New Salem: Renaissance - V&V Module Retrospective of Battle Above the Earth and To Tackle the TOTEM

The second to last of my retrospectives on these, I'm covering two modules I owned but never used. Sometimes one doesn't use things because they aren't great fits for your campaign. In this case I didn't use them because... they just don't seem very good.

I'll admit BAtE has an evocative cover
TOTEM is done by comics veteran Don Heck

so they look good enough....

Both of these modules suffer from similar flaws: both are two-part concepts, and both rely on some aspect of the Charisma rules in V&V to place the PCs at the sight of the adventure. BAtE has a page of "here's how you press pressure your PCs into going to rural Wisconsin for this adventure via the charitable contribution and Charisma system" while TOTEM simply states "we open with our heroes as guests at the unveiling of a super-hero history exhibit at this museum, because we know this is V&V and you're all good-guys who would do that." Neither sits well with me, but at least TOTEM just cuts to the action with something reasonable enough. 

Both then have a long swath of player frustration: a completely meaningless investigation sequence in BAtE before the heroes get the right local to lead them to a hidden spaceship (and get ambushed along the way), or an EXTENSIVE bit of NPCs talking to each other where the PCs are strongly urged to not interfere in TOTEM before super-villains attack. 

In both cases the super-villains are designed to get away: there's no way to stop the scout ship's escape fight and all the aliens disintegrate in BAtE; all the villains are equipped with one use for this scenario high speed jet packs in TOTEM. Why did the villains attack? to get a dimensional transporter they don't need (literally, this is a favor for another branch of the organization and it has nothing to do with the module's plot). Why did they do it during the opening? Just because. 

TOTEM then has a bit where a new hero who emerged in the fight lays out where the villains came from/went, to lead the heroes to location/fight two - a TOTEM base in the American Southwest. While BAtE has the heroes contacted by their government liaison about the space station being taken over and loaned a space ship to get up there. No investigative aspects, just here's the path to fight location two. Add a bunch of maps for the locations, the super-villains in each, and away we go. Both have a ticking time bomb to world devastation (Aliens in route to use station as holding spot for their orbital destruction beam! The senator from part 1 is actually Gregg Hartmann from the Wild Cards books and has the Wild Card virus as missel warheads!) that the PCs have to defeat the villains (or lose, once again get put into healing pods, have a chance to wake up, escape, and try again...). 

Some of the villains in BAtE are interesting designs even if none of them have reasons for helping the alien invasion other than "we're jerks". The TOTEM Villains are either fairly generic and have a logical reason to be there or not so generic and don't. I do admit I like that Chillblade is there because TOTEM is showing off and trying to recruit her to get her Canagian criminal organization. That's a neat bit of worldbuilding. I also appreciate that TOTEM are just straight up Nazis. Their thugs are Brown Shirts.

I commented earlier that the villain in this reads as an EXPY of Puppetman from Wild Cards and their plot is the release of the Wild Cards virus, but the module was published in 1985 and Wild Cards was released in 1987. Granted it was based on George R.R. Martin's _Superworld_ Campaign that ran from '83 to '85 in Albuquerque NM - the general area of the TOTEM adventure. But Puppetman was created by Stephen Leigh, who lived in Cincinnati, and wasn't part of that game group. It's all deeply perplexing. Is this just random coincidence? Quantum Entanglement? Let me know!