On Ragged Universes, Team-Ups, and Supers Gaming

I know I've commented on edges of this before, but here goes: at the flea market this weekend I scored a couple of my current targets - pre Crisis/pre-1988 team up comics - in the form of a DC Comics Presents #39 and Marvel Two-In-One #65. As I get older I have a deeper nostalgia for these sorts of tales.

George Perez on one, Ross Andru on the other

But more important is Plastic Man artist extraordinaire Joe Staton doing the interiors for DC

The thing i love most about these stories, moreso on on the Marvel side, is how disconnected they are, but aren't really. Let me unpack that. These books are designed for one popular hero and a rotating cast of second heroes. These should all be stand alone stories because the team up hero changes. 

On the Superman side the feel of each issue is determined by who he's teamed up with, so this really feels like a Plastic Man story more than a Superman one. And my sense is that DC editorial would pitch "we need to boost this character or complete this unfinished story" because DC always, always cared about that continuity hole stuff. DC feels like cleaning up untidy bits. 

But often in Marvel they aren't just one off stories. They are these weird things like Marvel Two-in-One where the Thing teams up with people. Here the FF are approached by the aquatic hero Stingray to assist someone who needs to meet the Inhumans, and Thing volunteers to take him, and they get attacked on the way. That was last issue. This issue Stingray is unconscious and Thing has to save them from a deathtrap but is helped by the Inhuman aquatic hero Triton. They beat up most of the bad guys, but said bad guys got away with the MacGuffin that had NOTHING to do with Stingray's mission. So Thing has to take off after it and teams up next issue with Scarlet Witch to get the MacGuffen back, and then lock in in Project Pegasus, which turns up in MTiO a lot. 

Now, this is kinda crazy. Stingray to Triton to... Scarlet Witch? 

More importantly, next time we see the MacGuffen, er, Serpent Crown, is in Marvel Team-Up, Spider Man's team up book. where he team up with Thing and Scarlet Witch, but also Dr. Strange and Quasar. This issue is 2 years later. These are all Mark Grunewald picking up and running with a story threat that Steve Engleheart started five years before that, where Engleheart being Engleheart had the villains be an evil Oil Company because it was the 1970s and he had just had the head of the Secret Empire be Richard Goddamn Nixon. 

That's quite the crew

What I'm getting at here is not just the ragged and unplanned nature of the comics in general, but the free-wheeling nature of the team-up books in specific. Marvel had a small stable of writers and a lot of experimental books that lasted a year or two, or characters that rotated through their Marvel Premier, or Monsters on the Loose or any other weird book they were running. And for these the book would end, and the writer would of their own accord carry the plots to the next book they were working on. And these would often be the team up books that were popular for the central character and kind of muddle along. And led to these sorts of ragged, organic stories where heroes bump into each other and we accept the strangeness of it because comics. 

So much of this got lost when comics started organizing more - the next time we see the Serpent Crown it's in a 14 Annual crossover for the whole Marvel line - and I think it's to the genre's detriment. Ron Edwards goes into the the blessing of this making it up as you go unfinished story style in Champions Now, which for all it's issues is audacious as hell. He really wants you as GM to lean hard into this feel. 

I'm going to chew on this a bit along with the Weird Tales game frame and more on the New Salem setting, and more on module design. I swear this stuff is coalescing. 

New Salem: Revolution - Module Retrospective on DC Heroes RPG 1e

I admit I was surprised to find that all of my adventures for DC Heroes were for 1E, and the edition of the game I actually still own is 2E; there weren't really a lot of changes, but it does show where my gaming purchase habits fell off after I was heading for college, and that the bulk of the DC Heroes game product was for 1E (42 non-core book items vs. 20). 

I will admit I have a deeply strange relationship with the DC Heroes game: it easily holds the highest Fiddled With Mechanics to Actually Played ratio out of everything on my shelf. There's so much to love and so much that is truly bizarre in the mid-80's design. That being said, I'm here today to judge the module design for the four that I own. 

Again, these are pretty covers, using the artists responsible for the books to carry the tone.

The fact that you have to hunt to find the titles on the Watchmen and Flash modules is a problem. 

Like the MSH modules, most of DC Heroes output assumes you are playing the game to play the characters from the comics, and in a sort of one-off fashion, like you're randomly grabbing this week's comics off the spinner rack. And like the MSH modules, they are steeped in the feel and lore of the comics in question, but while was able to/can see myself taking MSH modules I'm familiar with and converting them to other Marvel heroes (I did do it with Time Trap going from Avengers to my X-Men game, and could easily do Lone Wolves to with a handful of X-Men in the city with a couple tweaks, I wouldn't with Cat's Paw because it's just not very good, but my memory of Murderworld I think moving it from the FF back to the X-Men should have worked, etc.), three of these adventures feel convertible to a different hero set. I've stolen elements from City of Fear a couple of times but the module in toto? Not seeing it.

First, the Ambush Bug module Don't Ask! is designed for YOUR OWN HEROES! but it's also first a foremost an Ambush Bug scenario. Like he messes with Superman from time to time, this is Ambush Bug inserting himself and his characteristic whimsy into your story. If your players are into that, GREAT! If they aren't it's a train wreck, but the module makes this very clear. It is also EXTREMELY meta in the way that Ambush Bug stories are. The rough plot is the heroes are stopping Lex Luthor from gaining ultimate power via exploring a pinhole event in the universe, only for the Bug to interrupt and become omnipotent; the rest of the adventure is the fallout of an "aware that he's living in a comic book wanna-be hero suddenly having ultimate power" farce. Explaining any more would be giving it away.

The plot is, as is true for most adventures, pretty linear - DC Heroes modules are built with numbered encounters and a flowchart telling the GM how to move from one to another. If made today, this might have a Gumshoe model with core clues to lead you from scene to scene with more choices on route, but in 1986 stories designed to match genre were pretty damn linear. To their credit this isn't a AD&D map were the room descriptions are actually scene bits, and the GM has to read to the end to see what happens: we get an immediate Story Synopsis for the GM which is super helpful, and the module itself is just a fun read. Each encounter includes a paragraph of "Troubleshooting" advice for the GM is the encounter doesn't go as planned and a way to get things on track. Finally the book is just a hoot to read. it's so audacious that I am dying to someday run it, but what kids know Ambush Bug these days?

The Justice League International When a Stranger Calls module is a deeply odd duck. it is meant to be played in conjunction with the Booster Gold module All that Glitters, where the player playing Booster keeps being given options to split out on the current scene in Stranger  to have a solo scene during that time in Glitters.  I don't own Glitters, but it apparently has to do with time traveling villains taking over Mayfair Games while Booster is negotiating a deal for a game based on his license. This is very in keeping with the JLI books at the time, with a lot of sitcom style character humor in what would otherwise be a straight up super-adventure rather than the madcap humor of Ambush Bug. I'm just not sure the concept of singling out one PC for solo scenes across the module works. Did anyone ever do this? Please tell me!

Again we have the up front story synopsis and the encounter flowchart for the very linear adventure (you can choose the order you do the set piece fights in, but you can't skip them). The plot itself is... incongruous. It solves the problem of "if you have a chance to be Batman, be Batman" by having him wounded and staying at HQ to coordinate the heroes, giving the GM an informational mouthpiece, and gives Dr. Fate's player a "clue keeper" in the form of a paper fortune teller where the GM can say "look under the star" and the player gets the information from Fate's Occultist and Scholar skills as the story involves Phantom Stranger and some of the League's old magical foes. I admit that's a pretty clever play to feed information directly to the player as needed. Alas the plot also hinges on a twist that the adventure so foreshadows that it's hard to imagine the Players not twigging to it immediately. I have to remember that what is transparent to the GM is opaque to the players, but still.... I imagine you could run this with most arrays of Justice League heroes (including your own heroes if they are the current Justice League) but it's so steeped in League lore that otherwise it wouldn't work, and you'd lose all the tone of the 1980's JLI

Taking out the Trash, the Watchmen module, is so Watchmen specific that translating it would be really hard. It takes place around the 1968 Republican National convention, now in NYC rather than Miami and including two new candidates who are in control of two different corrupt/criminal organizations (as opposed to the current VP and front runner, Richard Nixon, who needs no one's help in being corrupt). There's politics and corruption and skullduggery and mad cults spouting religious apocalyptical nonsense while murdering people... It's VERY 1968. And it's also very Watchmen, where the main villain is Moloch from the original series at the height of his criminal empire.

As with When a Stranger Calls, this one has a subplot for just one of the PCs - the Comedian - but this time it's integrated into the module rather than tying to a separate module. Again, it's a strange decision in something that can't be part of an ongoing campaign to give one player a subplot, assuming someone is evening playing the Comedian. The synopsis, flowcharts, and troubleshooting at all here, but the encounters in this one (and it just dawned on me how indicative of the changes in game play that these are still called encounters rather than scenes) are very short, evocative, and provide a single data point. I think it's an effective enough adventure if you can get the players to buy in - better than Stranger, not as good as Don't Ask. It also might be something that could be frameworked into New Salem, moving the contemporary RNC to New Salem and finding ways to insert the PCs into that concept. I  do want to point out that Taking out the Trash is a GREAT Watchmen sourcebook, signed off on by Moore, illustrated by Gibbons.

Finally, and I know this is getting long, the Flash Adventure City of Fear. This one I've mined conceptually a couple of times, but it's a solo adventure for a super-speed hero who has the power level and questions about capitalism of the post crisis Wally West flash. The whole module is constructed around the 1980's obsession with high finance and genius businessmen whose wealth gives them immunity. There are no super-powered antagonists in the story outside of our master of industry who is so powerfully manipulative he's statted with Hypnosis and Mind Control (which based on how they changed things for Rorschach and Ozymandias between 1E and 2E, would be replaced with skills). 

Again the design of the modules with the encounters and flowchart and troubleshooting are solid. This is a solid mystery for the time period, with lots of NPCs to question and some twists and turns - and the fact that DC Heroes has rules for information gathering via skills and NPCs influencing heroes via skills and powers are used to good effect. The villains master plan is both sensible enough and perfectly fits the Flash - he plans on setting off bombs on all the passages in and out of Manhattan and, as panic causes the stock market to dip, buy on the crash and become a billionaire. I used it once in a V&V game where the PCs had no way to stop it with their power sets, and once in a DC Heroes game where the bridge severing was to Kandor up Manhattan and Superman had to stop the bombs. It's a really well executed bit, but unless you have a super speed hero who also does rough detective work, it's hard to slot in. 

So what did we learn here? the DC Heroes system has some advantages in terms of social interactions and clue gathering having specific rules that the adventures can make use of, unusual for a supers game. The flowcharts, synopsis, and troubleshooting are all great. But all of them are much too linear and specific for general adaptation. 

On Doctor Doom

I'm sure everyone who cares to know has seen the big casting announcement, and all the hoopla about the least important Fantastic Four related casting. 

You heard me. 

I didn't always feel this way. Back in the old, pre millennium days, Doctor Doom was a proper villain because people knew how to write proper villains. Lets take a quick look, shall we? 

He's a brutal, violent, totalitarian dictator who demands absolute control over the lives of the people under his rule, but as long as they all keep their heads down, do as their told, don't get above their station, and don't try to leave the country, everyone will be happy. He's Benito Mussolini by way of Nicolae Ceaușescu, only in power armor. Doom is the State in Latveria, complaining bitterly about the country not being respected while harkening back to an imaginary past that made it the equal of other European states. 

Which is a laughable concept. It's a Ruritania, a fictional postage stamp country. I appreciated the realization that in the cold war it would have been a US ally against its neighboring Communist states were Doom not such an obvious villain. Doctor Doom: so bad even the Reagan Administration wouldn't partner with him, But I digress. 

So why isn't Latveria in as bad a shape as similarly situated countries? Because Doom has legit super-tech chops. Give him that. Everyone is employed in or educated for supporting his super-tech advancements to keep the economy humming. But also he carelessly eliminates his best scientists as potential rivals or "fools", and he's so paranoid that none of his technology leaves his control. it all stays in his basement, er, dungeon. 

And to what end does he place this massive technological advancement: getting revenge on his college lab partner for being smarter than him, and wanting to spend more time with his mom (who is dead and in hell) - because he never learned to grieve and because people 'disrespected' his family once. Good. great. Nice thinking. His one girlfriend left him when he refused to move on like a normal person and he has been obsessing about her ever since. 

So we have a guy who spends all his time locked in his basement with his expensive toys stoking grievances with no romantic relationships and no peer friendships who lashes out at anyone who he thinks makes him look bad and insists on a dominance only worldview with his employees. He maintains a nouveau-riche appreciation for great European arts and culture that ends with the interwar period of art strongly challenging the status quo because that's what Fascists always do.

Basically, he's king of the Incels. 

What else do we know about this guy? He's a Romani from back before we stopped calling them a racial slur, but also from when all Romani were the exotic magical thieves of Europe*. So naturally he was also a magician who dabbled in black magic. As a way to get his mom back. Because mother issues. 

Oh and after he was kicked out of college for using university funds to try to create a portal to hell (but fucked up because his math was off and he wouldn't listen to Reed's corrections), he... <checks notes> Oh. Oh my. Went to the far east to find a secluded monastery and master all the physical and psychic arts until they declared him their master. So that's a thing... that happened. Wow is that some nicely coded yellow peril meets white supremacy. 

All of this worked (well most of it) in the 1900s because the comics knew he was the bad guy. The writers were people who knew the wars in Europe, knew what dictatorships looked like, knew what these sorts of threats these ravening loons were. Half the time Doom loses because he can't not fuck up his relationship with his business partners before the deal is over. His grievance against the Fantastic Four is built on such a slender reed (heh) that its almost comical were it not for the fact that he is played as a deadly threat... right up until he screws himself over. 

He's a great villain for a returning comic book serial - lots of angles, clear if crazy motivations, explanations for how he can get away and come back. 

And then the 90's happen and then the 2000s happen, and it just gets worse inside the comics for a lot of reasons I'll get to in another post, but Doom starts getting elevated past his Crazy Dictator status, in part because people forget. They forget the threats to their people and neighbors and European dictators cause. They forget the Cold War. They want their protagonists to be edgy outsiders who, if they work with a team, the team has to bend to them and not the other way around. And there's the Fantastic Four whose team leaders are LITERALLY your really smart Dad, your really capable Mom, your dad's wacky best friend  (who's smart than you but at least hides it: Ben's a fucking Astronaut, yes he's goddamn smart because they all had to be) who could be an edgy outsider except he's always still your dad's best friend, and the actual uncle who was edgy once but now is just that guy from school who likes cars and gets girls. "Dude no!" they yell, "I can't see my parents as the heroes of this story! I have to rebel against everything they stand for plus she's a wine Mom who like cares about stuff!"

But what represents everything they stand for? 

Hey, lets make Doctor Doom cool! What if we write books where my dad is actually WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING and MAKES THINGS WORSE while his worst enemy gets to be more powerful and cool and did we say he dabbled in magic? HELL NO HE'S THE BADDEST BADASS SORCERER ON THE PLANET! and have him fight EVERYBODY!

So in the end, I don't care who they cast as Doctor Doom to fight the Avengers, because Doctor Doom isn't designed to fight the Avengers. And to be honest, Doctor Doom isn't the first movie villain for the FF. He's the second, or most likely the third. He's the foe you build towards. 

Unless you want to rightfully make him the sometimes dangerous but mostly self destroying king of the Incels. But I doubt that's the take. 

* remember, Magneto became Romani just to explain the possible Scarlet Witch/Quicksilver parentage when they decided to do that, and all the X-Men were coded Jewish back when the book was a metaphor about being Jewish and having to assimilate and hide what you were or people would put you in camps. Once Claremont openly made Magneto a holocaust survivor the metaphor for everyone else shifted from assimilating Jews to closeted Gays because the metaphor had been actualized.

Scornbul By Midnight Act I Scene I

Quiet yourselves and prepare for the tale told to those to dare to visit the theater at midnight, to learn of what happened that day to the noble Melas. 

Having used fatigue as an excuse to slip away from his fellows, Melas takes a moment in the shadows to extricate the coded directions from his kindly Aunt Agatha. These lead him first back to his rooms to claim his greatsword (for Agathas advice indicates that there might be significant swordplay), then across the bridge to the west side of Serin and finally to a house near the Serin - Scornbul border. The central part of the structure speaks of once great wealth and taste, but the house was obviously expanded more than once, encroaching into its gardens so that now there is barely a sword's length of land between its furthest ell and its neighbors (and even that much land is luxury in this overbuilt area). 

The door opens promptly at his drawing of the great clapper, and it is clear that Aunt Agatha has prepared these people - the de la Erosas - for his coming just as she prepared him to meet them. For Aunt Agatha was once a student at Ferantino University - indeed once a member of the Loremasters that govern that body - some century earlier. Never once to let a planted vine wither, she has kept the de la Erosas in her debt for generations. By her accounts none of them are accomplished in war or the arts, but have had some limited facility in the business of shipping. She has cultivated their business with a suggestion here, an enchantment there, and the de la Erosas know to whom they owe their current status. They are not exalted, certainly, but not in debt like all of their peers who lost their business to the machinations of the mercantile classes. That status and income level is quite clear to Melas the moment he enters - it is obvious that the family cannot afford the land for another such house, and so over the years has expanded this one for all the various cousins and such to share. 

The man who met him, Osmundo, ushers him into a small sitting room - Melas knows that he is to draw out this man's problem, and then solve it. Permanently. After that the de la Erosas will be his eyes and ears in the community, as much in debt to him as his aunt. Well, almost as much. 

Melas takes the (for him) unusual tack of being forthright and friendly. "My aunt commended you to me, Signor Osmundo, and told me I should honor the ancient ties between our houses by offering any aid or service of mine which may be useful to you."

The combination of Melas' heavily armed, rough appearance, his friendly tone and the implication that the men are more or less equals in their service to a greater lord puts the man more at ease. He ands Melas a drink while speaking. "Your aunt is, as always, a kind and gracious woman. Please extend to her our thanks for her suggestion when you next speak to her. My family is indeed in need of assistance, through circumstances that stagger the imagination and make even the stoutest of hearts quaver." 

He sits to tell his tale, indicating that Melas should do the same. "The de la Erosas are a noble family whose lands are technically on the sea. The 9th Emperor granted my ancestors not just some small estates but the rights to several trading routes between the empire and the islands to the north and east. The first Osmundo de la Erosas was a merchant captain, you see, who did valiant duty breaking the siege of Wistre, running his ships at night past the Chrichtonian fleet. In any event, from that day forward the de la Erosas fortune was assured due to the lucrative nature of the routes."

He sighed heavily, "Alas, things change, as all things do. Some of my ancestors were not clever merchants, others fell prey to pirates, and the copper and iron veins on two of the islands whose routes we controlled played out. The family became desperate, some took their own lives, and our land holdings were whittled away to gnomish creditors bit by bit. There were even rumors of some distant Eroasa kin turning to piracy. Still, it was not until my twice great grandfather's time - when the only land holding we had remaining was this manor - that we had to license away some of the routes. Still, we refused to part with them entire, licensing them to tallfolk merchants as dowries for some of our distaff cousins.

He pours himself another glass, offering some more of the Madeira to his guest "Shortly thereafter we had the good grace to meet with your aunt, and her keen advice has prevented any further loss of estates. Nonetheless there are still Erosas kinfolk who ply Erosas shipping lanes. And there are certain crimes that even the distance of a marriage would not protect us. . . " 

Before he can make plain what is being so broadly hinted, there is a rapid, pounding knock on the door. Before either man can act a small blonde, eight year old bundle of energy flies into the room. "Papa, papa, there's a big sword and a little sword by the door! Is there is a knight here! Or monsters! Or a dashing… OH!" the cherubic, child stops dead with a look of shock bordering upon horror at Melas' appearance. 

"Ema, this is lord Balisca, nephew of the lady Vienne." The girls eyes grow impossibly wider at her father's words, and she dips into a proper courtesy. Still, her eyes leave his hunch and misshapen ears only for a moment. 

"Welcome to our house, lord Balisca." She pipes after a second, then glances at her father, "Is he here to fight the Blind Pirates?"

"This is a matter which must be handled delicately, I take it. Wouldn't want the wrong people to draw the wrong conclusions. Tell me about the Blind Pirates, Signor Osmundo."

The little girls eyes light up at this statement, only to have her face fall when her father pushes her gently out of the room with a "Now then, Lord Belasca isn't to be bothered with your little fancies. Out, out, out, or you won't get taken to the play this weekend." 

Once she is gone he closes and locks the door, "She's enamored with the plays and stories of pirates, Signor Melas. But she might not be wrong for that. My cousin, Huera Andres, has become most peculiar since her husband's death. She has entered the most profound state of mourning for the last half year - all the shutters of their apartments in Scornbul have been closed, she only goes out at night, and even then she is all in black, tatters and a veil. She was never a healthy woman but the weight has fallen off of her, and the cold of winter must have gotten into her joints to give her such a hunched . . ." he pauses here, glances away from Melas and then plows on, "Plus, all her staff discharged and replaced by rough hewn men, sailors who once worked for her husband she says, but all are blind. These are the Blind Pirates of my daughter's fancies."

"The blind servants handle her day to day affairs, when they aren't begging in the street or getting drunk in taverns. I don't know if she pays them or not. But there are rumors circulating. Terrible rumors. Not many yet, but it won't be long before the purveyors of penny shows in Scornbul make light of them. The least is that the mourning is a front and she has been holding orgies for the beggars and penny hangmen in her apartments. Scandalous, but such a derangement would only on her head. But her blind agents, well, one has scars on his wrists, hidden in the lace cuffs and waistcoats she dresses them in for her formal affairs, as if you could hide a mule with a horse's mane. Manacle marks, or I'm a fool, and they've long knives at their belts. So her new servants might truly be pirates, meaning that Signor Andres was not an honest man. But combine her mad behavior with the rumors of pirates, add even a whiff of things best left unsaid and it could destroy us all." He is visibly scared at this point, having moved from being concerned for his cousin to irate at her to this fear of losing everything to a chaos tainted family member. 

"If you would, Signor Melas, could you step in? Look in on her and her apartments? Confirm which of the rumors are true? And spirit her to us if it is the least of them?" it is clear that there is a lot Osmundo is not saying - that if the worst is true, then Hurea should disappear without an investigation being mounted that might make the taint public. There is some shame in him, but it is mostly for his weakness in not being able to act on this personally, or to bring it to the paladins and have the family face a full scrutiny.

Melas agrees, and turns the conversation to other matters -- in particular he'd like to know if Osmundo knows anything about that repellent Victor chap he had the duel with.

Only in the abstract - Victor d'Berengere has a reputation as a patron of the arts who supports several painters in the city, and also as being a man with a harsh tongue and an easily wounded pride. He has killed at least three men in duels, and there are rumors, scurrilous, base rumors, that at least one of those was an arranged killing using the duel as a cover. 

He pays his respects and leave before midnight. Wary of being jumped by irate duelists or Chaos beasts on the way home, Melas goes back to his room and, using his best stationery, writes a long and vapid letter of greetings and trivial family news, which he signs with his Aunt's name and scent with some suitably old-lady perfume.

The Night Chalice: Wealth and Network

Sharp Eyed readers will have seen the new page up on the blog holding the write ups of my Swords of the Serpentine game, the Annals of the Night Chalice. The rough concept is the PCs are the last surviving members of a moderately successful thieves guild in the default city of Eversink who, after an encounter with a sorcerer has slaughtered the rest of their guild, are trying to keep the Night Chalice a going concern. There's only one issue with the rules/concept meshing, and that's with trying to run a continuing business in a system where the default is don't stress the money. 

My current solution is that while play started with the Night Chalice being dead broke in liquid assets (the sorcerer stripped all of their accounts), they are still technically collecting money from the funeral statuary shop, brothel, smuggling shipbuilder, bar, gambling establishment , and smuggling warehouse that the players defined as places under their protection. (The warehouse full of smuggled goods which they never looked into because that's also where all the guild was slaughtered... Of course I also just thought of it so that's part of today's plot.) The sorcerer who was trying to destroy the Night Chalice also promised a smaller up and coming guild control of the Chalice's rackets as prepayment for future services, so if they didn't move quickly the PCs would lose those too. 

Fortunately for our heroes, the Night Chalice just broke the Hanged Men in a devastating raid, and are claiming their meager treasury (15 wealth), which is enough to keep them Comfortable with a bit left if they still have all of it at the end of the adventure. 

It also keeps them their profit making businesses: as long as they can defend their 6 sites each generates 3 wealth per adventure, giving them Comfortable lifestyles with 6 extra wealth. Of course they have also just stolen the recruits that the Hanged Men were bringing on board. Normally spending Wealth gives you 3 general ability point pool for when wealth might be useful, but if they prepay wealth per month they have a 3 point Network (stolen from from Night's Black Agents) per Wealth spent - They can assign Network points to a newly named member of the raw recruit gang and then use those points to have the member do stuff. But once the named member's network drops to 0, they get killed, burned, turn traitor, or what have you. So once someone is created, you need to keep unused general ability points in their pool to keep them loyal, and keep spending Wealth into the gang to keep it active. 

We'll see how this works. 

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.