fight into the base and deal with Taskmaster and MODOK. 

There is a lot to like here, in that it feels like a Feng Shui module of set piece fights held together with investigations. The GM is given various options, the players can use various paths, and as long as you edit out the first Kingpin instance (though the PCs might go there for questioning) it's no more or less railroady than a classic Call of Cthulhu adventure. Yes, there are strong assumptions that the PCs will get involved (too much verbiage in how the riot in scene one gets ever out of control until the PCs do something) but not the abuse of PC stuff that we saw in some of the contemporary modules. Rereading this now, I kinda want to run it. 

Cat's-Paw opens with the PCs being sent on a mission by their government contacts; an old manor house that contains high tech equipment guarded by Sabertooth and Constrictor. Yeah, Sabertooth again. This was before his X-Men Days, but at least he and Constrictor have worked together in the comics (Power Man & Iron Fist) and in Canada (in Iron Fist's solo book). Win or lose the heroes find one clue that leads them to the James Bay Hydroelectric Dam, where they are caught between two different villain groups - Mauler and the Raiders, and a pair of Synthetic Hulks - and a just introduced NPC gets kidnapped no matter what the PCs do. Interestingly, if someone is playing Sasquatch he might also be teleported away and the PC provided a different Alpha Flight hero. That's an interesting comic book twist. 

In any event the only trail leads to Justin Hammer's base, where they fight a bunch of his revamped tech villains before he hologram monologues at them about "The Other", the person responsible for the synthetic hulks. But there are no leads until a new villain shows up, created from the NPC inevitably captured 2 fights ago. This gives the heroes one clue to get to the Leader's base, to fight him and find that he is being manipulated by a new Great Old One, the big bads in the Alpha Flight comic. Cue big fight. There's even a "how the NPCs solve the problem if the players fail twice to make sure this doesn't end the world." 

Yeeeah, this one I have no interest in running or modifying. Yes, it has some Alpha Flight elements in it, but the plot is completely linear, the players have nothing to do with solving the mystery, and the collection of opponents makes very little sense. 

What do these adventures tell us? Tune in soon, true believers!

Emirikol Session III recap

 Here we really see the advantage of having seeded and built out the setting from the adventures – was able to seamlessly move from the conceptual data in Last of the Iron House (the actor pretending to be the high ranking cleric who worked against pirates) to the Lurkers in the Library to the tunnel complex of Last of the Iron House to the warehouse sequence that I just made up on the spot as the PCs chose which threads to pursue inside the city. And at the same time drop some information that slowly advances the mystery of Hightower Tor from A Dark and Stormy Knight. 

Because actions have consequences that they didn’t decide to bend all their energies to chasing Reme after the ambush he was able to follow through on his plan to kill the Cardinal of the West and frame Sebastian for it, entirely “off screen” because there was no possible mechanism for getting the PCs involved. They only learned about it the same time everyone else did, with the morning broadsheets. Their not spending the day tracking down more on Hightower Tor just left that thread sitting fallow as Alejandro is still searching for the book that didn’t turn up in the delve and there’s no reason for the PCs to know about that either. 

What they did do was earn a TON of credit with the library and the Loremasters, and if they didn’t stop the full extent of Reme’s actions they uncovered in advance what the outlines of the plan were, which will help them going forward. Again, the trick is to have lots of possible things happening that may or may not advance if ignored, and the PCs can follow up on them or not. After the fact it will look like a coherent narrative but it’s not cutting into the players agency at any point. 

The introduction of Hero Points did exactly what I wanted: the PCs could magnanimously hand over the lesser magic items to the Paladin Order for the Hero Points that they spend later in the game just as if they had sold them and then bought potions of stealth or climbing. It removed so much of the economic bookkeeping from play and got me the feel I wanted for this sort of campaign. 

Jim, Melas’ player, wasn’t able to make this session or the next one, so we instead did a PBEM sequence over the two months to track what he was up to. This nicely advances both his family machinations and the pirate/hag plotlines. The next 6 weeks of blog posts are that PBEM before we get back to session 4 (which Jim/Melas is also not present for). 

Weekly Book Recommendations (July 19)

This Week's Reads

Astro City Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5, Volume 8: These are like potato chips; you can't read just one. Busiek and Anderson have such a singular voice on this series that if you like it you generally adore it. There's a stretch in some of these were the stories are downers (a couple "I'm willing to do good but super heroics/intersecting with superhumans is too damn dangerous") that are weakened by being right on top of each other, but otherwise this is all really good stuff. 

Another in my occasional "Not Recommendations But I Need To Talk About It":

Miracleman: The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham: I, like so many people, was looking forward to the completion of this story, halted in 1993 by Eclipse comics implosion. When the shenanigans settled and the creators could finish the book with Marvel in 2023 I was interested, but didn't track it down until this week. I was ultimately disappointed. I'm sure the time lapse - even if Gaiman had the scripts completed back then they were doubtless edited some, and Buckingham's art style has changed over time (of course it has!) - which gives the book a bit of a disjointed feel. 

Spoilers ahead

Quick Art Recap on Alone Into the Night

I commented in yesterday's post about the Zircher art in the Alone Into the Night module, where two of the three spalsh pages for the short one hero adventures are kinda bangers. 

Both of these really catch the tone of the adventures in question, drawing on specific elements from them. Just fun stuff that you can easily see as the the cover of that months issue.

Memory Lane: Codename: LAZARUS for V&V

The last of the PCs I actually got to play for V&V that I'm willing to share (there was one more who was part of a wildly appropriative campaign concept from one of my best college friends that didn't last past the first session...), this one for a game where my friend Jesse - the one who ran some sessions in my campaign world for a while - started his own campaign world. He really wanted to focus it down so that every hero had a single clearly defined power. Everyone got 4d6 drop low for basic characteristics and a power roll of 2 (so we rolled 4 times and had 2-3 'powers' + possible weakness) and you needed to end with either 1 power and skills or multiple powers that clearly went together.

Jesse was a big fan of Strikeforce: Morituri, the comic where humans got eventually fatal super powers to fight off aliens. When he was running games in my world he had aliens invade where the alien race, having no metahumans of their own, were volunteering to become temporary superhumans to aid the conquest of Earth. I this game, the approach of the alien fleet was producing an energy field that gave some humans super powers - some of whom became heroes and some of whom were recruited by a shadowy alien advance team. 

On the surface it was standard super hero stuff, but kinda like homefront golden age comics where the villains were 5th columnists undermining our world. The alien agents had access to some hyper-tech, which gave them an edge as we were still getting our act together - if it had occurred to me I would totally have gone Brainiac 5 super-intelligence as power to invent the crap out of things, but it didn't. Instead I had 

CODENAME: Lazarus (Sterling Stryke)

Side: Good    Experience level: 1

Affect/Gimmick: 1980's action hero with regenerative powers. Just imagine he's being played by Michael Dudikoff from any of his Reagan/Bush 1 era films, but that he's also even more dearly impossible to kill. He's an expert soldier, force recon for jungle ops, undercover urban agent, martial artist, weapons expert, and ladies man. 

 Yeah, this guy; That's what we're talking about

Status: tactical leader of the Project: BARRICADE Earth Defense Team. 

Powers: 

1. Revivification (modified): This gives Sterling the following superhuman abilities
1. if incapacitated he will appear dead, and "revive from the dead" one hour later with full HP
2. If Killed, once a week he returns from the dead 23 hours after his death. This is at 1 HP and 1 Power point.  As long as he has 1 Basic Hit remaining he will recover.
3. Regeneration as the power, but he heals every 5 minutes rather than every turn. This makes it an out of combat only ability.  He cannot heal from damage caused by magnetic fields. 
4. Heightened Endurance +7
5. He can hold his breath and operate normally for 7 minutes.  
2. Heightened Expertise: +4 with all modern military weapons, including unarmed HTH. This also gives a +4/+20% bonus on any military tactics or strategy tests.  

Weight: 180               Basic Hits: 4         Agi Mod: 0

S: 15        E: 25           HP:  30

A: 16         I:  14          Pow:  70

C: 17                           Move: 56"

Accuracy: +2 (+6 with military)

Damage Mod: +1

Reactions Mod: +2/-2

Carrying Cap: 528    HTH: 1d8

Inventions: None yet, but he always had an array of modern military gear on hand based on the mission. 

Background/Origin: One of the top black ops agents of a government intelligence agency known as Project: WHIPPOORWILL, Sterling fought against Soviet agents and Central American drug cartels until the approaching waveform gave him impressive regenerative abilities. Once he discovered these he stepped forward and was integrated into Project: BARRICADE as the team's tactical leader, which has been... challenging to say the least. Fortunately his survival based powers give him time for second chances. 

I played Lazarus, the few times we got to play, as a caricature of an 80's action hero - his favorite schtick was Gorden Liddy-Like shoving a knife into his arm just to prove it didn't phase him - and getting by with firearms and a Ka-Bar knife would get him to low superhuman damage ranges. At the time the game stopped I had just recovered one of the enemy flight packs for possible reverse engineering, and it was the sort of game where all the PCs might have had access to them in time. 

New Salem: Renaissance V&V Module - Alone into the Night and Organized Crimes

This is the last of the V&V module retrospectives just because these are the last of the modules I own (I also own the villain sourcebooks but those aren't as useful for my purposes here). This time we're looking at Alone into the Night and Organized Crimes, both from Ken Cliffe (also responsible for HONOR and the Super-Crooks and Criminals supplement) and with art from Patrick Zircher. I hadn't realized until working on this series just how much content V&V had from 1982-1985 - 21 items from the rulebook through the Trouble for Havoc shared system adventure with Superworld and Champions). Since I didn't get them all at once but in pieces from 1983-1994. These two came at the end of that, purchased when one game store bought the stock of another disorganized game store and had these somewhere I could see them (along with TOTEM). 

Again we are looking at Zircher art, which is always so crisp and clear
There are two really nice splash pages in AitN I'll add later

The two modules aren't linked so I have to tackle them separately 

Alone into the Night is a collection of three solo adventures for GM and 1 PC, which is a style of play that works very well for supers. Super characters have a high degree of presumed competence, a wide latitude for how they can solve problems, but a clear set of expectations on what they are supposed to be doing (which V&V tries to reinforce with it's Alignment and Charisma systems). All three have a mystery element to them, but the first is a sort of horror mystery, the second a crime story, and the third a more standard comic book nonsense. None are great as mysteries because the author doesn't know how to structure them in a way that doesn't feel railroady. 

This makes the first (co-created by Kent Pauling) is a series of set pieces when it should more properly be an expanding incident: in the 1930's there was a serial killer in Our Fair City named the Garrote who, um, garroted people, and left pennies on their eyes. Shot by a police officer who stumbled onto a murder scene, Garrote escaped observation and vanished.  Since the murders stopped he was assumed dead. Rumors have swirled in the decades since that  the Garrote's costume and weapon were hidden in the cornerstone of the then under-construction Mayfair building. That time capsule is being opened 50 years later. There are 5 people who have an exceptional interest in the contents, several of which are tied up in a legacy/blackmail scheme. But instead of there being a roughed out timeline and motivations there are a lot of crimes the hero can't stop, murders they can't prevent, and a set piece fight scene at the end (admittedly in a neat locale). It just feels forced. 

The second is a political/business thriller, but it too is a series of set pieces of a different type -The PC has to be at the movie theater in their secret ID for the reporter on the run to drop an audiocassette into the hero's pocket before being shot down in front of them when exiting the theater, clutching a card with an address on it. Nothing the PCs do will save the reporter. Capturing the gunmen won't reveal any more information than what is already on the tape. The card leads to a "hero vs. hero confusion battle" where the PC encounters a grim vigilante pretending to be criminal to infiltrate the gang scene, but reveals where the person named on the tape is hiding. No other path will let the PC know where the <checks notes> industrialist leader of a major corporation... might be. Then the PCs is assumed to confront the person who ordered the killing, and fight his super-bodyguard as the industrialist tries to escape and disappear. Again it's all so forced, like 1990's level railroading a decade early.

I do want to give props on one thing: these two both give breakdowns of what happened in the playtest games and while #1 ended exactly how the story would have ended in any comic book with the player unable to stop the events, the second ended with a legit PC failure that doesn't read like railroading but the stakes of the adventure being explored and failure having ramifications. But the getting to there doesn't feel fun. 

The third is just a mess. Like literally a mess. Like "of course the player-hero will not understand much of this when he/she sees the computer printout. It's always amusing to see a player deal with the frustration of attempting to decipher a possible set of clues." level mess. The adventure is full of indecipherable data, lack of clues, and then responding to another attack. Since the villains plot is both high stakes (control of Canada) and absurd (by murdering all the candidates for Prime Minister via his super villain team), it's just <tosses up hands in frustration> 

There are two workable ideas here but both need a ton of work. And in all cases the 1980's convention of writing up the adventure as if it were fiction for the GM, who will enjoy learning things as they go and being surprised by the endgame in their prep, is rampant. (And happened in HONOR too....). At these there are modular and fill and common need. 

The on to Organized Crimes... which is a very odd beast. There is absolutely no introduction, to the GM. It opens directly with the PCs assisting with a high speed chase between fleeing robbers and slowly opens into a highly organized smuggling ring with the leader, the Organizer, and his group of super-muscle who are... ummm... kinda emotionally disorganized. The PCs are eventually able to disrupt the Organizer's smuggling ring but he escapes and starts a new plan to pit the local criminal gangs against each other and then consolidate the remnants and claim total control of the city's underworld. The players trying to stop this is disrupted by members of the Organizer's villain group (escaped but partially disbanded) who seek revenge on the heroes. And for some reason the Organizer's back up HQ is in a circus in NYC Central Park, with the PCs having to fight circus members at the end. 

There's no way this modular, and it forces a lot of assumptions into the setting that might not fit the campaign. If this were presented the way Dawn of DNA was, with the Organizer's moves appearing disconnected, and his henchmen (and wow do the Midnight Men look like the Deviants from DNA in dynamics...) being somewhat of screw ups leaving him open, this would work better. Or if we just ended the adventure at the end of part one. Or if Part 1 and the Midnight Men also had a circus theme and the villain was the Ringmaster and not the Organizer... all of these options would make it more coherent. 

You could make the argument that updated any part of these could work for an NSR game - save for AitN part 3 the stakes are low enough that they could be inserted into play for a session and be followed up on. But there's a lot of reworking needed, or integrating these ideas into the campaign world before you start (as I did for the 3E Emirikol game). 

Memory Lane: the Silver Knight for V&V

This character was the other one based on me. When I started a new campaign world in High School, the one I still primarily use for V&V adventures, which you can find here if you're interested, one of the other players, Jesse, wanted to try GMing for a bit but didn't want to build a whole world so I let him run games in mine - everyone else used their same PCs from the hero team Ground Zero and I got a chance to play. (My eventual decision to remove 'me' from the game world to explain my absence in the college years game means this PC is not in the campaign world website.)

Silver Knight played into my love of big bruisers, with his Chemical Powers mixed with heightened strength B and heightened expertise with bastard sword. He was an ok PC but stymied by the issues with agility/initiative in a team of martial artists and speedsters.

The Silver Knight (Brian Rogers)

Side: Good    Experience level: 2

Affect/Gimmick: He's a chivalric knight in appearance and general attitude, but also made of solid metal for lots of extra durability and super-strength. I liked the general idea of someone projecting their psyche into an animal or object to control it, but I wasn't keen on the idea of leaving an unprotected body behind, so instead I merged with the knight miniature I carried to animate it, and it grew to human size. I wanted Silver Knight to contrast with the rest of the darker mid 80's vigilantes on the super team, but I didn't play often or long enough for it to work out. 

I've been looking for a good image of a knight with a bastard sword for a visual reference but there is so much grey goo of AI generated stuff out there that I can't find something I like and am willing to link to. So here's an image of The Knight from DC comics. (edited to add: I just remembered I can block pre-2023 results, which got me this image of a Silver Knight from the DarkSouls3 game, which is closer to what I wanted; his weapon is ridiculous, but what can you do?)

Status: a probationary member of Ground Zero, he can draw on their government and MEDUSA contacts in a crisis.  

Powers: 

1. Chemical Powers Item - Mithril: Brian carries a small (2" high) statue of a knight made from the metal out of myth. Thanks to the enchantment he is able to 'merge' with the statue, turning his body into a 6'6" tall knight made of shining silver metal. This takes one action to transform and gives him the following advantages
1. His weight is increased by a factor of 5. 
2. He has a chemical powers defense at no action or movement cost. He also has no need to breathe while in this form.
3. His body generates a shield on his left arm which is always attached to him, which he uses to give Chemical Powers defense to anyone within 1" of him at no action cost - it does cost 10" movement.
4. This body generates a sword which is always attached to him. This is a +3 to hit +1d6 damage weapon when used with the flat of the blade (his normal method) but he can use the edge to add a carried Chemical Powers attack for 2d8 damage at a PR of 8 per use. 
5. He gains 20 points of strength. This is tied with his Heightened Strength power. 
2. Heightened Strength B: +27 points total, but only +7 of those are used in his 'normal' form. 
3. Heightened Expertise: +4 with all medieval weaponry attacks (including fists) This training also gives him a +4 agility solely to offset the penalty for weight gain
4. Heightened Charisma B: +8
5. Reduced Strength: Modified so that his Heightened Strength is only partially available outside his transformed self. 

Weight: 192 (960)       Basic Hits: 4 (20)    Agi Mod: 0 (-4)

S: 15 (35)  E: 9           HP: 8 (75)

A: 12         I:  13          Pow:  49 (69)

C: 21                           Move: 36 (56)

Accuracy: +1 (+8 with sword)

Damage Mod: +1

Reactions Mod: +4/-4

Carrying Cap: 390 (21,012)    HTH: 1d6 (3d10)

Inventions: None yet, but I think I was working on a mithril crossbow for the armored form that would let me make chemical powers attacks at range. 

Background/Origin:  Brian Rogers was a typical High School student deeply into theater and role-playing (Performing Arts background, History) until a visit to an antiquarian bookseller brought him the journal of a dark ages scholar that contained within it a secret recess holding the statue of a medieval knight. The books was not only a medieval warfare manual (whose precepts Brian rapidly absorbed) but also instructions on how to activate the immense power of the Silver Knight. Since then he has been doing his best to protect people from superhuman violence. 

My plan for the hero, if he ever operated solo, was to do the 'stronger than he looks' teen detective thing until things got dangerous, then taking the weightier and nearly indestructible form of the Silver Knight. His meager 1.6 actions per round limit him somewhat, but he does have a solid enough (13-) chance to hit normal foes and does an insane (3d10+1d6+1 with sword) amount of damage that he can boost even higher with the chemical powers attack. Not a lot of people can take a 31 damage average hit. More often with the super-team he would disable opponents vehicles,  build or break barricades, defend and rescue innocents, etc. in the proper heroic mold. 

I think the character has a lot of potential in the right game and wouldn't mind trying him again. 

Emirikol Intermezzo: the broadsheet Scornbul Observer

Cardinal Brutally Murdered, Sebastian d'Ferrantino Implicated

By Rutger Greenwald, exclusive to the Scornbul Observer

In the twilight of Seasday the Emirikol and the republic as a whole saw one of its longest burning lights of freedom cruelly extinguished. The venerable Cardinal of the West in Emirkol, Toussant Bregmestre, who in his time as the Cardinal of the East helped drive the chaos beasts from the city and in the centuries since has provided a bulwark against our own forces of self-destruction, was slain in his chambers. This loss to the Church of the Endless Ocean is cruel enough but made more so by the presumed identity of the murderer - none other than the Sebastian d'Ferrantino, elder son and former heir to the Loremistress of Ferrantino Library and Cardinal of the East in Signor Bregmestre's own church. It is a cruel tide indeed. 

The accounts of the evening make for harrowing reading, so we recommend that our more sensitive patrons avert their eyes now. As best the investigators are able to reconstruct, d'Ferrantino - whose odd behavior of late in and amongst the good folk of Scornbul has not escaped this paper's attentions, and culminating with his being identified as the headman in an assault on some common folk of the dock quarter by no lesser worthies than the cousins de la Bellasteros - brazenly strode into the Temple of the Endless Ocean, his presence noticed by at least four of the temple's laypeople. 

Not bothering to divest himself of his traveling garments or perform the ritual ablutions upon return to the metaphysical island of sanctity - perhaps because he no longer follows such precepts - d'Ferrantino made his way directly to meet with the aged Cardinal, using his privilege as a fellow cardinal to secure a private audience. It was not until two hours later that Lord Bregmestre's secretary, Osvald Dill, re-entered his master's chambers to find the Cardinal of the East tortured unto death, with what police are calling 'ritual chaotic markings' emblazoned on the walls and floor in Toussant's Elvish blood. 

A full hue and cry was made on the streets of western Serin around the temple only to find that Sebastian had flown. While none saw him leave the temple, he was identified as running pell-mell through a crowd of good gnomish and halfling citizens who were waiting to attend a concert that evening at the Bower of the Sun. Upon interviewing these witnesses the Observer has learned that the gnomes present spoke clearly of the scent of blood on the figure, and one witness - Mrs. Sunhild Elhers, who had been most cruelly trampled by the fleeing killer - spoke of a look of sneering satisfaction on the nobleman's otherwise fair features. 

At the scene of the murder Lord Carlos Oceano, the Cardinal of the South, worked with the summoned agents of the police and Luis Correna, the investigating magistrate, to reconstruct the events described above; these good and true gentlemen identified that the Cardinal of the West had been poisoned with a rare and expensive tincture of bloodbee venom. Those familiar with the sting of that insect are familiar with the thickening of the flood and lethargy that soon follow, and this tincture, whose manufacture is banned in the republic, produces a crippling paralysis so great that the victim cannot even scream. Signor Correna postulated that once the paralysis was in place Lord Bregmestre suffered no fewer than 30 non-fatal wounds before his tormenter finally allowed him to expire. 

Lord Oceano, being attuned as he is to the ebb and flow of the endless ocean, was able to rouse the departed Cardinal's spirit to confirm the particulars. The details of that discussion are not being shared with the press, but the Observer's sources inform us that the spirit of the departed Cardinal did indeed identify his young fellow cleric as the instrument of his murder. Likewise, the Magistrate has requested the Loremasters to provide one of their number to assist in this foul affair, but their mystical inquires are also not being made known to the public. 

This silence, combined with the d'Ferrantio heir's violent and, as it has been called, Chaotic, behavior dockside this last week, are leading many to conclude that the evidence being mystically unearthed furthers the case against this prominent figure, but that his close connection to both the Temple of the Endless Ocean and to the Loremasters might well be leading to misplaced loyalties in this affair. Already calls are arising within the government for Magistrate Correna to either end all magical analysis of the case or stick solely to the discernable facts or to call in the assistance of one of the Tower Residents in Serin for some unbiased assistance. The Magistrate has made no comment on these requests. 

One loose end in this tragic sequence of events is the presence of Cardinal d'Ferrantino at all - Signor Sebastian had left the city Seaday morning as part of a pirate hunting fleet. Unwilling to let such a discrepancy stand, the offices of the Scournbul Observer have at great expense made use of professional diviner Akos Yappi to contact sailors of that fleet. From them we have learned that past midday the fleet came across some sailors that had inadvertently captured a dolphin in their nets, and the unsuspecting Cardinal bore witness to the dead avatar of the ocean mother. By the rules of the Temple any cleric would have to undergo isolated ritualistic cleansing to maintain their connection to the tides, and appropriately Cardinal D'Ferrantino left the fleet in a small rowboat and was therefore wholly unobserved at the time of the murder. How he would have covered the distance from the fleet back to the temple is unknown, but if the rumors are true and the Cardinal had, like many sailors before him, succumbed to the call of Chaos, then such magics might explain it, just as the Cardinal's oceanic magic would have returned him to the fleet. 

This reporter, for one, is hopeful that some other answer will present itself: the Cardinal of the East, Sebastian d'Ferrantino has been a good friend to the city as a whole and the Scornbul Quarter and is one of the communities most favored sons. Still, persistent contact with pirates and the forces of Chaos have undermined other, lesser men in the past. We at the Scornbul Observer will report to you what we see as soon as we see it.

Memory Lane: Manhunter for V&V

This was the first V&V character I had based on me, back in 6th grade. I never had the chance to play him because I was always the GM.

Manhunter (Brian Rogers)

Side: Good    Experience level: 1

Affect/Gimmick: True to the name he's a detective type/bounty hunter hero with magically based illusions as his main power and carrying a staff that collapses into a cane and also has a detachable head with cable for swinging and entangling people and stuff. Much like with Renegade he was supposed to rely on confusing and misdirecting his opponents attacks with illusions; the sort of thing that works much better in fiction than at the game table with other PCs, especially early teenage boys who want to show off their powers rather than do subtle detective work and illusions that leads all the enemies to shoot each other. The visual image of him - full face mask, curved-edge long cape, silver cane-staff - came from one of the reader-provided heroes in the Adventure Comics run of Dial H for Hero, but I no longer have the issues I once owned. Never throw anything away, kids. NEVER. Anyway I'm pretty sure that's the origin of the image, but without the full issues I can't confirm. He also looked kinda like Puzzle Man from the Marvel Comics ads, but without the crossword motif.

Covers by Ross Andru and George Perez explain why I bought these in '81. 

Plus Puzzle Man, who interestingly was another fan-created hero

Status: Presumably I had intended for him to work with the authorities on tracking down criminals. I guess. It's I have no idea where I got this from, except maybe the Fall Guy was big on TV at the time. 

Powers: 1

1. Heightened Intelligence A: +12, adds the Law Enforcement and Religion/Mysticism backgrounds
2. Heightened Agility A: +14
3. Special Weapon - Converti-Staff: this high tech weapon can appear as a cane, a quarterstaff, or a mace and chain as needed, and the 'chain' of the mace and chain can be extended 10" (50'), and retract with enough force to pull in 1000 lb. or rapidly lift Manhunter for swinging and jumping. Assume any form is +3 to hit, +1d6 damage.  
4. Illusions A: Visual/Audible/Psionic, PR 3 per turn, 1 action per turn to maintain. This can cover an area or a single person (with a successful mind control attack)
5. Psionics: Through specialized training he can use his illusions to 
1. become Invisible or PR 3/hour only vs. living minds.
2. Transform (C-1 Disguise) at will PR 3/hour, only vs. living minds
3. Sense the minds around him out to 25" as a heightened sense; this is constant.
4. 'Locks on' to someone in that range (with a mind control attack) he can follow them as per Telepathy. PR 3/hour
5. If he makes an illusion directly attack someone he can make a PR 3 Mind Control attack to do 1d12 Power damage. 

Weight: 140                Basic Hits: 3    Agi Mod: +0

S: 10         E: 10          HP: 12

A: 25         I:  25          Pow:  70

C: 13                           Move: 45" 

Accuracy: +4 

Damage Mod: +5

Reactions Mod: +1/-1

Carrying Cap: 140    HTH: 1d4

Inventions: None yet, but I figure I would have made some 

Background/Origin:  Brian Rogers was a typical Junior High School student deeply into theater and role-playing (Performing Arts background) until he spent a summer living with his uncle in distant, far off, exotic Minnesota. There he learned that his uncle had, in the 60's, been a member of a group of mystically-trained international adventurers. After three months of intensive psionic tutelage Brian had unlocked the true potential of his mind, enhancing his intelligence and grace and giving him the ability to sense minds and manipulate perceptions. Taking these powers back to Connecticut he began his career in super-heroics, using his illusion powers to guard his identity and keep the criminal element off balance.  

I remember the image of the staff, and I knew I carried one because I didn't have natural weaponry or an attack power and needed the combat boost. I'm making it a special weapon here but I'm not sure; it might have just been something he carried, and was going to invent the other functions for if I could. The Psionics power was a grab back of things I thought illusions - especially his psionic illusions - should do or that I thought were cool. I still do. 

Memory Lane: Renegade for V&V

The final of my three characters from Mike's game set in the 2037 Washington DC Metroplex, This was born of wanting to play a smarter, more detective oriented hero on the nights when no one else was showing up to game. Legerdemain was the noble hero type, Impact was a blunt instrument, and I wanted to play a front and center martial artist vigilante detective. I'm not sure why I decided to make the character at least nominally Jewish - most likely to to do something different from my others - but since the source books Mike was borrowing from had a lot of 1980's next generation Nazi villains in them the character morphed into a Nazi hunter shortly after his creation. 

And there ain't nothing wrong with punching Nazis. 

Today i have no recollection why I wanted to lean so hard into being a terror of the night that I had Heightened Charisma B and Prejudice to insure massive negative reactions from everyone, but I also know we weren't using the charisma rules as written (who did?!) this combo just had him be super scary and intimidating for everyone. I don't think I ever read Spider-Woman but the combination of his superhuman charisma and the prejudice ability are almost like here pheromonal power where everyone was either attracted or terrified by her. (hence the 'to know her is to fear her" tag line) - something about his darkness powers made him scary as hell. 

Renegade (Isaac Pearlman)

Side: Good    Experience level: 5

Affect/Gimmick: Two-fisted detective hero, terror of the night, hunted by the law and the cops both, who turned into a Nazi hunter. Very inspired by Batman Year One, I would even do the narration to my journal hard boiled hero voice over while playing. Since he's a shadow in the darkness there isn't really a visual image the manriki-gusari was inspire by the hero making one in the Guardians of the Flame series. 

Status: Wanted by both local and federal law enforcement for several deaths (he didn't kill them, but people do tend to die around him) and hated by several criminal organizations and feared/despised by the remnants of Nazi power, Renegade is a purely solo hero. 

Powers: 6

1. Heightened Strength A +13 (this is a lot of training but also effects from the injection as his carry cap is superhuman)
2. Heightened Agility A +10
3. Heightened Expertise: +4 to hit with manriki-gusari (+3 to hit +1d4 damage; this has a blunt side to the chain and a curved edge side to the chain, and his current model is SR 22; he carries a spare that is SR 12)
4. Heightened Charisma B: +22
5. Prejudice: Some aspect of the injection that gave him his shadow powers has made him terrifying to both sides as Renegade, and slowly cost Isaac his secret identity. 
6. Darkness Control: can create or control shadows, range is 69", 19" radius. PR 2 to create/reshape and one action to create/maintain
1. Invention: He can modulate the light level in the darkness, making deep shadows with darker shadowy shapes inside them. This counts as Illusions A, but only for black and white images and counts as reshaping 
7. Mutant Power - Shadowwalk: when inside shadow or darkness he can 
1. See as if it were daylight (note that he can't see through shadows he isn't in or isn't controlling. imagine a space of light acting as 'insulation' against this power).
2. Cling to walls/ceilings
3. Teleport 7,600" range, PR 5 per use. 

Weight: 192                Basic Hits: 4    Agi Mod: +0

S: 25         E: 12          HP: 34

A: 24         I:  17          Pow:  76

C: 32                           Move: 61 ground or 7,600 teleport (7.5 miles) 

Accuracy: +4 (+11 total with manriki-guisari) 

Damage Mod: +3

Reactions Mod: -6 vs both good and evil

Carrying Cap: 1615    HTH: 1d10

Inventions: He has one invention with his darkness control, above, and the following permanent inventions. He's usually using an inventing point per level on one shot inventions to defeat individual foes. 

1. Microrecorder/speaker lets him both record conversations and plant them to replay where convenient. This is used both to capture damaging information and confessionals and to set up confusion inside the darkness. 
2. Safecracking Kit: This high tech kit gives him a +4/+20% bonus to open electronic or classic safes and locks without leaving marks. 

Background/Origin:  Isaac Pearlman (American, Research/Technology and Law Enforcement) was a forensic scientist who was assisting the clean up of a V.I.L.E. experimental location (as it happens, the one Impact escaped from) who discovered a vial of an experimental human enhancement drug. Unable to leave well enough alone he continued to research it, and finally injected himself with it. Already a highly skilled martial artist, his human potential was enhanced, letting him become faster and stronger. Something happened to his psyche and personal magnetism, giving him a terrifying intensity that started scaring off people he didn't already know well. And most importantly, it gave him an affinity for shadows and darkness that would make him the ultimate spy... or assassin. 

Using these powers he started spying on, and disrupting, criminal activities across the greater DC metroplex. Originally targeting V.I.L.E., he was instrumental in bringing down B.A.D., and collecting information on FORCE  (not from the module, a NPC vigilante in Mike's campaign) which he ultimately decided to not reveal. Finally stumbling across a new Nazi party in the US, Renegade found his true calling as a Nazi hunter, and has focused specifically on their activities ever since. 

Renegade doesn't kill himself, but he has no issues with maneuvering his opponents into attacking and killing each other, either through fostering a sense of betrayal, shadow plays to mask his activities, pushing groups to attack each other Red Harvest style, or similar methods. This indirect body count plus the unsettling nature of his superhuman charisma means he'll never team up with anyone. 

Weekly Book Recommendations (July 12)

This week's reads

Knave Second Edition: I was in Ben Milton's Kickstarter for this hyper stripped down version of D&D for OSR play. I gotta admit that for what it is designed to do it is pretty sweet. Milton designed the game to run for 5th graders (about 10-11 year olds for those of you not in the states), and honestly with the inclusion of another adult GM at the library I kind of want to start next school year shifting over to Knave and run Tomb of the Serpent King followed by cobbling stuff from the Dyson Logos map set I just Humble Bundled. Lots of the book is random tables to provide inspiration or specificity on magical or weird things at the drop of a hat, and that's great. I'm not 100% sold on the magic systems, but they make sense internally and produce an interesting world, so I'm not gonna kvetch.

Astro City: The Dark Age (which is in two volumes): This was originally meant to be the second volume of Marvels which didn't focus on Phil Sheldon (the sequel that did continue to focus on Sheldon did come out, and it's much less intricate than this), eventually making its way to Astro City. It's a solid read on it's own - a little overlong perhaps - but there's an extra layer of fun in tying each of these back to their birthplace Marvel plotlines. It's obvious that the Blue Knight is the Punisher, for example, but the whole sequence at the end of book 3 I was sure was tied to Serpent Throne stuff from the Avengers originally, through Busiek's redacted notes, was meant to take place in the Hellfire Club during the Dark Phoenix plot. I think it works better here then it would have in Marvels volume 2, because the creative team was able to make up what they needed to move the story forward and not be locked into the continuity (even if playing games with that continuity is it's own sort of fun). 

Astro City is a great resource for anyone trying to follow the V&V mold and build a campaign from scratch. All of the characters are very distinctly their own things while still being recognizable as their comics inspirations. Once they're set, Busiek plays out their stories in a logical way, taking them further from their inspirations, just as your own campaign would do. He locks down hard points in the extensive history early on, and then comes back and builds on them piece by piece as needed. Time passes, characters change and grow. Most game worlds (and independent publishers) have their own Superman, their own Batman, but none of them feel as well realized to me as Samaritan and Confessor. Check these out if you haven't before, if only for game inspiration.

 

Memory Lane: Impact for V&V

Continuing from the other day, here's the second of my three PCs in Mike mid/late 80's V&V game and more old fogey reminiscing 

In my memory we must have started this sooner than 1987 since I graduated in 1989, but it couldn't have been earlier than the September 1986 publication date of this comic, since this was the visual inspiration:

Steve Lightle was the bomb 

Which means for my memories to jibe I had to have played some summers in college (which I know I did) but also that we played a metric ton of games when I was in High School. It's hard to imagine now, especially with my old man schedule and watching my kids struggle to get in game time, but we prioritized gaming so much back in the day. 

In any event, Mike was the one who had Opponents Unlimited, Super Crooks and Criminals, and Most Wanted Vol 3 as source material, which means we had to deal with V.I.L.E. and B.A.D., as well as a lot of Nazi adjacent villains; who thought we would be dealing with those 50 years in the future? I mean really? 

I did a long breakdown of this one across these posts

Mike was a firm believer in what would now be seen as OSR style play - actions had repercussions. Nothing was easy. Mistakes lived with you. Victories were seldom 100%. The monsters want to win. The earth elemental steps on your head to make sure. OK, not that in a supers environment but you get the idea. As a result of some frustrations of how Legerdemain with his classic good guy attitude was unable to score heavy victories against V.I.L.E. (who were very organized and national in Mike's game), I brought in a different character with a different attitude. Plus I really wanted to play with the Armor rules in V&V, which are a great translation of the power from the comics.

I've been torn on this but I'm going to present Impact as I originally played him with notes as to how I would do the design now. 

Impact (Adam Kuriakin)

Side: Good    Experience level: 7

Affect/Gimmick: Thug turned anti-hero out of vengeance against his former employer. He's a but of a loose cannon on a road to redemption. The visual image for the character was the armor on this cover of Creatures on the Loose, a book title so 1970's that it came with its own bell bottoms and giant lapels. 

Surprisingly, it's Adolph Hitler in the armor; Also surprisingly, the armor changes color inside the issue.

Status: Wanted by both V.I.L.E. and the police, Impact is a hero in that he is a villain who targets and disrupts other villains. He funds his activities by raising V.I.L.E. and other villain organization bases for the cash and technology he needs to keep his armor running. 

Powers: 4

1. Mutant Power Device: This reflexes booster partially imbedded in his forearm increases his agility by x1.5 for initiative purposes only. (round down, currently 24) 1 charge/round, 14 charges. (These days I would make this a Bionics so it's fully embedded and have it alter his initiative interval from a 15 down to 10; he wouldn't go first but a 5+ would have him act on 21, 11, and 1, rather than a 7+ for 31, 16 and 1)
2. Armor B (Device) 100 ADR, with 3 inset powers
1. Heightened Strength +20
2. Heightened Senses: Telescopic vision (range penalties are 1/10th normal), Sensory Protection (-4 to be hit by sonic powers or flash attacks), Heuristic Analytics Suite (+20% detections) (why didn't I just triple his detects? gets to the same place...)
3. Screamer Missiles: the spikes on his armband, he carries 6 at a time, range is Ax15 (240"), HTH +4 to hit, 1d8 damage but Sonic Carrier (1d12) damage, 3" radius explosion. 
3. Energy Field Harness (Force Field device modified to mirror Flame Powers + Absorption Device): This torso mounted harness allows him to manipulate kinetic energy for several effects. It has 32 charges total for all uses. Assume a 15 in all basic characteristics
1. Energy Field: one action to create brightly glowing energy field around body; this is needed to use other powers.
2. Energy Blast (as force field): 2d8 damage, 30" range, 1 charge/shot
3. Flight: Move at 45 MPH. 1 charge/3 hours of flight.
1. Invention: Acceleration device lets him kick up to 900 mph. Doing so requires he be in his armor for the heuristic analytics and uses 1 charge per hour from his reflex booster. 
4. Personal Force Field: 1 charge per 8 points of damage repulsed or 4 points that penetrate; this can be considered automatically started with the energy field creation if he chooses to do so, but continued uses requires actions as Force Field
5. Absorption: One action and one charge to convert damage blocked by field to Carrying Capacity (25 lbs. per point) or charges for the energy field harness (1/point done, charges past 32 are lost) (Yes, this means that if he has a saved action and takes a 16 damage hit he can either get +400 lbs carry or (+16-1 for absorption -2 for the force field charge) +13 charges; I felt that was worth the nerfing the carrying capacity baseline on Absorption)
4. Reduced Charisma: -6 , Max Charisma = 9 (the original character didn't have this, but given how I now understand the Charisma modification roles; given his near constant stealing of the enemies gear and money his charisma will never be high, but this does mean he gets bonuses with non-V.I.L.E. Evil characters)

Weight: 204                Basic Hits: 5    Agi Mod: +0

S: 14/34     E: 13        HP: 16/33 in armor

A: 16          I:  12        Pow:  55/75 in armor

C: 6                            Move: 43" or 63" in armor, 198" flight 

Accuracy: +2 

Damage Mod: +1

Reactions Mod: -2 vs good, +2 vs evil

Carrying Cap: 4,142    HTH: 2d8

Inventions: see above 

Background/Origin: Adam was a street thug pulled in as a baseline recruit for V.I.L.E., and he was picked by Sir Lemur as a test subject. Given Lemur's mind control powers it's not like consent was required, and when Adam woke with a bio-mechanical implant in his arm. The biological boost of the reflex booster burned the sedatives out of his system faster than expected and Adam was able to bludgeon the V.I.L.E. medical technicians unconscious and make an escape, stealing several experimental devices on the way out. 

Once free, Adam started venting his aggression against his former employer in ways that caught the attention of other members of the criminal element who V.I.L.E. had been muscling out of the Washington DC metroplex. Adam, now Impact, found some allies he could pay off with stolen funds to keep his armor working and back engineer his screamer missiles. This has given him a small "support gang" to back him up, but he doesn't work with them publicly, A handful of heroes are willing to work with him in his relentless attack on V.I.L.E.'s activities - relations good enough for him to be able to show up at their bases to request help on his attacks as long as it was kept relatively secret. 

This character was really fun to play in the dark hero mold, very different from what Legerdemain was like. And I made good progress in his goals, including beating Prodictor Kapella, stripping off his suit and burying it in a collapsed mine when I couldn't destroy it. Lots of fun stuff.