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Thursday, June 20, 2024

New Salem: Renaissance - Bill Willingham's Classic Duo

We're opening this overview of super hero module design with the one two punch of Death Duel with the Destroyers and Island of Doctor Apocalypse, probably the best known pieces of V&V media as they were converted by their creator into the Elementals comic book. That shows a dedication to his gaming creations, folks: lots of people convert their D&D games into fantasy novels, but not nearly so many pull it off with Supers games to comics. 

That's a pair of evocative covers!

Here's the view from 5000 feet: Doctor Apocalypse is a James Bond style villain with his own private island, small army, group of super-villain henchmen, genius intellect, indomitable will, a magic gemstone that gives him any 6 super-powers he wants at any time, giant robots, a city-destroying satellite, and a desire to... own Manhattan as a sovereign state. Oooooookay. To be fair, he plans to use that as a base to capture superhumans, teleport them to his private island, and magically brainwash them into an army to rule the world. 

Interestingly, Doctor DNA's goal was to jump start the evolution of the human race starting with chemically brainwashing superhumans into an army to rule the world. So it's a thing. But while DNA worked in the shadows, Apocalypse goes for national blackmail: to prove his chops he unleashes a 5 day supernatural hurricane on the eastern seaboard of the US that contains emotion destabilizing magic. After this he sends a video to Dan Rather outlining his demands for the annexation of Manhattan. And to further prove his power tomorrow he will destroy Times Square

Now, lets take a break here. 

  • The whole thing with the storm? that's great. Solid advice to the GM about how to have the PCs interact with the storm in abstract, but this whole bit really needed fleshing out to make it equal to the other fights in the module. too few game systems have rules for dealing with rescue situations, from out of control vehicles to burning buildings to mega-storms, and by God, Super-Hero games need those! 
    • It also has the requisite bit of if a PC has comic awareness or similar powers they find it blocked when trying to find the origins of the storm. Ugh. Just let them jump forward a bit guys; they have this power for a reason! Anyway, 
  • Written in 1982, so cut the Dan Rather at CBS gets a tape thing some slack. 
  • The module is 21 pages, but all the game mechanics are duplicated for 1st and 2nd edition and 4 of the pages are dedicated to artwork. It would have been great to add another 4 pages and really get into how fighting the storm would work mechanically, other than luring the PCs to attacking each other cloaked with musty emotional illusions. 

Then in part 2, the actual 'start' of the adventure, we abandon the seaboard wide hurricane to reveal... A GIANT MECHA. Seems like a bit of a let down. It's it tough giant mecha, but come on. I suppose some points for switching up the threats, and there is a nice concept of the mecha crew spending half their actions destroying Times Square, so there is an external problem mechanism, which is nice: they might defeat the mecha but if it has already trashed a major American landmark did they really "win"? (Interestingly, the giant robot design here is partially duplicated in the Day of the Octopus starter adventure in the first edition of FASERIP Marvel Superheroes, with the same secret weakness)

Once it's defeated, the heroes can question the crew to locate the Destroyers HQ in Manhattan, mount an attack on their base, defeat the destroyers (with the author outlining how to give them a second chance to do so) and find out the location of Apocalypse's secret island. That's the end of Death Duel. 

How is it as an NSR Module? The first segment with the storm is great, open ended, super evocative, but is handled in a perfunctory way by the module. The other parts of the module are a railroad- mecha fight (meh) and a "break into the villains skyscraper base and fight them" which is a logical enough next step to not feel railroad-y and doesn't contain any "the heroes must do X" or "Y power doesn't work". Willingham lays out the individual Destroyers battle tactics and relationships, gives a detailed map of the facility, the security structure of the facility, and recommendations for what sort of scenario the PCs might enter based on their actions. It's well done in terms of open ended GM advice. The assumption is in one of the two fights the heroes will win, which given the genre is a safe assumption; if they win neither, the next logical step is what happened in the Elementals comic: the heroes are captured and brought to Apocalypse for "programming", which is where they wanted to be anyway, but now have to escape again. 

The second module starts with an infodump on Apocalypse's background and base - century old secret historian and mystic, and Nacht Island 100 miles north of Bermuda respectively - and in the second adventure, invade there, fight the James Bond base villains, and hopefully defeat the really freaking tough Apocalypse before he starts using his city-killing satellite to force compliance on his Manhattan demands. After the PCs get this briefing from their government contacts they are left to their own to plan the assault, with the caveat being that a) keeping the American science expedition on the site safe b) disabling either the killer satellite or is cloaking mechanism, and c) defeating Doctor Apocalypse. 

From an NSR sense this is generally fine; OK sure it's an awful lot of "you have to stop the bad guys before he does evil" plotting, but the island base is full of just reams of lovely James Bond shit - opulent villas, monorail tubes, mini-subs, underwater bases - that means the GM has to REALLY understand what's on the island but once they do the players can use their PCs powers and abilities kind of however they want. 

As an aside, the strangest bit are the villages of island natives, generally non-industrial, very stereotypical "superstitious jungle island natives" tropes, some of whom still practice the cult religion that gave the evil white man Dr. Apocalypse his powers, while their rituals do nothing. In the center of the island is the temple of elemental evil... oh sorry, more general ultimate evil... that was the core of Apocalypse's origin story. I have to say, Willingham excising all of this was an improvement in Elementals, but it's presence here (and that my heroes resolved some of the problems of Nacht Island by throwing a meteor at it from space) radically changed my V&V game world by introducing a lot of new powered demon villains when this place was cracked open. None of this was in the module as writ but this was very evocative to a young me.  

So does this work for New Salem? ... ... Kinda? There is absolutely space for an aside in the New Salem campaign for a weather controlling evil guy with an army of new henchmen to try to blatantly conquer the city, forcing the PCs to team up with some of the Syndicate's villains to stop this outside threat. There would have to be some stronger, or any, reason why this city in particular is what Apocalypse wants, and the idea that the US government is going to cede away a key piece of our economic infrastructure is nuts, but it's nuts in a sort of James Bond way. At least the railroad nature is kept to the broad strokes and not the minutia. 

This got very long and took longer than I thought; I doubt next weeks' review of FORCE and Assassin! will be as lengthy. 

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