New Salem: Renaissance - Supers Modules and what did we learn

After a month spent on this I think I have a few observations on what I in particular am looking for in a supers module. 

1. If it is designed for an existing supers property...
1. Iconic: I want it to thread the needle between what is iconic for that property and its history and being portable to different heroes if that's what the purchaser needs. The MSH Modules Lone Wolves and Time Trap were both really good for this, and Don't Ask! managed in in a different direction, where your heroes had an Ambush Bog story invade their normal affairs for a while, just as he did in DC. 
2. One and Done: Since its unlikely you're playing an ongoing campaign with the the heroes in that supplement - not impossible but unlikely - it should have the assumption that this is a one shot/con game that focused people can do in 3.5 hours. You can have a bunch of optional stuff in there, recommendations for if you have more time, but the idea should be you are getting together one day to run this adventure for these heroes, and then like the Leverage crew all walk off in different directions. 
2. If this is a Scenario (rather than a Supplement, see below)...
1. Modular: You can drop it into any existing campaign as an outside event happening to the PCs, just as Don't Ask! does. There needs to be a clear on ramp for any group of PCs to enter into it - it shouldn't involve Generic Government Agent giving them an infodump and pointing them at the problem - and a reasonable way for them to skip it if t's really out of character. Now, they likely won't skip it because of table contract, but the fact that it is skippable makes it something you can insert into a sandbox game, with ramifications.
2. Clear Stakes: The stakes need to be clear, self-contained, and optimally low for the broader game. This lets the GM either drop this in as a two issue event or an annual and everyone knows the wheels are on the rails. Of the GM can easily modify it so it's a seamless part of the game, foreshadowing and integrating it as part of the sandbox. That increases utility. 
3. Classic and Clever: Scenarios should be riffing off classic tropes as a way to show the GM how to do this sort of thing and let the players experience the types of stories they love with their characters in a well presented way. They also need to not be completely generic. Terror By Night lets them fight a vampire and do the circus thing, but has some nice twists to break it up. Enter the Dragons Claw: HONOR is you fighting Ninja! But it's also 1980's high finance business politics. A scenario should always have a neat spin. 
3. If it is a Supplement...
1. A Single Book: I know this wasn't the style at the time, but if Death Duel with the Destroyers and Island of Doctor Apocalypse (or FORCE and Assassin!) had been a single longer book, with the lead in stuff that Dawn of DNA had for the hints of the organization (but which fell down on the master plan) you would have something ideal. A clearly defined villain group that had plans and fall backs and ways for the heroes to encounter them again and again, and maybe get ahead of them to give the players real agency.
2. Easily Integrated: Supplements are bigger than scenarios in that they define a larger part of the milieu...nope still feels weird to use that out of D&D... game setting and therefore they need to be pretty easy to integrate into anyone's game. The design of smaller teaser encounters before one of the big plots kicks off. A n explanation for how the group had stayed under the radar for so long or had just been created. How the villains interact with the world in a general sense.
3. Sandbox-y: This ties with easily integrated but while Scenarios should be a little sandbox in that the players can just ignore them and their limited stakes play out, supplements should be sandbox in that the seed the setting with stuff. FORCE and Assassin together present several different plots going at once under different identities and umbrellas. Make the GM aware of all of these and their respective time tables so if the heroes go somewhere they may stumble into something. Also the information on the group should make it clear how they would react to another group either from a different supplement or the GM's campaign - how would Force react to Doctor Apocalypse, or vice versa? 
4. In all cases...
1. Supers adventures need clear organization: The DC Heroes lead-from-the-front synopsis to the GM about what is going on is a huge deal, as is their flowchart and the "troubleshooting" sidebars. That being said the flowcharts need to have more options to get from A to Z, with things the heroes might skip, branches of investigation, etc. Modern mystery design from Gumshoe games are a big help here and should be emulated in the way to start ay A, end at Z, but many paths to it, and enough information for the GM to end at M if that's what the PCs do. The ideas of how the big final fight should be explained, but not made mandatory. I know the genre conventions lead to certain things, but a troubleshooting bar of "if the PCs figure this out faster than you think, alternate endings are..." 
2. Investigation needs to be part of it: Lots of heroes have detective skills or information discovery powers, and the adventure should have those. Just going straight to  When it comes to the information gathering beats, the GM should get a clear list of the names of the people who might be questioned and what they know (as MSH did in Lone Wolves, and DCHeroes did in City of Fear, and kind of needs to do with the mechanical nature of DC's interactions).The classic V&V modules only do this in the most cursory sense, but I think it's needed to capture the investigation pillar of supers. 
3. Maps are Neat but not Needed: I love the location maps for the V&V modules, especially the area maps with points of interests, but the room by room maps with descriptions feel like holdovers from the D&D design era. We don't see supers in comics doing room by room searches of places (unless it's the funhouse in Terror by Night, which is part of the plot), especially if there's a time limit. If the base matters, give it in broad stroke areas and what's likely to be in there, with where the villains are and how the base responds. We don't need every room detailed. (also there were a lot of clues in rooms that PCs might never enter, making it easy or hard to solve certain plot points based on whether the PCs tore every room apart, or it all happened off screen after the last fight? This is a place where more abstract works. 
4. Theme Matters: When you're building your villains, try to give them a coherent theme based on the setting or scenario. If your fighting Ninja they should all feel Ninja-y, your not what he seems Vampire should have similar sidekicks, etc. The useless side bit in Assassin! investigating the bio-engineering place would have been 100% better if all the security guards had powers based on the place's work rather than being hired supers guarding this isolated business. the Dr. Apocalypse series would have been better served with the Elementals portrayal of the doctor making them rather than recruiting them. If Dawn of DNA had been a Supplement you could have started with the Aberrants because that's all Doctor DNA could fine, and then newer created supers or recruited heroes could filter in over time. That the Organizer's supers in Organized Crimes are not under his control fits when the middle bit relies on that team falling apart, but the ad hoc nature of the villains in Battle Beyond the Earth does not. 
5. Don't play favorites: Please don't have a favorite NPC who centers in the module. Just don't. I shouldn't need to tell you this. 

I think that's it, but will add more if they come to me. 

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). 

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!

 

New Salem: Renaissance - V&V Module Retrospective for "Enter the Dragons Claw: HONOR" and "Terror by Night"

This may feel like a strange pairing for two V&V modules this week, but bear with me, because I think it makes sense. 

More solid covers - Jim Holloway is always fun, and his interior art in Honor is just a delight
Patrick Zircher is to me the 2nd most influential V&V artist. 

I have a great personal fondness for both of these modules because I was able to run them with my college game group to the exact right effect. Why? because they are inherently Modular. Which is a big thing that the prior ones were not. The other 5 modules all postulated world changing events, mass casualty scenarios, etc. and two of them were sequels. Including these could radically change your game world if the heroes failed, so of course there's a strong strong impetus to make sure the heroes don't fail. (Which is mostly baked into supers as a genre, but even more so here). In HONOR, the stakes are an inter-generational power struggle for control of a Japanese electronics company that just some part of occurs in the PCs city to hook them. In Terror By Night a reformed vampire is testing the heroes capabilities while conventionally wooing a human woman. The stakes are just so much lower. 

The former feels like a guest author has taken over the comic for 2 issues. The latter feels like an annual. In both cases it's a disruption from the PCs normal plotlines to deal with this one off thing, and then resume normal programming. In which case, super-helpful for a GM who wants to take a break, or if one player wants to run the game for a couple sessions without breaking anything. Both of these are easy, training wheels modules. 

In my personal use, I ran HONOR over a couple of sessions with two players in college. They rolled up random heroes with an aim for "these should be Avengers level" and got some pretty archetypical heroes - a Flight Invulnerability Strength Speed Himbo with a Sneaky Royalty Cat Lady - and just jumped right in. 

The plot is pretty linear: the heroes see a news report about a corporate merger, stumble across an attempted ambush of one of the people involved, a request from that person for protection, a pretty slick kidnapping that shouldn't make the heroes feel stupid but can be stopped by clever play, and then a weird and unnecessarily complex turnabout ending. The stakes are super small; and will likely turn out the same if the PCs do nothing. It's useful for NSR play only in that the PCs can just safely ignore the whole thing. Plus the villains are generally cool, interesting enough for this sort of one shot fight... unless the heroes some day end up in Japan. 

Since Terror by Night is designed to test the heroes, and my college V&V game was the classic "players as PCs" it was easy for me to slot it in as their midterm exam. But even without that additional hook, the module it just a classic set of tropes where the Players will go "Oh! We're doing the circus thing!" and hopefully run with it. It doesn't so much fit the dark and gritty tone of of New Salem, but that might be seen as a nice break or a an excuse to ramp up the threat level in the various tests and have the villain vampire be as bad as villain vampires can be. There are a handful of "what you can do next" ideas at the end of the module if the players enjoyed it and want to see more; I like the open ended nature of it and made use of it in my campaign. 

I personally adore the leaning into the tropes, and just as Holloway's art in HONOR catches the slightly silly vibe of the whole ninja thing. Zircher's internal art here is just fantastic with panels of the sample heroes in the test chambers of the vampire's funhouse. Just great stuff! Again, it's completely trivial and modular, but as a module that's a good thing IHO.

New Salem: Rennaisance - V&V Module retrospective 2, looking at F.O.R.C.E. and Assassin!

Last week we looked at V&V books 2003 (Death Duel) and 2004 (Doctor Apocalypse), so this week we look at 2005 (F.O.R.C.E.) and 2006 (Assassin!) by Thomas Dowd. Which is just a little weird because there is a three-year gap between FORCE and Assassin!, in which a lot of other books came out (including Dawn of DNA, which we discussed 2 weeks back). Something was clearly up there....

Covers thanks to this nifty site

This two-parter has a very different style than the last one in that it is not intended to be played one right after the other, but instead for years to have passed between the two modules (maybe the delay was intentional! naaaah....)

First up, are these individually or collectively good for NSR style play? Ummmm....no. 

F.O.R.C.E. is a bit of a mess design wise - the information needed for the GM to understand things is scattered around the book, and there's an elaborate plot structure that feel a bit Rube Goldberg. 

The main villain, Franklin Orscar Randolph Charles Emerson (so twee!), is a wealthy industrialist who had his personality transplanted into a highly human android body to avoid a debilitating nerve disease, but the android brain brought with it both messianic delusions and a hyper-charisma psionics power, taking the name "Force". Now, we discussed Charisma at length earlier and this character is an interesting worked example of how that works, and Dowd goes into some detail of how and when Force uses his super charisma. When he really turns on the power Force gets a +9 on reactions, so a roll of 10+ makes someone very enthusiastic. That in turn gives a +3 on the Loyalty roll, and Force will use this repeatedly to get someone to the Enthusiastic permanent follower level. (I find it wonderful Force doesn't have Heightened Charisma B to take him to 46 Charisma, but has a psionic power to get there; it's not just a great example of how you can tailor your roll set in V&V to get the kind of powers you want, but also how the description of the power can do EXACTLY what you want it to do. However, it's also a way to get the Reaction modifier to apply for more than one roll.)

As an android Force has used inventing points to get a highly limited disguise power where he can change his height, face, eyes, and hair to look like other people, so he has three identities in the first adventure: Force the super villain terrorist James Bond villain, Emerson the industrialist, and Hieronymus Kinkaid the cult leader. The whole makes it clear that while Doctor Apocalypse dominates with brute power, Force is the Charisma/plotting/the law says you can't touch me/always has an escape hatch (he has back up bodies he transmits to if this one is caught) designed to frustrate the players. It's a classic archetype that comes right up against the "This is the GMs favorite NPC" issue. 

Somehow Force has stolen (either with his terrorist group The Force or through an agent created from Kinkade's cult) a nasty bio-weapon - and here we have problem one because the bio-weapon is so nasty that it circumvents the PCs super powers and kills them anyway if exposed, presumably to raise tension but mostly the writer undercutting the players abilities - and hidden it somewhere with a mid sized nuke (that they also presumably stole? and the bio weapon can survive being at ground zero of a nuclear explosion to be disseminated?) to blackmail the US government for $500 million in diamonds. Sure, it's comics, run with it, but we don't get an explanation as to why they want or need this, how they plan to move the diamonds, etc. Bio-Nuke Armageddon in 10 days unless the PCs do something (the threat is a secret, so the PCs have to have some way of finding this out via government contacts). 

"Several days before the final ransom deadline, after days of fruitless investigation" - and here's problem two because there's no way to predict the PCs powers or capabilities to say that they are stymied for a week - we have what should be the cold open of a journalist investigating the cult dying in the PCs arms with a croaked warning  - problem three, even if you revive the journalist he's still brain dead because how dare you keep Revivification as a power and mess up my plot - that gives them reason to tie Kinkaid's cult to the Force, and specifically a yacht off Long Island Sound. It would be so much better to frame this as "here's the way of last resort", or "this guy dying at your feet is what brings you into this scenario to begin with, the government contacting you after you stick your nose in". 

If the PCs instead recommend paying the ransom and trailing the pick up, they discover the pick up is done by a teleporter (named Teleporter) and the Force's not stupid strategies on how to avoid being followed. Still, there's nothing that says the PCs clever plans (like shrinking down and riding along with the diamonds or the pick up guy, shape shifting into the briefcase holding the diamonds, reading Teleporters mind, etc. 

Still, everything from here is "here is the route of the yacht and how it defends against PC action/ here's (another) Caribbean island used as the Force's base and how it defends itself, here's the Kansas commune and how it defends itself" that is highly reminiscent of Doctor Apocalypse and at least stands as a "The Heroes take the initiative, the villains react" style of play that sort of works from an NSR sense. It's just a shame that these spaces are presented in such a map-heavy manner. Every room is detailed as much as if it were an OSR dungeon. How to present these things differently is something I have to think about, because super heroes isn't dungeon crawling, but the GM still need some detail to put in front of open ended PC exploration. 

I did want to stop and look at the concept of Consequential Play in scenarios like this because the stakes in these modules are just so apocalyptic: the heroes are always trying to save the world. Yes, it's comics, but there needs to be some thought as to what happens if they screw up. There will be another blog post on this eventually. 

No matter how things play out the PCs won't be able to permanently capture Force because of his unknown at the start transmit to new body trick, but they can stop his plan, destroy his base, expose Kincaid's cult as being connected to the Force, and generally mess him up.

The next module, Assassin! doesn't even advertise itself as a sequel to F.O.R.C.E., with the PCs being called by their government handler to protect a senator/presidential candidate from an assassin (code named "the Assassin"... must be Teleporter's cousin or something). The people hiring the assassin have nothing to do with nothing, the Assassin himself is unstoppable for plot reasons, and all of it is a set up to reveal that the Senator had replaced with an android! (dun dun duuuuunnnn!) There's only ONE CLUE to follow to find out where the android came from, the most knowledgeable scientist on the topic, and it leads the PCs to a mistaken identity fight with a 4 member superhuman security team at the company. 

OK, its classic in the comics but it's totally railroading the PCs into looking like shmucks, and makes the company look suspicious as hell. What small tech company in Flagstaff, Arizona has that much security?! But it turns out that the guy no longer works there, he's living in a small cabin in the Rocky Mountains (that somehow the government minder knew nothing about despite tax and property records?) and points the PCs there, where this is ONE CLUE sending them to a Florida Keys yacht club, where there is ONE CLUE to send them to the (fictitious) Central American country of Chinilaya, which is ostensibly self supporting, wisely governed, and cold war neutral (like I said, fictitious in 1985). 

Their government minder will push for an immediate assault, driving the PCs into a fight with the Chinilayan military, who all come from central casting. If they win there is ONE TRAIL to the President's house; if they lose they are captured and brought to the Presidents house. There's ONE TRAIL from there to the Force's hidden base, because with the loss of his Kincaid identity, Force changed up his disguises to replace the second in command of Chinilaya, and maneuver things to become it's benevolent charismatic genius leader. Who also has a salvaged rebuilt Soviet nuclear sub that he's about to use to blackmail the US for a billion dollars in gold because the PCs have interrupted his plans to make the android president. 

The module then ends with a) a cut scene of where Force has escaped to and mentioning his next plan, which is never revealed, and b) a mini-adventure where the GMs actual favorite NPC, one of the villains from F.O.R.C.E., has struck out on his own and gets a chance to make the heroes look stupid. 

The whole module is written not just as a railroad, but as a "and then the players look stupid or have to do dumb things" railroad, where the identity of the villain is hidden from the Gamemaster until the end of the module like it's a novel. I give full points for the various environments and challenges, and trying to hit various tropes, but it's just a mess for any sort of player driven play. It's even more of a James Bond adventure than the others we've seen, and since it's 150% as long as F.O.R.C.E. there's a lot of space for problems.  

I ran F.O.R.C.E. as a kid and it went pretty well, and I ended up doing several things with the organization, specifically the Church of Divine Harmony cult, over the course of the game that ended up mirroring some things in Assassin!, but I didn't get a copy of the latter until well after college and never ran it. I really don't know how well it was distributed. To make the whole thing work in an NSR sense the Force would need to be detailed as an organization book, with the several different plots and plans Force has, his various bolt holes and identities, his minions etc., and how he interacts with each of the times the players disrupt one of them. 

It's possible to integrate these into a New Salem game just by having a) having the journalist's collapse in F.O.R.C.E. be the PCs entry to the scenario and finding out what's happening, and the yacht leaving from New Salem, and then b) in Assassin! it's Reverend Greene who arranges the assassination attempt as a way to nudge the PCs into dealing with Force for him. But as said, Assassin needs to be completely rewritten. 

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. 

New Salem: Renaissance - super hero RPG module design

Getting back to New Salem, and I promise that July is the month where i flood you with corrupt social order adversaries to build out the other side of the threat conspyramid, I wanted to take a minute to look at how you could/would/should even design adventures for super hero games, never mind super-hero games that are trying to have a NSR/Sandbox/player driven focus like New Salem. 

I come to this having just...

1. Read some Mastodon posts about treating adventure writing as if it were technical writing - there is information on what to do and how to do it that needs to get in front of the Game Master as quickly and cleanly as possible for maximum use in play - and that adventures should be written with that in mind. This being gaming, of course there's push back and counter arguments in a healthy ecosystem where no two tables are actually playing the same game. 
2. Watched a video review for I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City (which I am running for my library kids D&D group this summer) which dings the 1981 module for not giving the GM a clearer story direction. Now, I suppose if you're producing content entirely for GMs who are used to modules giving them stories with rising action, climaxes, etc. then this is a fair warning, but since I1 started as a tournament module that was then expanded to "and once you've done that you've discovered a lost city full of treasure and plots and mysteries to explore" with the faith that 1981 AD&D players would want to do that without additional plot motivation, dinging it for that feels out of place. 

That being said, I've previously discussed how the super-hero genre is story focused as a rule, and the whole of the New Salem: Renaissance project is to get the genre into a place where a sandbox story would be effective. So what would a module for that look like?

Looking over the classic V&V Modules (there were 20 in the game's heyday, with four villain collections), with two of them being a back to back two-parter (Death Duel with the Destroyers + Island of Doctor Apocalypse). Others are set up as sequels (FORCE can be followed by Assassin; Enter the Dragon's Claw: HONOR can be followed by Search for the Sensei), and these are all very story-driven. There's a precipitating event that is outside the PCs control - the villain makes an attack or someone tells the heroes that there is an attack coming. There's then some back and forth with the villain where the author is making assumptions of the heroes tactics, powers, and strategies. This can get super clunky and railroading. 

My favorite is that FORCE opens with an investigative journalist dying at the PCs feet trying to pass along information about an evil cult. And then despite Revivification being a standard power in V&V the it absolutely cannot work here because it would break the investigative opening to the module. Super-heroes just have such varied abilities, power levels, and tactics. The genre wants you to write stories like the comics, but everything about the genre makes generic modules REALLY hard.

For some reason, my favorite is the deeply sketchy Dawn of DNA

How can you not love that cover?

The module isn't one direct adventure but a series of events being made by a shadowy mastermind who has a slow plan to take over the world. The three parts a) are the PCs having disparate encounters where either the mastermind is making quiet moves, or his henchmen are getting bored and making dumb plays that draw attention to their activities, b) the henchmen deciding the heroes know too much and taking steps to eliminate or ambush them, and then c) the shadow mastermind unfurling his grand plan, which the GM is meant to integrate into the larger world (with existing NPC hero teams already having fallen under his control, for example). Unlike other modules these are meant to be interspersed with whatever else is going on in the game world. To the players they might feel like almost randomly generated encounters. 

It is very short (about 16 pages of text) but like many sandbox adventures it opens up to "and then what do the heroes do next?" Exactly how entrenched Doctor DNA becomes in the world is based in how much effort the PCs put into resolving what is happening early, and maybe taking the fight to him, but it doesn't presume any of that. 

I'm going to delve more into the other modules I have over the rest of of June.

New Salem: Renaissance - and (the end) of EVERYTHING

The third of our three problematic powers is Death Touch. Which is pretty self explanatory in what it does and why it's problematic for a random roll in a supers game. 

The rulebook acknowledges this up front in that superheroes should be allowed to reroll or modify the power as a matter of course. And lots of people do; to the point where it's really "Death Powers" in most of the games I've played in. So much so that the power itself just needs to be rewritten to better fit the rest of the game. 

Lets tackle the basic mechanics of the power as writ, as it's unique in the game. 

1. It requires an "successful Hand-to-Hand" mode attack" where the effect of the hit is the Death Touch potentially activates. This is weird from the jump because some of the defense types are designed like D&D Armor Class: you are still struck, but not well enough to penetrate your passive defense. Robot Body doesn't make you better at evading attacks, just resisting them; Stretching Powers might be evasion or it might be harmlessly absorbing the force of the blow. The other thing here is unless you're a martial artist type, the HTH attack mode sucks, at a 25% chance to hit at all. Now, we can get into this later, but for a lot of people this is just a lousy way to start.
2. "If contact is made (i.e. a hit is scored), the effect is..." OK stop here. This seems to imply that the hit that potentially activates the Death Touch might not also do HTH damage. You have to decide if you're trying to punch or if you're Death Touching. That makes sense in comic books - Instant Death attacks are almost always their own thing, so that the heroes can punch it up with the villain before the baddie opens their extended hand and reaches out to.... But if that's the case, the HTH attack mode makes even less sense as, again, you just need to touch them. Obviously this depends a lot of visuals. 
3. You don't roll damage, the target gets two saves to not die. One can easily see the Agility save being one to minimize the contact ("If he ever really gets his hands on me I'm dead!") and the Endurance to try to fight off the effect for a second to break free. Nicely simulationist. But it kinda neuters the ability. Basically you have a 50/50 chance to incapacitate an average human and a 25% chance to kill them, but much less for other heroes.
   It is fascinating in that it cuts through so much other stuff: a high HP don't help, high Power Score won't let you roll with it, Invulnerability and Armor don't protect you. a Death Touch attack could kill Superman with one hit! Except his Endurance and Agility are at least 15 each, so it has a 6% chance to do that. Or if both are 20+, a 0.25% chance. You're really not likely to kill your opponents, but you COULD. 
4. It only costs you Power when it works. This shows up a couple other places - Emotion Control and Mind Control - and it's an interesting mechanic. The high PR power that completely removes an opponent from play, but you only pay the cost when it works. Oddly, Paralysis Ray also removes an opponent, but that costs 7 per attempt. (Transmutation also costs 8 per attempt, but can have a ton of versatility and do damage, so I see the logic). Given the action economy trying one of these and failing is a bummer, so having the big drain on your power cost would add insult to injury, especially if you can do Death Touch or HTH damage, but not both. 

I'm torn here because in order to keep to the NSR ethos of this project I want character death to be a distinct possibility. Keeping the "this cuts through all your other defenses" rules works for that. But I also don't want to have rules that say "this auto-kills NPCs and Pcs get these saves" because the game as writ is very symmetrical and that injects some narrative asymmetry I'm trying to avoid. 

I've been gnawing on this for the better part of a week, and I think I've landed on:

Death Powers: The character has powers that allow them to directly damage the life force or biological processes of another living being. When struck by Death Powers, the target has to make two saving throws on d20 - one vs Agility to minimize the length of the contact and one vs. Endurance to survive the contact at all. If the target makes both saves they take 2d8 damage as if this were a regular attack and the attacker expends 5 Power. If the target makes one save, they lose all their HP and are immediately incapacitated - this damage is not mitigated by invulnerability, armor, or rolling with the attack - and the attacker expends 10 Power. If the target fails both saves, they lose all HP and Power, and are dead; note that they do not take any damage to Basic Hits, so the corpse is in excellent condition for Revivification or some other medical intervention.

Heroic characters can usually choose to 'pull' their Death Powers attack so that no saves are rolled and it does 2d8 damage; only one save is rolled and it either does 2d8 damage or incapacitates; or the full range of effects are possible. 

Death Powers normally has no range, needing to be delivered by touch or with a Carrier Attack (see 3.4). If it is delivered by touch, it requires an HTH Mode attack to hit, but with a +4 attack modifier as the attacker needs only to touch the target, not strike them hard enough to do damage. (If Death Powers is carried by an HTH attack that also does damage, no modifier is applied to the attack.) If the power does have range, it is the characters (C+Ch) divided by 5 inches. 

I think this improves things quite a bit, while keeping the potential for instant death. It's something a Player Character can have as their primary power as they can usually 'pull it' to just be an attack with a decent chance to hit and solid damage, with the ability to pull out the stops. It's clear that it can be a touch or a carried attack, and also implies that it can be carried by, say, Lightning Control for an electrical attack specialized in causing cardiac arrest. 

The option for short range death powers as death powers design works well for, say, Needle from the Revolution (who also had a Devitalization ray attack and telekinesis) for her biokinetic powers, or for Demise in the Wild Cards books, who could lock eyes with people at short range and psychically kill them. 

 

 

New Salem: Renaissance - ...The Universe...

The second in our trio of powers that need modification, Cosmic Awareness. This one needs tweaking because first of all it's not a great adaptation of how the power appears in the comics, and also because it has a degree of meta play that doesn't let it translate as an NPC ability (which is very unusual for V&V)

That's a lot of highly specific text for a power that certainly seems to be designed to not be used, and when used gives a minimum effect. "Correct answers to Yes or No questions" is definitely not worth it for an average charisma hero asking even a single question: that's a 50/50 chance of being messed up. So the player needs to spend a massive amount of Power, say, 25+ points, to get even a 75% chance to to make an attempt. And even then the chance of finding something is, for an average hero, 1 in 3. 

Essentially as written the power is useless without some combination of Heightened Intelligence and Heightened Charisma. Worse, it doesn't really match what Cosmic Awareness did in the comics, with the best known practitioner being Captain Marvel, who was literally granted Cosmic Awareness in the run on his series. This provided him with a general sense of oneness with the universe, let him detect and locate cosmic level threats, and acted similar to a 'spider-sense' in terms of predicting physical harm. I don't know that the term existed in comics prior to that, even if there are other people who have displayed some version of it, including Spider-Man, whose spider-sense might as well be a low level Cosmic Awareness. 

The problem is that almost any other implementation of Cosmic Awareness is just Heightened Senses. Even this iteration of Cosmic Awareness is just "asking questions of the GM" carved out so it's not taken as a Heightened Sense. 

So what do we want Cosmic Awareness to do? I think the general answer is that the character is passively aware of threats to the cosmos and can learn things they would have no way of knowing.

Mechanically this means:

If there is some threat to the cosmos (or the planet, continuity, whatever) the Gm treats it like any other sense: if it's likely big enough for the character to sense it as they would any other stimui, they do. Less obvious cosmic threats, they have a chance equal to their detect danger to sense it. Cosmic Awareness also helps characters using any other senses, letting them re-roll any missed Detect Hidden or Detect Danger checks due to their cosmic senses. 

If the player wants to learn something specific, it's a d% save vs. I * 3, and if successful the GM will give them some level of information about it. The character can spend 1 point of power per 1% added to their chance of success, so this can be exhausting. Failure means no meaningful answer, but not incorrect information; the character knows they can't interpret what they are sensing. Failure by more than 20% causes the character to get lost in the universe - treat this as Paralysis Ray with a d% save vs. Charisma to recover themselves - and if they miss the roll by more than 40% they also take 3d10 Power damage as if hit by Devitalization Ray. 

I think this is a lot cleaner in the concept of the power being a general information feeder, a double for danger sense, and a way to get something closer to an Augury from D&D as opposed to a set series of Yes/No questions that has to be gamed out. 

New Salem: Renaissance - LIFE...

V&V 2.1 has three powers that stand out either in their general weirdness or in how they don't manage to capture the comic book version of the power. Today we're looking at the first of these.

This is weird, right? It's not just me, right?

Revivification is a strange choice because it's not like there are a lot of supers with this power. It feels very holdover from Empire of the Petal Throne that somehow made it into the 2nd edition. But the concept of healing someone? That's got a lot of comic book antecedents. A such this power often gets changed to some sort of healing ability. 

Healing: 

This is the power to restore health to the wounded, diseased, and perhaps even the dead. It can be used (E/3 round up) times per day, at a range of 1", and taking one full round to do so (if it is not the character's first action of the round they cannot act again until the commensurate action of the next round). Each use restores either the target's Healing Rate in Hit Points or 2d8 Power Points. The character can choose to activate more than one use of this ability at one time, restoring more HP or Power Points with a single action, but doing so costs 8 Power. 

If the character attempts to use this power on someone who has died within the last hour, and who still has Basic Hits remaining, they may discover that the body has a "spark of life" remaining, and may be restored to the living with a single use of Healing and 8 Power Points. The chance of being revived is the percent of their Basic Hits remaining. 

For Example, Captain Awesome has 4 Basic Hits, and has been reduced to 0 HP and 0 Power, and 3 Basic Hits in a fierce battle. To all appearances dead, the healer has a 75% (3/4 = 75%) chance to find a spark of life and bring the Captain back to life. 

The character may bring back person who has been deceased up to 10 days. The circumstances depend on the nature of the death and the characters source of powers - a mystical hero would be be able to revive someone who "died too soon" due to a curse or magical attack, while a high tech hero could revive someone whose death didn't involve brain damage via some memory storage and nanite restoration of dead flesh - but this the attempt is entirely at GM discretion. If the GM deems it is possible, the chance of success is 100% -10% per full day dead, all of the characters uses of Healing for the next week, and 25 Power. If the roll is a failure, but is less than 100%-2% per day dead, the target is revived temporarily; they have long enough to close their last case, capture who killed them, make amends for their crimes, have one last personal discovery, or say goodbye. (If this is a PC, it's for one last game session, and they may have new powers for that one last session based on the method used to revive them.)

Note: If the 'dead' character is a PC who made the d% save vs. their last positive Power score (see 7.2 Replacing Slain Characters), this power revives the 'dead' hero at no additional cost, as this power is the GMs method for explaining their return. 

This includes the original power, but also keeps the Golden/Silver Age feel of these sorts of healings. The Endurance based number of uses is to make sure the players don't abuse this as a "team regeneration" where an hours rest gets everyone back to full health. 

Next Time? THE UNIVERSE...

New Salem: Renaissance - New Magic Table

I know, unusual day for a V&V post, but I hadn't been able to finish the Magic table for yesterday's post, so here it is. 

Now corrected to show all the numbers!

You'll see a lot of similarities with the Psionics chart, in part because I want to hew to the similar origins in the 2E rules. But at the same time, there were a lot of changes. Magic Spells is added, obviously, and Psionics removed. But I also added a lot of new powers.

Some things, like Illusions, Invisibility, Weather Control, and Non-Corporealness, were obvious small-chance powers for magic for being classical magical abilities.

Death Touch and Revivification are also magic powers more than they are almost anything else, and both advertise themselves for getting redefined as death and life related powers. 

I hemmed and hawed about Telepathy, Teleportation, and Telekinesis because they are so classically Psionic, but kept them on because lots of magical heroes have some version of them. 

Absorption, Dimensional Travel, Transformation, and Transmutation were added not just because they can feel Magic-y, but also because they are so very open ended in their design. You can do lots with these in ways that don't make the character feel like everyone else with that power. 

I could have added a lot more, or created more special powers that perfectly fit the setting, but these work for me. Next week I will do some of that, creating new text for Cosmic Awareness, Death Touch, and Revivification that makes them more innately useful and comic-booky.

New Salem: Renaissance - New Psionics Tables

Continuing on last week's discussion on the Villains & Vigilantes (available at finer on-line game stores everywhere) power generation tables, and how we can modify them. Here's the expanded Psionics table, separated out from the Magic/Psionics table to give more options for people aiming at being mentalists from the jump. 

All the powers other than Magic Spells and Flight from the original table are on here with 7% chances (except for Cosmic Awareness which was boosted from 1% to 4%), with another 12 powers added that to me, at least, feel like Psionics based powers. You will note that I have added "Companion" to the "Pet" power, just because I like expanding the concept of the power in the players mind. 

Some of these, like Animal/Plant Control, Heightened Senses, Emotion Control, Illusions, Mind Control, and Teleportation, are easy adds. Yes, there are all ways that these powers can be non-psionic in nature, but they are also all powers that are readily equated to psionics. OK maybe not Plant Control, but given the open ended nature of V&V 2E's power design it's better to just list the power and not try to limit them at the jump. Teleportation was the one I struggled with most as adding this at 4% or 1%, but remembering the Tomorrow People I went with the 4%

Keeping that in mind, I added six more powers at 1% - Absorption, Devitalization Ray, Dimensional Travel, Flame Power, Force Field, and Paralysis Ray - that I felt hit the general psionics profile but aren't as often seen in that space. Absorption could always be used to duplicate or steal mental energy, memories, psionic powers, and so on; Devitalization Ray and Paralysis Ray are some form of stunning attack; Flame Powers is Pyrokinesis, and if the 'human torch' equivalent of the power doesn't fit the players conception we can trust them to not pick that one; and Force Field is easily an offshoot of telekinesis. 

I admit Dimensional Travel is a stretch, but none of the other powers in the game quite fit my psionics profile; It might have been better to drop it and increase Fame Powers a 2% chance. Or move Cosmic Awareness back to a 1% chance, dropped Dimensional Travel, and increased Flame Powers, Force Field Devitalization Ray and Paralysis Ray to 2%, leaving Absorption at 1%. While this is all noodling around the edges, it does make Psionics feel like it's own thing, and specific for my campaign world (albeit highly generic). 

I was hoping to get Magic done today too, but that;s for another day.

New Salem: Renaissance - Customized Power Charts

Since we have been discussing the various power designs and generation methods I wanted to take a look an an option for our base system, V&V, that I don't know that other V&V GMs play with, which is redesigning the Power Charts for your specific campaign. The basic idea is that you can prioritize and split the powers up as you wish. Since they are mostly there for inspiration and giving some framework, you're not going to break anything. 

In some ways this takes us back a bit to the 1E charts, where the origin types had separate power charts - and you could recreate that if you wanted, but I more want to take a look at how to tweak the system. V&V 2E has two different sized of power charts: Powers, Devices, and Magic/Psionic items (which also incorporates extreme hypertech like the Green Lantern Corps Rings) are expansive lists, while Skills and Magic/Psionics are tighter lists. The expansive lists have roughly 60 powers on them, with 40-ish at 2% chance and 20-ish at 1%. The tighter lists are 12-14 powers, each with a 7-9% chance (except Cosmic Awareness, with a 1% chance on Magic/Psionics - wow did the scarcity of Cosmic Awareness make me think it must have been the most kickass power ever as a kid; in practice, not so much). 

The Skills list is generally fine, as it's not so much "skills" as it is "abilities common to non-powered heroes" or "if you've already got some things you think are cool roll here to see what training you did". It's great to be a DC style hero with your one high tech device and lots of training, or your badass martial artist. 

The Magic/Psionics list is...well...here: 

It's a very short list of 12 abilities designed to maximize your chance to get mental powers or Magic Spells, which is strange because you can just, ya'know, pick those. And it creates this weird implication that things rolled on the Powers table can't be magical in nature, because the Magic table is here.

This may have all be an aside, but I'm leaving it in. 

My idea then, is to build new power tables for New Salem: Renaissance that better reflect what I want to see in the setting. They will have two designs

Expansive will have 

• 10 powers with a 3% chance each - the most common super-abilities in the setting.  
• 20 powers with a 2% chance each - common super abilities
• 30 powers with a 1% chance each - rarer super-abilities
• One of those 1% powers is Mutant Power, a unique super-ability. 

Tailored will have 

• 10 powers with a 7% chance each - core abilities of this tailored set
• 6 powers with a 4% chance each - common options in the tailored set
• 6 powers with a 1% chance each - rare options in the tailored set. 

Yes, this is going to force me to expand on the skills list a bit, which is also going to add more powers. But it also lets me build separate Magic and Psionics tables. WATCH THIS SPACE, TRUE BELIEVERS. 

On the Generation of Mutations

Continuing the discussion from last week on how the rules presented mutations and powers from Gamma World 1E to V&V 3E/1978 to 2017, I want to talk this week about how mutations/powers were generated in those systems over time (with a bonus rules system tossed in). 

In Gamma World 1E, the mutation generation system is as follows: you roll 1d4 for number of physical mutations, and 1d4 for number of mental mutations. Percentile dice are rolled once for each mutation on the appropriate table and recorded on the sheet. About 30% of the physical mutations table is defects, as is 20% of the mental mutations table; you could get no defects, or all defects depending on your rolls. If you are particularly unlucky on rolling your characteristics and mutations the GM might declare the character hopeless and you start over. All very early style design. EXCEPT....

This? This right here? this blew my mind. You still roll for number of mutations but the player gets to PICK which ones they want. And then based on the number of (presumably positive) mutatons taken the Referee adds defect mutations based on the numbers rolled - from no defects if you only have 3 mutations between physical and mental to 2 defects (one physical, one mental) if you have 3+ mutations in each type. This degree of player control of mutations was so unexpected based on Gamma World reputation for wahoo bananapants crazy. Of course it's also potentially adversarial in that the Referee isn't obligated to consult with the player at all in terms of defects selected, but it's also potentially collaborative in creating reasonable mutant genotypes rather than bizarre combinations. Highly recommended for someone like me who wants the idea of PCs being from stable mutant communities while not being limited to the animals/mutated human strains in the book. 

Now chronologically we jump to V&V First edition, where you start with a roll to determine your origin type 

Followed by rolls to determine how many powers you have based on your origin type and which table you roll them on.

Where each List is tailored with the powers that they felt most likely for heroes with each origin type - you can see that Designed and Sponsored share the same 40 random options... 

Because they get their powers through the same mechanisms, but the origin type is not just how you got your powers but the relationship to maintaining those powers/your place in society. 

Note that the pervasiveness of the Marvel Universe mutants is present in this game, even though it's not in the Marvel Universe. (More on this in another post.)

As with the 2E combat charts, there's a lot of implicit world building in 1E's tables: the powers you may get depend on the origins of the powers, and you're funneled into certain concepts. This isn't bad, per se, but it's got a lot of inherent restrictions, and the tables probably aren't robust enough. Here's the last little step: 

Note the strange division of authority. If you have 2+ powers, you have to drop one. If you only have 2, the player picks which one to drop. If you have 3+, the GM picks which one doesn't fit. I mean, why is this there? Why does the GM get to decide which power doesn't fit? It just seems so bizarre. 

As an aside the language in that last sentence is strange - how does the GM modify a non-combatant power into a weapon? What does that entail? My first thought is that you could take, for example, Invulnerability and make it a sword that grants that power, so the PC now has a sword to attack with that also has, I dunno, super-parrying or something. That is something I do regularly in 2E and a lot of other GMs/Players don't think of, but maybe my doing that is reading something into it. 

Thanks to a friend of the Blog I have had a chance to look at Golden Heroes, which the 1984 printing is apparently pretty close to the 1981 fan publication. Gold Heroes lets you roll 2d6 powers (!) and there is only one table to roll from but many of the powers have Grades, where if you roll it multiple times you get extra stuff. Alternately you can in the process decide to not roll but just spend a power roll upgrading something. You can also allocate rolls for "advantageous background" which is what lets you play a millionaire industrialist with a ton of government contacts, for example (that would be two advantageous backgrounds) or a head of state (another one), but you still have to roll for which one you want. 

This is an interesting gimmick, solving some of the issues of how wealthy/connected to make the super hero in a game without point systems. Easily my favorite bit out of Golden Heroes and maybe stealable for V&V. The player is then urged to develop the rationale for how all the rolled powers fit together - the origin story and core concept - and forfeit anything that doesn't fit. This is very open ended and very much in player control, which is great. There are also statements that if you want to make up a power that is not on the list you and the Scenario Supervisor (SS, unfortunate acronym) can work it out. 

But then the SS is meant to come in and insert weaknesses and limitations into your rationalized powers. This power requires a device, this device is charged this way, these powers can't do X things because of your rationale. It's presented as adversarial and controlling in the dozen examples the book gives, with the player having no control over the changes the SS is making to their character. It's deeply strange, and very freeform, and I can see it going very wrong. But it's also of a piece with V&V 

Moving on to V&V 2E, we have the following: you roll 1d6+2 for number of powers. You can roll on any of 5 tables - Powers, Devices, Magic/Psionic Items, Skills, and Magic/Psionics - swapping tables however you wish on each roll, and then roll 1 time on the Weakness table. You can also skip rolling all together and just write down the powers you want, or pick the ones you know you want and then drop others. Once you've rolled your 3-8 powers (plus any secondary effects they may have, like how good the Heightened Strength is or what your Animal/Plant Powers are), you pick one power to drop. You can also drop your weakness if you're willing to drop another power. You can also work with the GM to modify or tweak any of your powers, decreasing one to increase another, making one a subset of another, or just boosting the ability of your small number of powers to make you more capable compared to PCs on the team who rolled a high number. 

It's all very player controlled, open ended, and pretty much guaranteed to spark ideas while giving you the character you want to play. The GM does have some input to make sure you're not going nuts with the rules, but the combination of randomness and player control make it my favorite of the ones we've seen here. Also notice how the origin type concept is gone from 1E: there's no more implicit worldbuilding in the design. Now, this also means there's no guardrails to help players build consistent characters to steer them towards ideas like the Charismatic Involvement hero (much much more on that later), which can be a problem for some players. 

Last up is Gamma World 4E, which has significantly edited the process. There's no mechanism for the players to select their mutations with the GM determining their defects

Everyone has 5 mutations, which are randomly split between Physical and Mental with a d6 roll 

And then rolled randomly, with high rolls meaning chances for multiple powers or picking a power. So you have somewhere between 2 Defects and 3 Mutations, to 6-7 Mutations. There's no space for GM intervention other than declaring a character hopeless, but there's also no place for player control. The dice rule all.

EXCEPT: Each mutated animal and plant gets mutations based on their player selected base stock. There are some balancing aspects to it, but but it's a player controlled way to get a set of controlled 'mutations' - all Octopi start with chameleon power and extra limbs and gills - and it's a pretty slick implementation for players to feel that their choice of animal or plant stock matters (in 1E it's all up to GM and players deciding what the character has). And they can gain another mutation if they decide to have no human features (including speech). So mutated animals get perhaps an overly generous deal.

This has been interesting to me at least. I obviously like V&V 2E best for this in terms of its player control and general design, but each of the systems has their charms and drives certain things about the games.