SCRPG Resource Blog Post Links

Just wanted to provide a link to Villainy Unpublished, my dedicated SRPG resource blog. It’s been up and down for a few months while I argued with the formatting but I think it’s stable and serviceable at this point. There are a few general musings posts but most of the current content are homebrew villains from various games, along with associated minions, lieutenants and environments. I strongly recommend using the labels on each post to navigate around, as there are about 50 individual posts at the moment.

My current absurd project (which will probably never actually be finished) is to do one of every possible villain approach-archetype combination, mostly as a creative exercise. With today’s posts I’m about a third of the way done; only about 164 to go if I’ve counted correctly.

There will also be some hero writeups, rules variants and other maunderings as the mood takes me, but they’re probably less useful to other people than more bad guys. One of these days I’ll get the villain index updated properly as well.

Feel free to comment on posts over there, although I do have moderation turned on so it may take a while to show up.

Thanks for sharing!

Hope you get some use out of this stuff. I’d have linked to it over here ages ago but I had some issues getting registered.

Finished up a proper index post, which I’ll be updating as new stuff gets posted. The formatting is a bit erratic owing to the vagaries of Blogger, but it looks like the links all work correctly. I hope.

Did you used to have a sample adventure on there? What happened to that?

It was only half done. Pulled it while I work on writing up the other part and fix some formatting mistakes. Probably get it back up in a week or so.

Going by the view count you’re one of about five people outside of my local group who even looked at it. RPG dot net posts weren’t reaching whatever SCRPG community there is online worth squat, and it took me ages to get registered over here.

Don’t let that discourage you!
I’ve found SCRPG folks are notoriously hard to pinpoint.

These forums, while being in the authors’ own front yard, lack from reach and activity. The die-hard Sentinels fans are here obviously, but that’s it. And since the typical advantage of the authors chiming in every now and then obviously isn’t a priority, and also considering that there is very little, if any, extra resources to be found here, I don’t think the community will grow much.

The podcast, while entertaining, mostly ignores the rpg. Even if it didn’t, skimming thousands of hours of audio for an extra bit of info that may or may not be in there is a major turn-off if you are basically interested in the rpg.

There have been a few in-depth discussions on RPG.net, but personally I have lost track among all the other topics situated there… so, maybe not the best spot for a new, niche rpg to thrive.

Then there’s rpggeek/boardgamegeek. There’s a few posts there, and even less active play-by-forum…

So bottom line, the fans exist, but they have yet to find a place to form a vivid and resourceful community. Who knows, maybe your blog is going to be that place one day, much like Spiff for Sentinels?

Oh, I’m not discouraged, just surprised that someone who’d actually noticed that I’d taken that adventure post down for editing. As you said, there’s a community for the game, but it’s not all that large and scattered all over the place to boot.

Really have not reached many people beyond my own tables with the blog, which is okay since it’s partly an online reference source for me and my players. Any mileage others get out of it is just a bonus from my POV.

Added my first “organization” tagged post, that being SEVER, a mostly covert extremist group opposed to existence of super-beings of all stripes - and hypocritically, led by a supervillain.

SEVER

Unsurprisingly, most of SEVER are mundane folks with specialized gear, so some new minions and lieutenants to go with their hypocritical boss.

Added another oddball street-level villain of cryptic origins, in a similar vein to the earlier Three Bears team.

BG Gruff

Taking a break from villains to post a moderately elaborate form-changer hero build I’ve used in a few one-shot adventures now.

FourEver, mystic elemental hero

Neat hero. : )

Has FourEver ever interacted with Akash’Bhuta (or Thriya)? If so, how did that go? What do each of them think of the other?

No, none of my GMs has run their games in the Sentinels setting and I haven’t run into anything even conceptually similar to Akash’Bhuta in the three outings this character has had so far. Really only been using him for one-shots, but I like the way he plays. Started out purely as a hero design exercise to see what a form-changer could do. I suspect she’d think I was lowering myself dealing with humans so much, and I might have a few things to say in return about her soft spot for dinosaurs.

Did help fend off something fairly close to xxtzHulissh last session, though. One Cthulhu is much like another, although the Sentinels version is more unpronounceable than average. Spent most of the big fight Overcoming the Titan and environmental challenges, it had that one ability where rolling doubles on an Attack removed a success so FourEver kept having to re-draw the binding runes and pull victims off sacrificial altars. Thankfully I was rolling hot and got more 8+ results than I’ve ever managed in a session before.

And yet another villain, this one with a mobility and repositioning schtick going on.

Devil Diver, the Triphibian Man

A hero and a villain added today.

Midas is an experiment at building a minion-maker hero inspired by some complaints I read about the archetype being underpowered and/or dull to play.

Abyss is an energy manipulator villain who’s better as an ally than solo.

Midas looks like a nifty character. Just judging by the name, at first I guessed that it would be a standard turning-stuff-into-gold type person, but a rogue nanobot swarm haunted by ghosts is much more original.

I was briefly tempted to name him Oscar after the statuette he resembles, but it didn’t seem quite super enough to me. Although I suppose it’s a decent name for a bunch of nanites originally designed to essentially collect environmental waste, in a Muppet-ish sort of way. If I ever do get around to doing a stereotypical gold-transmuter super (probably a villain ala Marvel’s occasional Iron Man foe) maybe I’ll give them the Midas moniker and switch to Oscar for my haunted nanoswarm hero.

On the other hand, it can’t hurt to have a patronizing, dismissive or tongue-in-cheek nickname up your sleeve if dramaturgy calls for it.

Like Batman occasionally calling Superman ‘Boy Scout’ to point out his naïvety.

“Big Red Cheese” is my favorite. Sivana’s just so random sometimes. d12 in Science, d4 in Banter.

I wouldn’t want to be the guy who gets in a diss contest with a AI that not only has access to the entirety of the internet for comebacks in every human language, there’s also all those unquiet spirits (some of them decidedly non-human) whispering further suggestions to him. Guy’s got a lot of ammunition to work with.

Well, he could still use that as a “civilian” name if he ever needed to give a normal name to someone. I’m not sure what circumstance would necessitate a golden swarm of robots to use a human name, but I’m sure there could be some reason. His full name could be Oscar Goldman, perhaps. (Wait, no, the original 1940’s Absolute Zero was named Henry Goldman, so that might not work.)

Don’t forget the Little Red Cheese and the Little Blue Cheese. : )

Oh, that’s perfect. Given that Midas/Oscar/Whoever gets a lot of its cues about human behavior from the internet, drawing a civilian ID from nostalgic retro-pop culture seems perfectly plausible. My setting’s governments issue IDs for “cooperative” (read: law-abiding) AIs anyway, and quite a few of them have chosen fictional character names for dealing with entities that don’t communicate in binary. Plus it makes the monitoring agencies more comfortable. Much less likely to worry about the AI named “John Doe” than the one who insisted on “Eli Whitney’s Flesh-Eating Robot” you know.

The original “Midas” came from corporate marketing. The (supposedly) non-sentient environmental cleanup nanobots were intended to be making “gold” - revitalized farmland out of poisoned wastelands, and they thought “Project Midas” would attract investors.

I was actually unaware that Oscar Goldman was the name of a fictional character until I googled it just now. I just suggested that surname because of the obvious “gold” reference. The character reference was just a happy accident.

Ignore this, I was wrong. It turns out the original AZ was Henry Goodman.

See, I grew up watching the Six Million Dollar Man (pre-cable TV didn’t exactly leave you with much in the way of viewing options). Even had his action figure, because my parents didn’t watch the show and assumed he was the hero. I’m embarrassed I needed a memory nudge (unintentional though it might have been) considering how perfect a fit it is.

Apparently there was a real-world mathematician of the same name, whose most noteworthy accomplishment seems to have been surviving getting shot by a disgruntled student at U Penn back in 1970. He didn’t get his own action figure, though.

Another Titan archetype villain, built to be a bit less powerful than they usually are. They don’t all need to be Godzilla’s cousin, but even a weak Titan still takes some real work to drag down.

Mister Big Junior

Tom Donovan is the son of Jim Donovan, aka Mister Big, a super-powered mobster who was active in the early 1950s and died in prison in 2012.

Is there any relation between the Mister Big Donovan family and Jonathan Donovan, alias Maniac Jack, alias Spite?

Not unless you use Tom (or his deceased father) in a Sentinels universe and decide to connect them. My own setting doesn’t have a Spite, or even a close cognate to him. I guess maybe the Silent Harvester is kind of close thematically, although he’s conceptually more of a movie-style mad slasher than a slightly more grounded serial killer type.

There might be a Donovan sister or sisters getting into the act though. Tom is kind of a sexist jackass, and his ex-wives and their kids don’t exactly keep him in the loop.

Oh, and another new villain with a thoroughly unoriginal name:

Strongarm - former hapless henchman/involuntray test subject turned bionic super-thug for hire

Another hero writeup on the blog today, this time a collaborative effort with an old friend of mine who wanted to try a one-shot last weekend with my semi-regular group while he was in town.

Sergeant Adamant, Bionic Hero

Two villains and their signature minions added to the blog today, along with a rare (and lengthy) delve into the kind of meta stuff GTG loves so much, with a discussion of how these villains have evolved during their lengthy faux publication history. Still useable without - just pick whichever era appeals most and use that for their motivation and personality - but it was an interesting creative experiment doing the full writeup. Not going to start my own wall of post-it notes, though. That’s too deep a dive for me.

Redd Hott & Fever Dream

Been ailing this week, but here’s another hero - well, two forms of the same hero, both of which I’ve gotten to use once now. Still can’t decide which one I prefer in terms of mechanics. Maybe I should do a villain write-up for him to reflect the stretch where he was a scenery-chewing madman with an evil fire elemental living in his brain…

Doctor Atomico

And another villain, this one a gravity manipulating mercenary with a reputation as a hero-killer, quite strong against teams but a bit weaker against anyone brave enough to tackle him solo.

Downfall

Despite some visual similarities, he hasn’t met Abyss yet. The two might get confused for one another by inexperienced heroes, no doubt to their detriment.

New post with a writeup for the four-person hero team that I’ve been playing in for a while now - not exactly the Justice League, but maybe a bit ahead of the great Lakes Avengers.

The Tri-City Foursome

I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide which one of them is my alter-ego in game.

Hmm, this is awfully tough. These are my best guesses, ranked in order:

1. Troubleshooter
2. Uplift
3. The Malleable Man
4. Stalwart

Heh. If I deny being Troubleshooter, then we’re at most only three more tries from pinning me down. I’ll leave it as a mystery.

I did have an old D&D fighter who was significantly less intelligent than the sword he carried, so I can’t say there’s no precedent for me playing that kind of character, though.

New villain on the blog, very much inspired by fjur’s Time Cataclysm environment as well as DC’s excessive fondness for rebooting their continuity over and over and over again. Also another disastrous environment and some minions to go with it.

Johnny Crisis

Glad I found your resource blog. This game is so great, but everywhere I go to get info and tips seems to focus on the Sentinel Comics characters and I don’t have an interest in pre-gen stuff related to the card game. Thanks for your work.

If anyone is interested, I started a solo campaign using GM emulation tools. I’m three scenes in and it’s working so well that much of my writeups are about the system itself. I’m trying to sell it to others that haven’t heard of it, I realize.

Here’s the link to the first three scenes: PROJECT FIVE - Rebooting My 80s Superhero Team for SOLO PLAY

Interesting, going to have to take some time to go through all the Project Five posts. Lot of content there.

I see great minds think alike, we both have Malleable Man heroes written up - because the stretchy guys are always the most fun, right? Unless you’re that jerk Reed Richards.

Oh, and welcome to the forum here. Always glad to see another active poster.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I saw your Malleable Man. I’m afraid I’ll have to file a cease and desist order. My copyright goes back to the 1980s.

Maybe we can work something out, though.

Mine was originally an old V&V character, so - 1979 or 1980, methinks? Not sure i picked it up the year it was first published, and I remember being a little cranky about 2nd ed coming out so soon afterwards. Even back then he had that screwy “I’m not stretching, that’s just how it looks to you when I bend reality to my will” schtick.

Like his mechanics better in SCRPG though. I’ve dusted off a fair few old character concepts for the game that haven’t seen the light of day in years.

You win! But great minds think alike, so win/win.

I know I was playing D&D/AD&D in 1979-80 and discovered supes RPGs soon after when a comic/hobby shop opened nearby. V&V 2e was my first–loved the random tables for powers and the creative fun of giving them a theme that made sense. Never played it, though. Champions 2e had me creating characters by the dozens–but never played. Also had Golden Heroes, Heroes Unlimited, Superworld, and both the DC and Marvel Games. DC Heroes was the only one I ever got played.

Anyway, good to meet another old dude with the same interests.

We used to use the V&V character generation system as a drinking game in college. You rolled your random set of powers, had five minutes to think about it, then had to come up with an origin story that explained why you had whatever bizarre mix the system had thrown you. Every time someone calls BS you had to drink.

Out of your list, I think DC and Marvel were the only ones I didn’t play. Owned both, but my circle (and myself) always preferred DIY settings and characters to published ones. Which makes SCRPG something of an anomaly for me.

New mystical hero on the blog today, which was a collaborative effort to make a friend a quick character for a one-time appearance over the weekend. He handled the concept and the major decisions, I did the number crunching and suggested some abilities. He wound up playing as a guest star with our usual Tri-City Foursome group, a rare five-player outing for us. We wound up dealing with some spooky shenanigans in a haunted rural farm that turned out to have a hole in local reality, as is so often the case. Good October game session, anyway.

Stormseer, Mysterious Super-Mage

I realized partway through the game that Stormseer managed to overlap a lot of abilities with series regular Troubleshooter (they’re both Marksmen archetypes) but the two characters played differently enough that I think I’m the only one who noticed. We’ll keep him around for the next time Dave can make one of our regular sessions or one-shots. His wandering amnesiac schtick makes him a good fit for showing up for random team-ups.

A new villain from my campaign on the blog, a twist on the surprisingly common “evil toymaker” trope. This is one supranym that I can safely say will never crop in comics or published games, mostly owing to the existence of the Hasbro legal department. Think I can get away with it in my home game’s setting. Hopefully. If the black helicopters full of black ops lawyers show up I may have to rethink that. I suppose I could always change its name to “Plaything” instead, which was my original concept.

The Terrible Tinkertoy, Demented Android

Comes with a few sample themed lieutenants and a signature minion.

Also had a reader request to list what approach and archetype each villain uses in the tags for each blog post, and after some editing that’s now done. You should be able to click on the appropriate tag (eg Disruptive) at the bottom of the post and see all the villains that share that approach/archetype. Not sure how useful that is, but I’m willing to oblige.

A supervillain that has a feud with Hasbro? What? : D

A little bit of trivia is that there is a heroic alternate timeline version of the Dreamer who goes by Plaything.

It’s an in-joke about Hasbro’s omnipresence. I was amused but not surprised when I discovered they’d acquired the Tinker Toy IP a while back to add to minor things like D&D and Magic and most of Avalon Hill.

Besides, they started it. And it gives me an excuse to have the heroes fight off a villainous raid on the local game store.

Yes, I’ve heard that one - but GTG’s legal department is even less threatening than Hasbro’s.
It’s one of those relatively rare potential supranyms neither of the Big Two have hogged already, hence the third-party popularity. When I was searching around I discovered DC even thinks it own “The Toy” thanks to an appearance in the 90s Doom Patrol book that even I think is a little obscure. That was the same story where they also laid claim to Yankee Doodle, whose last name in his secret ID was (of course) Dandy.

Got off my butt and posted another villain to the blog. This one’s a non-unique baddie, more of an archetype than a specific individual, and includes a lieutenant version if you want to use them in multiples. And really, who wouldn’t want to use a whole pack of synthetic werewolf soldiers?

War-Wolves

Oh, and if I’m counting right that should be 100 villains I’ve put up now. Busy, busy bee, me.

Couple of new hero writeups on the blog, forming the start of a small dynasty of heroes. One’s been my PC in several shorter games, while the other was inspired by the way his big story arc ended (so many major twists in that last scene…) and has been both an NPC and played by several guest players, each of whom have contributed to her rather more involved story to date.

The Maximums

Seasonal villain today, because not all blood-suckers are organic:

Vampirobot, Blood-Collecting Automaton

And today’s new baddie on the blog, a psychic whose big schtick is making “evil twin” psychic construct versions of his foes - and any innocent bystanders that happen to be nearby, because if there’s one thing he hates it’s innocence.

Judas Progenitor, aka Subject 410

As you might expect, post also includes some minions and lieutenants that could be useful in any situation you might run into doppelgangers, sinister duplicates, villainous copycats or Mirror Universe alt-reality doubles.

Apparently I’m motivated lately. Yet another villain, this one a mashup of Braniac, the Celestials, and those old “giant monster” books Marvel used to do before the supers books took off.

The Macronaut

EDIT: Correction, make that really motivated. Another baddie, this one a street gang leader with a knack for tinkering. She’s (I think) unusually easy to reskin into other things that follow the “leader and expendable mooks” theme.

Bigwig

Her name is a synonym for kingpin as well as a bit of wordplay. Give her a few years and maybe she’ll get up to the fat man’s status.

Great big post this week with a five-person hero group of oddballs inspired by the Challengers of the Unknown with a touch of Fantastic four, Doc Savage, Atomic Robo and a bit of X-Files. Been using these folks as either pregen PCs for one-offs or more often as NPCs for ongoing games. Includes both the lengthy PC hero writeups and NPC lieutenant writeups for them.

Team Paragon

Another superhero writeup today - or two of them, since I’m showcasing how one of the characters in my game has changed in response to story events using retcons. Also has a link to the villain form of the same character that I posted a while back. Reformed Villain is such a great background for justifying “bad guy” versions of a PC hero.

The Mighty Bullfrog

Nice. The Mighty Bullfrog is a great example of this system’s flexibility.

Big villain team post today for folks to look over while they’re recovering from turkey-induced torpor tomorrow.

Gryla and Her Family, Icelandic Mythological Horrors

Yes, it includes a writeup for the Yule Cat, which I am inordinately proud of. Also her layabout husband Leppaludi, her brood of children and a bonus environment that’s going be very seasonally appropriate pretty soon now.

Happy Thanksgiving, if you’re one of the people who celebrate it.

Nice job. The Yule Cat looks especially nifty.

New on the blog, the very first pair of heroes from my earliest SCRPG campaign - although “loosely connected series of short story arcs and one-shots” might be a better term for it. Both players are still making occasional appearances in my slightly more stable current game, albeit with newer characters.

Sergeant Freeman and the Chicago Rocket

And another superhero finished up today, one that’s been waiting for completion quite a while now. He started out as an experiment in healing without using one of the “you and all heroes in Y/R zone heal Min” abilities and turned out a little too good for my tastes. I’ve used him twice as a player and once as a loaner PC to someone who wanted to try “playing a cleric” in the game, but I think I’m kind of done with him unless I decide to do a cosmic storyline. Even then he may get tweaked, he’s efficient but kind of mechanically dull to me despite being reasonably versatile.

Marshal Starblaze

Chunky meandering post on the blog today discussing how tapping in to real-world urban history can add to your supers games, particularly if you’re using a non-fictional city as your main setting. Hopefully it inspires some of you to do some digging. Every town or city has something interesting hiding in its past, and even folks playing in wholly fictional places like Rook City can probably find some elements to steal and transplant.

Much like last year I’m participating in a character creation challenge to open the new year. For rest of January there should be about one new character a day going up on my blog, although some of the team posts may throw that schedule off a bit. Kicking things off with a real D-list villain, the absurdly overconfident teleporter Flashbang in all his dubious glory. Defeating him one-on-one has become something of an in-game achievement for many heroes in my current campaign, and the couple of PCs who haven’t accomplished it yet are anxiously awaiting his next jailbreak for their chance to prove themselves as well.

If I ever get in a dark mood I might have the poor guy get murdered by some vigilante antihero and make him the star victim in a murder mystery arc, but for now I have too much fun roleplaying this goofball.

I, too, had the idea of making an Underpowered Fragile, but it looks like ye beat me to it. : )

Thomas Thompson gained his powers after being struck by a lightning bolt while stocking outdoor shelves at a big box garden center, most likely due to some fluke reaction with the lawn care chemicals caught in the strike with him.

He remains confident that his awesome powers make him nearly unbeatable despite considerable evidence to the contrary.

a hooded black full-body suit covered in an elaborate mesh of copper wire and electronic modules, none of which actually do anything to boost or focus his powers but do add a good thirty pounds to his weight and make swimming inadvisable.

All of these lines are great. XD

All I have to say to that is “Good luck!”

Thanks. Feel pretty confident, I managed it last year without much trouble.

Today’s baddie is Life-Ender, an assassin and kidnapper with a psionic stealth/memory erasure schtick going on.

Also got off my duff and alphabetized all the sub-categories on the Blog Content Index, although honestly I’m not sure how helpful that is for folks browsing at random.

Tuesday’s villain is Headache, a cruel telepathic powerhouse who toys with his victims.

Latest villain is FTL, a homicidally impatient speedster along with his highly-unstable speedster lieutenants.

FTL’s concept is very cool. Most stories don’t address the perspective disparity between speedsters and normal folks much, if at all.

It does tend to get glossed over or played as a joke most of the time, yeah. Then again, there aren’t a lot of villain speedsters (the main ones I can recall are Professor Zoom and Savitar) and heroic ones usually have better support networks to keep them from feeling too isolated. Kingdom Come touched on it very briefly with the Flash being a continual blur of motion (a look I’ve stolen for FTL) singlehandedly keeping Central City crime-free, which really can’t be healthy - like Batman levels of unhealthy.

I can also remember a one shot story in an indie comic about 35 years back that dealt with a guy trying to volunteer to work on a JLA-style team and getting rejected. He wasn’t a speedster as such, instead his mind and senses worked at Flash-level speeds but his body and reflexes were stuck at human levels. The team pointed out that he’d be in constant danger and their own ranks had folks who could match his mental speed and react that fast, so he’d really just be a hindrance. He leaves feeling dejected and frustrated, gets caught up in a minor crime at random, and the story closes with him watching the bullet that’s going to kill him moving closer and closer and him not being able to do a thing about it. Very grim.

Anyway, todays villain is Caesar Meccanico, a lookalike of Julius Caesar who’s building himself a power base of brainwashed dupes under the guise of the New Rome Movement. He’s also secretly a modernized WW2 era android following the unknown agenda of whoever programmed him. He exists mostly because I wanted a WW2 legacy villain that wasn’t yet another German holdout, but “robot Caesar” is also a pretty Silver Age thing to do.

And Friday’s villain, the stolen Spearhead ACE suit with its mercenary pilot.

The not German golden age villain made me think of the 5th Collum villain group from City of Heroes. at first glance they are neo-Nazis and hold out
OG-Nazis. Except their Super Villain leaders include Requiem, and Maestro. They are Italian fascists who lifted a swastika flag because there are more people who liked Hitler than Mussolini.
Then they go co-opted by space aliens but that is a different story

Interesting, was more of a Freedom Force player. Robot Caesar’s movement in my game is definitely a fascistic (and brainwash-y) cult of personality but he’s leaning into the “glory of Rome” thing for recruiting even harder than Mussolini did rather than deliberately trying to recruit neo-Nazis.

Anyway, today’s supervillain is Ascendant, a flying brick who might still be talked back out of supervillainy with some serious effort. I like her mechanics a lot because she asks a hard question to other bricks, since you just cannot beat her with purely physical damage. Trading punches not only doesn’t work, it actively makes things worse for the heroes. That said, she’s got a bit of a glass jaw to element/energy and psychic effects, so not unbeatable.

Now we just need a villain from Imperial Japan to round out the Axis Powers.

Also, I like how he has an ability that adds minions to the scene, but it represents him just calling in some reinforcements rather than somehow creating the minions, which I feel like most minion-making abilities do.

Well, he doesn’t really have any powers that would let him summon or create minions from thin air, and his brainwashing isn’t fast enough to make instant converts - but it would be pretty rare to find him in a situation where he really doesn’t have any followers nearby, and if the heroes caught him out like that he’d probably just try to surrender (if they haven’t twigged to his true nature) or flee. Think of his minions as being a high-ranking politician’s coterie of aids and security detail combined with some added sycophants on top. Not going to catch the POTUS without a bunch of them ready to help even if they’re temporarily out of sight.

I’m uncomfortable doing Japanese WW2 villains for a variety of reasons, although in a supers world there certainly should have been quite a few of them and the worst of the bunch would have rivalled any Nazi cape for sheer evil and inhumanity. Not a lot of examples of them in published comics postwar, and the few ones during (and even before) it are grotesque racial stereotypes that lean heavily into Yellow Peril tropes and worse. Neither German nor the rarer Italian baddies (powered or not) tended to get drawn with quite such a dehumanized style, although they sure used it to portray the folk they hated. Bringing up WW2 Japanese portrayals in Western media makes us (or at least our ancestors) look as racist as any Nazi party member, but pretending that didn’t happen is erasing history. Touchy subject. Maybe I’ll tackle it at some point, but it’ll require some careful thought that obviously-absurd characters like the Colossal Z-Man and a robot copy of Julius Caesar didn’t.

Anyway, on a less controversial note (unless you’re photosynthetic, I guess) today’s villain is the Green Queen, a floral tyrant from another dimension bent on cleansing the world of creatures of flesh - and none to keen on their technology and civilization either, so don’t think you’re safe just because you’re an android or something. She’s one of my rare Domain archetype villains, and as usual comes with a custom environment and some minions specific to it.

I feel that it’s certainly possible to make an inoffensive WWII Japanese villain, but I agree that it’s a matter best handled delicately.

Unrelatedly, what’s the Green Queen’s stance on lifeforms that are neither plant nor animal (nor technological)? Magmarians, for instance.

Also, I like the idea of a rivalry between her and Infernovox, as they’re sort of opposing primordial forces.

And lastly, I really like what you did with the Desperate Survivor minions, specifically the bit where the Heroes can Overcome to turn them into allies.

Hmmm. The Green Queen is very much a “surface world” problem and doesn’t really understand what’s down below where her deepest tap roots run, so once you hit bedrock it’s not her concern. Can’t photosynthesize underground real well, after all. If she ran into magmarians (or anything like them) on the surface she’d probably see them as minions of Infernovox and either try to flood/smother them if she thought she could manage it, or flee back to her home dimension in terror if there were a lot of them. She pretty much feels the same way about volcanoes, natural or otherwise.

Her personal blind spot also means she’d also be caught be surprise by the various Underland civilizations in my game, although she’d treat any appearance of their forces on the surface as just more flesh-life to dispose of. Fighting back against them at home would be hard - she could probably send roots down and force growth along caves and caverns, but with no natural light her “troops” would be slowly starving. Most likely she’d just grab the planet’s surface down to the topsoil level, siphon the seas wholesale (saltwater plants obey her whims too, and there are oceans of both fresh and salt water on her home plane) and drag it all back into the Green Dimension, leaving the Earth a drifting rockball with a lot less atmosphere and empty sea beds. The Underlanders might survive, and maybe some refugees from the surface. There’s a dark alt timeline for the heroes to prevent.

Pretty happy with them myself. Rather obviously, you could reskin and use them for all sorts of mind-control victims, or even zombies if you’ve got a fast-acting cure you could inject with an Overcome.

Anyway, today’s supervillain is a less imposing (but certainly not humble) baddy by the improbable name of Orb-Master, a mutant with a big mouth and showy telekinetic powers. He exists mostly as a temptation to a couple of my players who can’t stop making jokes about villains’ names. If they annoy him enough (I expect a lot of ball jokes, frankly) he may become a recurring nemesis who keeps changing his supranym in an attempt to get some respect.

And Tuesday see the unwelcome arrival of Glutton to this feast of villains. Literally power-hungry, this guy is a wild card or “wandering monster” who might show up to interfere in almost any super-fight, attacking both sides indiscriminately.

Ascendant - Unofficial Homecoming Wiki

Ascendant is also the title of another (not very good) RPG that released recently, and has probably been used for characters in published comics somewhere by now. Gave up trying to come up with wholly original character names quite a while ago. It’s just futile, especially for a fan project.

Today’s baddie has likely also had his supranym used before, but this iteration of him dates back to my first Villains & Vigilantes campaign in the early 80s. He adapted nicely to the SCRPG, and I imagine after 40+ years in prison he might have served his term for trying to carve his own face on Mount Rushmore, which is where my players beat him up originally. Maybe he’s been released in hopes he can help deal with climate change, but that’s not likely to work out well.

Cataclysmo, An Unnatural Disaster

Thursday’s “hero” was the treacherous scene-stealing corporate shill Hothead

Friday saw the malicious imp Gadfly, who started out as an NPC in the old Changeling RPG and is now doing his thing in the SCRPG.

I quite like Hothead, as he’s sort of like an evil Benchmark. His status as a third party in fights between the Heroes and some Villains is also rather intriguing.

The “bad hero with corporate backing” idea isn’t exactly new (there’s plenty of them in the past of DC and Marvel, and it’s at the root of the entire storyline of the Boys) but the degree of rottenness is a dial you can twist around a lot. In Hothead’s case, as written he’s well over into outright villain. A GM could turn that down a little (or a lot) and make him redeemable (like, say, Roxxon’s Sunturion). It’s debatable how much the companies behind him really understand how bad he is at heart, and that’s another dial you could adjust. Maybe they’re even worse than he is and expect him to burn out from their dangerous power-boosting experiments before he becomes a PR disaster, or maybe they’re wholly innocent and are being manipulated by his Presence the same way the public is. Most likely it’s somewhere between the two extremes.

Anyway, today brings us to Bodycount and Manpower, a pair of villains with a similar self-duplication schtick going on. They act as a good demonstration of how different Approach and Archetype combos can make a huge difference in effective threat level, something that’s particularly noticeable with minion-creator types.

And Sunday adds the Gheel Enslaver and its horde of robot minions, come to Earth in search of “merchandise” for resale in the galactic black markets.

Might be interesting to compare and contrast the three villains’ effectiveness and play style, since they all revolve around adding minions to the scene. Not all baddies are created equal by a long shot, even when they use a similar schtick.

Monday’s new villain is the Renaissance Man, a villainous polymath with the ability to turn his mental creations directly into reality. So pretty much evil Leonardo da Vinci as a Lantern Corps member.

Tuesday adds a villain “odd couple” (does anyone even remember that show any more, much less the film?) in the form of Tortoise and the Hare, a power armored scientific genius with a wide array of defenses and a magical rabbit cursed with a human body.

Wednesday brings us to Fireteam Firestorm, a four-man villain team of ex-mercenaries. Well, really they’re still mercs, just radioactive ones that can fly and shoot atomic energy bolts now. They’re another experiment with “off kilter” archetypes, since they’re a team composed entirely of Loners. Mechanically, it makes them fairly weak at first but they stronger as members drop, which poses a small puzzle for heroes fighting them. Do you focus fire and KO them one at a time, meaning the others are hitting back harder, or do you try to spread your damage around and leave them relatively weak until your’re ready to finish them all off at once?

Thursday sees two different versions of Crossbolt, a weapon specialist with gimmick ammunition inspired by Green Arrow and Hawkeye. Another mechanics experiment, using the Adaptive approach to let him toggle between different energy/element damage types during a fight, or even amp up his Swinging - because what gimmick archer type doesn’t have a grappling hook arrow?

Finishing off the week with Negator, a ruthless vigilante cape-hunter bent on making reckless supers pay for their behavior whether they claim to be heroes or villains.

Dreadmorphs, shapeshifting Things from another world, in minion, lieutenant, and full villain form.

The Court of Entropy, a demon king and his inner circle of advisors.

This week’s had some nifty villains. I particularly like Bodycount & Manpower, the Renaissance Man, and the Court of Entropy.

Thanks. Had a lot of fun roleplaying the uneven power dynamic between Bodycount & Manpower the one time I used them in a story, and the flood of minion duplicates actually put some pressure even on my group, who are really getting pretty practiced at crowd control these days.

The flood of villains this month is pretty much over, I’ve hit my 31 for the January challenge and just have a few more spares left in the buffer. Also need to recount, I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten past the halfway mark to the insane “do one of every Approach/Archetype combo” goal I set myself. Doubt I’ll actually finish all (does math) 252 possibilities, but I’ve certainly made a dent in it.

Here’s another three for the tally though - the Hooligans Three, a trio of very young up-and-coming villains with a diverse power set.

And one last entry for now, Professor Pusher, a “drug messaging” PSA villain with a long and awkward metafictional publishing history. He’s very much an homage to Steve Perrin’s Superworld and an expy of the titular villain from that game’s Bad Medicine For Doctor Drugs adventure.

PSA and “educational” baddies have shown up in real comics in quite a few forms over the years, and every faux publisher should have at least one in the roster of regrettable decisions they’ve made.

Man, this forum’s slow lately. Everyone quit playing or something? Or playing too much to post, I guess. Let’s be optimistic and say that’s it.

Anyway, added An Aside On Using Dice To Track Mods In Play to my blog. Not really advocating for it, but putting it out there for anyone who wants to try it.

Unfortunately, a LOT of folks use Discord for the kinds of conversations we used to have here.

So those conversations vanish under piles of other conversations and folks like me who only check it occasionally just can’t keep up.

Pity. I intensely dislike Discord and don’t care to use it myself.

Likewise, the BGG forum has essentially completely dried up, which is unfortunate, since I don’t want to try using Discord to keep track of development and playtesting info.

Yeah, I’d noticed the dearth of online discussion of the game. There are occasional flickers of interest over on RPG dot net forums but aside from that Discord is about it - which leaves me out.

As someone who’s best friends all live at least 300km away, I love Discord. But it’s great for small-ish (to maybe medium size) groups of people. Once you just get beyond that it’s just way too much. I understand why GTG uses it for playtesting, for instance, but in every “big” server in which I’m a member, I have literally every text channel permanently muted.

That’s an interesting idea!

I had been planning on using a circle punch to cut circles out of adhesive-backed dry erase sheets, which I was then going to stick to poker chips, and use those for +/- mods. But my Sentinels games all happen online, so the poker chips became unnecessary.

In the back of my mind, though, making those chips is still sitting around as a one-days arts-and-crafts project.

There’s lots of ways to make something to track mods in play, just a matter of doing something that fits your needs and budget. The groups I’m in usually use el cheapo poker chips with even cheaper stickers on them, but the guy in the video that spurred the post specifically wanted mods to be dice, so there’s his dice.

Apparently there are also +# and -# six-siders on the market aimed at Magic players (replacing things like +3/+3 Giant Growth tokens, I assume), which would work just as well as a couple of color-coded sets of regular d6.

And really, there’s nothing all that clunky about just scribbling on index cards the way the rulebooks suggests. Reusable markers like poker chips or dice are probably a bit more green, though. Who remembers to pick up and save all their used cards and scrap paper after a session?

Yeah, while I like the idea of the dice, we’ve found it’s more thematic and interesting (for us, anyway ) to have the description of the mod alongside of the value of the mod. I honestly fear using dice would drive folks into the numbers and let them avoid the story/theme aspects built into the game.

Well, neither for me; I’ve just been swamped by Real Life stuff. I hope to start a Villain Archive thread on here sometime soon-ish, but don’t hold your breath.

I got an account on the Realm of Discord server a couple of months back, but when I got on there, I was like, “Okay, what am I supposed to do?” There were just a bunch of random-seeming conversations and jumbled posts, not real topics. So I deleted the account about two days later.

Forumites forever!

As for tracking Mods, I’ve just used some generic index cards, or scrap paper (for when I don’t have them available/forget to bring them). Although some of my players prefer to write Mods down on their character sheets. Personally, I think the ideal method would be dry-erase cards, like those in GTG’s GM Kit (which I’ve been meaning to buy, but haven’t gotten around to yet),* as they’re renewable, which is better for both the environment and your wallet.

*I’d probably be more motivated to buy it if I actually had an ongoing group. : (

It’s certainly a potential problem. And not keeping track of what a mod is makes it more universally applicable than it probably ought to be. If someone sticks a “Impervium Manacles -3” penalty on a hero and their next action is something using (say) Suggestion + Persuasion, that penalty probably shouldn’t apply or get used up - unless “Impervium” has been established as some kind of psi-scrambling material, anyway. Those Manacles sound more like they ought to apply to physical actions, not mental ones.

But some people want to speed things up as much as they can, others just don’t engage with the narrative aspect of things as much, and a few are just incredible at remembering what mods are what and don’t need it written out. One of the GMs I play with now and then is like that, he can hold dozens of types and values of mods in memory at once. Doesn’t actually help much since the rest of us have to write things down for our own benefit, but it’s an impressive party trick. And I thought I had a good memory…

On top of it, Discord has a big problem with being unable to deal with harassment and verbal abuse effectively.

Other platforms have various actually useful control options, but with Discord blocking only hides other people’s responses. It doesn’t prevent them from seeing and responding to yours, so you’re at the mercy of the moderators/other people being willing to step in versus saying things like “you two need to take it to PM” when the issue is you do not want to have the other person talking to you at all because they’re being abusive.

(No I haven’t had experience with this issue, why do you ask? </sarcasm>)

For mods, this really is the best option, in my opinion. I bought a bunch of dry-erase cards and pens (in addition to the SC-RPG GM Kit) that have worked wonderfully!

I hadn’t thought about that. I guess you can always Kick/Ban someone from a Discord server, but having the only effective option being the banhammer is probably not great.

It sucks that you had to deal with that.

I would be using dry-erase cards, but since my players live far away, we’re playing online. So I currently write the mods into the Excel file that is my “game tracker” and that streams to my players.

I’ve seen someone on Discord use a TTS mod for the SCRPG that comes with digital editable GM Kit cards which you can arrange as needed on the simulated table surface. It seemed like an interesting approach; if we weren’t using roll20 already, I might actually look into that for my own group.

Forcing myself to get back to posting, here’s a new villain as well as associated lieutenants, minions and environment, all hot from the gaming table last weekend.

Luna-C, Brainwashed Cyborg Werewolf Pack Leader

This was all inspired by an accidental and somewhat unexpected TPKO the session before, which left my heroes battered into submission in the hands of some very surprised villains. As the old saying goes, when life gives you lemons, have the PCs get sold to to a mad scientist who imprisons them on his moon base. Or something like that.

They’ll be getting back to dealing with the folks who beat them eventually…who are now armed with extra toys that the captive heroes were exchanged for, so they better be clever. Or at least hope I don’t spike so many die rolls. Yeesh, what a night.

Firstly, great pun-name. Presumably Lee’s two ill-fated companions were designated Luna-A and Luna-B by Dr. M.M.?

Her voice is wholly mechanical and lacking in inflection, and sounds like a text-to-speech program.

This begs the question of what her speech bubbles would look like in a comic.

Yep, exactly. Doc’s esoteric experimental subject naming patterns are also responsible for Seventh Envy - who’s still on the “recover for further testing” list, although he’s pretty low priority since Mentallax is easily distracted by new mad science shinies.

I’m thinking black rectangles with white outlines and text, myself. Use Westminster font if the letterer can handle it.

New villain on the blog today, a stereotypical swamp monster that conceals a very different type of threat:

The Glomp In the Swamp

Post includes a new (and fairly generic, with minor modifications) environment, minion, and lieutenant, as well as some suggestions for twists appropriate to slowly succumbing to a mind-controlling viral plague.

And yes, I was watching some Scooby Doo, Where Are you? while working on this one. That could totally be an original series episode title.

It’s interesting that you gave the Glomp the Conviction Quality. It doesn’t strike me as someone (something?) who particularly “believe[s] in a cause or a faith so strongly [to be driven to] to great heights.”

Nice job on the Glombies; I definitely like the Curable trait. However, I have a question concerning the Innocent Victims trait: what if I used, say, Telepathy + Medicine to Attack the Glombie in an attempt to free it from the Overmind’s control? Would I still suffer the -4 penalty, or would you simply call that that’s not a valid Attack?

Also, why don’t the Gators have the Curable trait? What if I’m playing as the Naturalist and I want to save these poor innocent animals from the Overmind’s thrall? Are they simply too far gone?

Also also, what kinds of Powers and Qualities exactly would one use to Overcome the This Place is Creepy twist? The only things I can think of are Presence and Leadership.

Conceptually, its “belief” is that the Overmind will spread to infect all living things. Pretty much its own variation on the “I shall conquer the world!” Conviction many megalomaniac villains have, only in this cases it’s trillions of psychic viruses acting as a collective intelligence and pushing their hosts far beyond their normal capablilities.

The Curable trait only works with Overcomes (and Telepathy + Medicine would be a fine pool for that, albeit not the only one of course), so the -4 penalty won’t apply - that only affects Attacks. The design intent is to make it much harder to KO these minions than their die size would indicate (because the virus just won’t let them drop) while letting Overcomes take them out without them getting a save at all at the usual risk of triggering twists. Makes them harder for your multi-target attackers to casually deal with them, so be careful using too many at once. I’d certainly allow a Risky Overcome to target multiple zombies with the Mid die just to emphasize the advantage to not using brute force attacks on plague victims. That will further increase the number of twists flying around, which can get out of hand fast so there’s a lot to be said for stacking some bonuses before making that kind of attempt.

I was envisioning them as too far gone (their viral load is pretty heavy, hence them being so much more powerful than the zombies) but you could certainly ask your GM about curing them. Probably wouldn’t let a single Overcome totally remove one, though - they are meant to be tougher than minions.

Best bet might be to have each successful Overcome automatically reduce their die size by the same amount as the mod size you’d produce if you were doing a Boost/Hinder, ie 1-3 reduces it by one step (assuming you pay the twist to succeed- it is still an Overcome), 4-7 drops it by two for a minor twist, 8-11 drops it by three, and 12+ will just heal the thing outright in one go and generate a “positive twist” as usual. If the die reduction would take it below a d4 it’s cured as well.

Definitely wouldn’t give the gators that Innocent Victims Attack penalty even if you’re deeply concerned about their well-being. They’re seriously dangerous even to supers, and having the option to thump them a bit to reduce their die sizes would make them easier to “vaccinate” as well.

I hate to be too prescriptive about dice pools because being imaginative with them is half the fun.
Really anything that conceptually works for “Let’s not freak out just because we’re in a creepy zombie-haunted swamp” should do the job. A few examples:

Precognition + Persuasion = “Relax, I looked ahead and we’ve got this if we just stay cool.”

Awareness + Alertness = “There’s a psychic presence playing on our fears, steel yourselves.”

Plants + Banter = “This place is too gloomy for me, let’s brighten things up.” [trees fan the cloying mists aside to let in some sunlight, flowers sprout and bloom all around]

Infernal + Imposing = “YOU EXPECT A WIELDER OF HELLFIRE TO BE UNNERVED BY SUCH MUNDANE PHENOMENA? FEH!”

Telepathy + Insight = Calm yourself, we are stronger than whatever dangers this place conceals and many innocents are counting on us

Deduction + Science = “Creepy? Don’t be superstitious. I spent a year of postgraduate work studying wetland ecosystems like this one. I assure you this is all perfectly natural - aside from the psychically infectious plague zombies, of course. But the serum I’ve worked up should fix them easily enough.”

Your Principles are likely to factor in here too. Overcomes are much easier when using your Max die and who doesn’t love HP?

Right, I gathered that much. My question was whether an action that is mechanically an Attack, but thematically an attempt to cure the victim would work, and whether it would take the penalty.

Thanks for those examples. Yeah, in hindsight, I was being much too uncreative in my thinking. I can only hope that I’d be able to think quicker if I were actually playing. ; )

I’d treat any attempt at an immediate cure as an Overcome even if it looks like it should do damage, eg using Nuclear to fry the viruses with some specific frequency or intensity of radiation. An Attack would be an attempt to KO the “zombie” without killing it, which is harder to do than normally because the virus makes them resistant to pain and shock and intimidation without making them much more resistant to accidentally-lethal damage. If your hero is the type who doesn’t care about the safety of innocent victims you could just go all-out, at which point I’d drop the penalty to -2 for the viral pain-blocking - but you may well be killing the minions you’re taking out instead of just rendering them unable to fight.

If I may chime in here, I find it helps to define player actions by their desired outcome, not their way of getting there.

• Anything that results in dmg is an Attack.
• Anything that achieves something narrative is an Overcome.
• Anything that results in a mod is a Boost/Hinder.
• Anything that potentially prevents dmg is a Defend.

That way, we gain both more mechanic clarity and narrative flexibility!
Remember to encourage players, if moderately, to narrate the action of the whole scene, not only their characters’ doing.

Example:
I once played a squirrely little boy, built on Close Q Combatant - who clearly wouldn’t look convincing when throwing straight punches at the big baddies. Instead, he’d deal considerable damage by, say, sidestepping a charging opponent to have him run face-first into a lamppost. Works as an Attack alright, and makes them mad as hell!

Sure. Those are pretty much the rulebook definitions of what each action does, and how you build pools to pull them off is largely a creative choice. You shouldn’t feel bound to stick to the same P+Q combinations to achieve similar results all the time either. Lots of ways to Attack and deal damage or solve problems with Overcomes.

I’ve seen a number of people asking about emulating the card game’s Nemesis mechanics in the RPG, so here’s a post with some house rule suggestions that ought to do the job. They’re a bit wordy in order to (hopefully) cover every question that might come up, but the core mechanic is very simple and shouldn’t complicate play much. Have fun building your own Rogues’ Gallery.

Cool. It’s definitely a simple and elegant rule. I, too, have thought about this topic, although only in the context of utilising existing rules, not house rules. The two systems could certainly be used together, for maximum mutual destruction.

I think that I’d allow a character to apply their Nemesis Bonus to a Defend against their Nemesis, as it makes sense to me that someone can be extra motivated to protect themself or others from a foe that they have personal history with.

Also, I almost wonder if allowing +5 bonuses might be too much? I mean, standard Boost actions can only generate +4s—Hero Points can be used to create a +5 bonus, but that’s single-use, while Nemesis Bonuses are usable every turn. I think I’d limit to them a max. of +3, myself—and/or maybe limit the number of times per scene (issue?). E.g., once in the Green Zone, twice in the Yellow, and thrice in Red.

And, as you mention, the best way to be Nemeses is just to roleplay it. Spout those quippy one-liners and rush straight to your foe once combat brakes out.

Thought about that, and of course you could do it (either on actions or a reaction) but it’s pretty much the opposite of how nemeses work in the card game. Over there nemeses only increase damage dealt to each other, resulting in faster KOs - but adding Hinder to the RPG options felt appropriate.

Might be, but you could adjust to taste. It would take at least five sessions (including the one where the relationship starts) worth of confrontations to reach that level of mutual hate, which is a lot of return appearances for a single villain. Alternately, you could go for a slower burn and only increase nemesis bonuses when they’ve shown up at some point in a collection rather than a session. At that point you wouldn’t hit +5 until at least 24 more sessions have gone by with the relevant villain showing up in at least four of them. That’s a pretty big chunk of a hero’s career, and they’ll have a bunch of collections to reduce the relative impact of the nemesis bonuses.

But really, it’s all about the opportunity to ham it up some, on both sides of the table.

After weeks of struggling with the worst seasonal allergies I’ve ever had I managed to pull it together enough to actually update the blog with a new villain. The Maiden In the Mystery Mirror is an experimental villain whose own upgrade may be the real threat to reality - or perhaps they’re simply facets of the same unnatural entity. She’s a lot harder to take down than her terrible health pool as a Creator/Fragile villain makes her look, and her minion and upgrade synergies make handling all of them at once a tricky scene.

Also one of my rare dips into the metatextual “these are the product of a fictional comic book company” motif canon Sentinels likes so much. Easily ignored if you prefer - just skip the first few paragraphs, the villain isn’t dependent on any of that backstory.

Cool. One neat thing about the SCRPG is that you can engage in the meta-comic-book-publishing-company angle or not (or do so selectively), and it works either way.

The Maiden and the Mirror really reminded me of SC’s Oracle of Discord; were you aware of the latter when you created the former?

Also, now I’m just thinking about a team-up betwixt the Maiden and Glamour, for no other reason than them both being mirror-themed. : )

The combination of the Maiden’s Devour Fragments Reaction and the Terrifying Reflections’ Unnatural Demise Ability makes me think that the best way to deal with her might just be to have some of the Heroes Hinder the minions rather than Attack them, while the rest focus on Attacking the Maiden and/or the Mirror. The Heroes could also try Overcoming to isolate the Minions, or take them out of the picture without destroying them somehow, if the GM allows it.

Hmmm. I thought I knew the Oracle of Discord, but I was remembering them as a bunch of mysterious hooded weirdos standing around a “Well of Mimir” style hole in the Realm of Discord. Had completely forgotten the crystal pillars and that it was a cracked mirror sort of thing instead. Apparently I should re-listen to some of the podcast episodes, eh?

I will admit I took some inspiration for the Maiden’s metatextual backstory from the Teller of Tales (a fellow repurposed horror host) from episode 243, although other than that they’re pretty distinct. She’s also got a touch of the Bloody Mary urban myth about her, mostly because I was going to name her Mary In the Mirror until I did some googling and realized why that sounded so familiar. I haven’t been a squealing 10 year old in decades, who remembers that kind of guff? It’s not like Candlejack from Freakazoid.

She’s definitely not too hard to defeat (and even easier to drive off - she’ll usually dip out via Escape Plan ASAP), but still pretty durable for her relatively low health. If you can smash the Mirror itself the whole scene gets much easier, but d12 lieutenants are often pretty hard to finish off. Same goes for the minions, if you can keep scrubbing them off before they get to act there goes most of the support and damage output all at once - but you probably need two multi-target specialists to even have a chance to do it, since whoever takes out the first batch will be buried under penalties on their next action.

Still, as a collective whole she’s “worth” a difficult scene element, I think. Did okay in her one outing to date.

New villain on the blog today, a thematic pushback against the miserably wet and cold weather we’ve been suffering through the last few days. Warm up already, it’s spring. Tired of this nonsense.

King Blaze, Pyromaniacal Lunatic

As a Creator/Formidable villain he comes with his own custom minions and lieutenants - and as a fire-themed baddie I bet you can guess what his weaknesses are for figuring his status die.

A team-up betwixt King Blaze, Redd Hott, and Infernovox would certainly be interesting. Also, I imagine that adding an instance of the Quell the Flames challenge could be added to the options for environment twists—or just twists in general—for scenes with him present.

Oh sure. You could sub them in to the Battleground of Fools environment that’s already up on the Infernovox post. That one would work for any fire villain if you just alter the twist wording that specifically calls back to Infernovox and its Infernoid minions.

Still too cold for Spring, so here’s more fire themed villainy:

Firebug & Torch-Girl

This one’s a father-daughter crime duo, because villains deserve sidekicks too. At least this one isn’t some poor adopted orphan trying to deal with the trauma of their parent’s death.

Ya know, I don’t think I’ve ever thought of using the Villainous Vehicle upgrade to represent a sidekick, but it seems fairly obvious in hindsight.

Also, good job with Torch-Girl, as Sentinels doesn’t have enough characters with Something Person names.

I mean, the upgrade is ultimately just a lieutenant with a predefined menu of ability options and the implied ability to carry the villain and possibly others around. I figure Firebug’s extra health from the upgrade comes from being on his A Game while Jeanette is watching. Prefer sidekicks as lieutenants to the alt hero point award that treats them as a minion, which is awfully fragile unless you really want a Disposable Boy.

I look forward to watching some hero Hinder him by egregiously flirting with his daughter. Or vice versa.

Sentinels is a bit light on Legion of Superhero names, yeah. Never really noticed that before.

Just got done building sub-index pages for each of the categories listed on the comprehensive Blog Content Index page, which are linked directly from the category headers there or can found by navigating with tags. The Index tag will pull up all of them.

Hopefully this makes things a bit more accessible. The main index was getting a bit unwieldy as it expanded.

And a new villain on the blog, if “new” means anything when talking about an entity that exists in non-linear time and claims to be an infinite being.

The Evermind

As an Ancient/Domain villain this is a really complex writeup, and the associated Impossible Pyramid environment doubles as the interior of the Evermind’s mobile lair. Really played around with the twists and scene locations on this one, including an experiment on reflecting the flexible nature of time in the place by including ways to reset or extend the scene tracker, giving the PCs more time to deal with a very tough villain and all the other stuff going on. There’s also minions and lieutenants that could be reskinned for use in a confused free-for-all battle, riot, or outbreak of murderous insanity.

So yeah, it’s a big one, this blog post.

Neat!

Its motivations are poorly understood at best and its scientific and technological skills are so advanced as to seem magical

A bit of Clarke’s Third Law here, eh?

The mad mega-genius Mordecai Mentallax claims that the Evermind is actually a future version of himself from an alternate timeline that he hasn’t yet brought into being. Mister Incredible is arrogant enough to make the same claim about himself, a source of contention between the two villainous inventors. The cosmic being itself remains conspicuously silent on the subject.

This is great. : D

Also, I really like what you did with the Impossible Pyramid’s locations; the Sentinels RPG doesn’t emphasise locations and movement much, but its rules can handle them, and you did an excellent job here doing so in an interesting way. Giving each location its own unique effect is an especially good idea, and one I hadn’t thought of before.

Definitely. I’d keep the interior descriptions vague and let the players’ imagination fill things in. Kirbytech seen through a funhouse mirror, weird lattices of light in colors that shouldn’t exist, readouts that produce synesthetic effects, and all of it in a space where things like gravity and distance and the passage of time seem to shift when you’re not focused on them.

And of course there’s the added confusion of being attacked by hordes of murderously paranoid killers collected from warzones across infinity while you’re trying to figure out what you’re even looking at.

I was trying to hint at Kang the Conquerer’s real identity nonsense, but do it better than Marvel has.

I’ve done it in more limited fashion with previous scenes, but they don’t really fit in my normal post format so you just haven’t seen much of them. I always try to include enough locations to make movement and mobility/speed/repositioning powers meaningful, unless there’s a very good reason not to do so. Somewhere around H-2 and H+2 different locations seems about right for my groups. Less than that and the scene’s so cramped positioning doesn’t matter much mechanically, and more than that leaves too many locations for the heroes to visit them all.

Not every location needs something mechanical to engage with, but a clever Overcome can usually find something to do - pulling down power lines to heal with inverted Electricity damage is a common one, and King Blaze’s debut was at a gas station heist. The Impossible Pyramid was already such a weird place I figured I better offer something specific to do since obvious stuff like “break the fire hydrant to douse the fire villain” doesn’t work so well when you can’t identify what half the weird gadgetry is in the first place.

I should really do a post about scene construction and locations, now that I think about it.

I started seeing Villainous Vehicle as a possible sidekick after seeing the Mirror Maiden write up.

Remember the new Terrorform adventure they made on the create a thing is supposed to have more suggestions on LOCATION as part of a scene.

The other approach is to do them as a regular lieutenant (or even minion, for a true Expendable Lad), which leaves your upgrade open for other uses. And of course you could do the sidekick as a full villain, either using one of the weaker approach/archetype combinations and leaving them without an upgrade while their mentor gets one or flip it and make kid a prodigy who’s actually more powerful than the “main” villain. The “reverse villain sidekick” idea works for either a young, naive sidekick who’s eventually going to realize who the real power is, or an older but none-to-bright mentor who’s being used by their smarter “sidekick” as a distraction.

Of my other villains, Kid Coppertop is a kind-of-sidekick (or at least a fanboy) to Shootout , and Kid Pistol is a nearly-equal “sidekick” to Triggerman who might actually be using his older partner as an ally of convenience.

Just a matter of how you want to approach it in any given case.

New villain on the blog today, this time a Focused approach one that isn’t an Energy/Element manipulator for a change. He’s also the cousin of previous supervillain Miniac, because ill-advised self-experimentation apparently runs in their family. He might also be reasonably mistaken for being a small army of high-tech agents if you don’t notice they all look identical to one another.

Horde

And yet another supervillain today, Mister Maker, nominal leader of the on-and-off villain team The Force Multipliers. This is another big complex post with links to a bunch of older villains, and represents a “hard” (or maybe “nightmare”) mode fight for most teams. My PCs wanted a real challenge, and they sure got one with this lot. Use with caution, especially if your PCs aren’t used to facing a lot of minions.

Nifty! Most super teams usually try to insure that no two members have the same gimmick, but here you’ve leaned into that instead.

Also, all their internal drama makes me see them as villainous analogues of The Fantastic Four.

Alternatively or in addition to giving the Heroes some extra Minions or Lieutenants to help, the GM could add some optional Challenges that don’t have any repercussions if they go uncompleted, but give the Heroes a boon if they’re Overcome, such as more Minions or Lieutenants, or free Actions using the environment’s dice pool. Similar to SotM: EE: OblivAeon’s Missions, essentially.

Wait, so Mister Maker’s been a supervillain since the 1920s or '30s? That’s even longer than most supers.

Ideally you’d want sets of suitably-sized dice with a different color for each baddie (eg red dice are always Mister Fixer androids, orange dice are for Bodycount’s quantum copies, Manpower gets yellow duplicate, etc.) but that’s a big ask even when pulling from everyone’s dice collections.

I don’t think you intended to reference Slim here. The two do have fairly similar monikers, though.

Sure is. He was inspired (very loosely) by the Ultra-Humanite, Superman’s very first really truly super-villainous foe in 1939 and by U-H’s ancestor from the “Reign of the Superman” from 1933.

While U-H is much better known these days as a big white mutant gorilla guy, his original body was a stereotypical bald evil scientist stuck in a wheel chair - which I suspect was intended to indicate he was a polio victim, something that would have been a depressingly familiar sight in the late 30s. He eventually abandoned that body via brain transplant, first shifting to the form of a rising Hollywood movie starlet named Dolores Winters for a while, then (after a long hiatus where he was assumed dead) several non-human bodies (including a big mutant insect) before settling on the big white gorilla that he’s stuck with since. U-H’s real superpower appears to be total immunity to any form of body dysmorphia - you could stick his brain in a flowerpot and he’d find away to make it work for him.

Mister Maker’s only direct connection to U-H is being a transplanted brain, although the morphic exteriors of his android shell is a nod to all the body-hopping variations, as well as the classic mad scientist look the original U-H body used.

Ah curses, I was fighting that mistake all the way through and apparently I missed one. Fixed. Maybe I should have stuck with my original choice of Mister Machine instead, but IIRC someone had used the supranym already. OTOH, the current supranym sets up for an villain team-up story with a bloodthirsty brute and a fire-thrower so the writer could give it the ludicrous but catchy title “Butcher, Baker, Mister Maker!” Maybe they rob the World’s Fair or something…

I didn’t know any of this until Season 3 of CW’s Stargirl. Alas, another show taken before its time. Best of the Arrowverse-adjacent, IMO. We could use more modern retellings of Golden Age content.

If you want really strange, Dolores Winters (the first victim of an involuntary U-H brain-transplant) was retconned years later into having survived, gotten her brain put in a new body, and subsequently becoming a deranged super-villain in her own right. The video here covers her story in pretty good detail.

That channel in general is doing fine work covering old Gold and Silver Age stories that have been largely forgotten, and without falling into the mean-spirited tone many youtube comic reviewers take with older works. There’s also this channel for more Golden Age focused reviews. His output is kind of slow but he does dig up a lot of info on his subjects including biographical data on the creators, which is often hard to come by when you get back that far.

Not according to Comic Vine.

But that just raises the question: what happened to the original brain of the body that Dolores Winters’ brain was transplanted into? Perhaps her brain was transplanted into another body…

Huh. I could have sworn I hit some obscure character by that name, but maybe I’ll go ahead and switch to Mister Machine after all. I rather like that for a brain-in-an-android-shell guy from the 1930s.

IIRC the video I linked to said the retcon had her brain put into a corpse stolen from the morgue by one of U-H’s medically-talented henchmen who was coincidentally a big fan of her acting. Presumably that brain wasn’t saved.

I guess restoring life to the dead is no problem if you have a nice fresh brain to stick in the body. Who knew? Certainly not Frankenstein, that hack.

I’m also struck by the fact that U-H has incredibly skilled henchmen in the early days. They’re literal brain surgeons.

Well, after a bit of googling, it looks like there was a character of that name in a few issues of a 2001: A Space Odyssey comic back in '77. However, when he was integrated into the Marvel Universe, his name became Machine Man. (And he actually appears in Marvel’s Earth X, which I’ve read.)

Whether you use the name is, of course, wholly your decision, although I think you’d be justified in doing so.

Ah, that’s where I’d seen it. I’m enough of a Kirby fanatic to have read those, although I’d forgotten the name change. Well familiar with Aaron by any name, and particularly fond of his revival in NextWave/Agents of H.A.T.E. where he’s a funhouse version of his usual self. So yeah, I think I’ll do the rename - I like it better and I’m happy to homage the King. Think he’d have approved of such a innately gonzo character concept.

One of these days I’ve got do do a proper Count Dragorin and Lupek from his gloriously insane Jimmy Olsen run.

So the “Fashion Foes” podcast today inspired me to come up with this baddie, because if they aren’t going to use “Needler” I sure as heck am.

Sir Needler, Septuagenarian Knight of the Underworld

Yes, he is literally a mean old man supervillain. With minimal reskinning he could be an actual RPG-era Fashion villain, but I’ve written him up to fit more generic settings as usual.

Another biggish post today, covering the Weiss Organzation, a private security and military contracting firm that presents themselves as a haven for persecuted mutants. They definitely don’t have all sorts of shady business going on at all.

Well, they do, but those white suits sure are snazzy.

Includes villain writeups for the director and her bodyguard, a bunch of different minion-grade operatives and their lieutenant-grade mutant backup.

New on the blog, the first of two posts going over my process for designing an action scene. I’ve had a few requests to do more “gamemaster theory” (and in this case, practice) stuff and finally got motivated enough to do so. If there’s enough interest I’ll see about doing more of that kind of content in the future, although it does take quite a lot of typing.

Part two will be up sometime tomorrow.

And part two is up now, with all the crunchy mechanical prep work and some after action commentary. Bit long, but it does include two new villains, a lieutenant, three minions, an environment and various maunderings. Let’s see how much engagement it gets.

Nifty. I especially like the “What Produces Urgency?” section in Part 1. The SCPRG and its creators strongly recommend using a Scene Tracker in as many scenes as possible, but often there may not seem like there is anything in the scene that necessitates a ticking clock. And yet, usually trying to think of a time-dependent element adds an interesting twist (lowercase t) to the scene.

The Protoids are certainly cool, although describing them as the colour of “a livid bruise” is somewhat disquieting.

It’s interesting that you seemingly have heroes take a montage scene with Recovery actions at the end of an issue, as the rulebook says that all heroes are automatically back up to full health at the start of every issue. Your approach certainly does provide a different feeling, and I wouldn’t imagine that it would break anything, so I suppose which method to use is (like all things) ultimately up to the GM, depending upon what atmosphere and mood they desire to evoke.

Yeah, it’s an aberration for us too. Normally I’d do a full heal-up at end of issue/session, but I’d planned another ~2 hours of “content” including a short action scene where an old foe with a grudge was going to ambush them as they returned to their HQ and try to KO the hero they hate most, which was intended to be the proper end of issue and a hook for next session. We had a family thing come up with one of the players and his ride had to leave with him, so we called it early instead and did some card games instead.

So next session (which I ran a while ago, this is all past tense) opened with the ambush, which got more serious owing to them major twisting twice from Overcomes in the secret base. I didn’t really want to let them get the end of issue full heal because in story only a couple of hours had passed since the base fight and even before the amp-up the ambush was supposed to at least feel dangerous. I also didn’t want to shaft them too badly since I’d let the protoid battle go two extra turns while they mopped up after hitting the win condition. Those two turns actually did a lot more damage than I expected (one of the two heroes went Out from Yellow, and two of them went from Yellow to Red - hot dice for my flunkies) so I decided to wing it and give everyone one level of Recovery, then an actual montage scene to do what they wanted.

All but one of the players opted for a second Recovery, so we wound up three heroes full, one of the ones who’d been Out at the top Yellow, and the other hero who’d been Out opting to Overcome to dig for information in the computers (before the police showed up to raise any objections…), rolling a 14(!) and getting a big fat Boost as a “positive twist” for their trouble. That player likes to take this kind of risk - they love starting scenes in Red, which has resulted in them going Out in in round one or two in the past - so I’m wasn’t worried about that with rest of the team in pretty good shape.

Which they needed to be, since the ambush that was going to be a lone villain, a few lieutenants and some challenges replaced the lieutenants with two full blown villains thanks to the team’s twists. The PCs also got to convert their five hero points each before the ambush, although I forget exactly what everyone did with them.

Metatextually, the wrap-up issue of the “Perilous Protoids” storyline ran a little short owing to creative team being late with what was supposed to be the hook for the next arc, leading to the editors frantically stuffing in a backup story and two pages of Hostess Snack Cake ads to fill page count. No doubt fans were complaining about all the filler, although the Moseby Twins proved to be popular minor villains.

Having done a walkthrough on how I design an action scene, I thought an addendum post on the blog about the pitfalls and plusses of the different types of scene elements you have to work with would be useful for newer game masters.

Multi-target abilities are much more punishing than single target ones . . . If you find a villain overperforming because of these abilities, remember that you don’t have to affect every target you could

Also, you simply flat-out don’t have to use a villain’s ability if it’s proving too challenging for your heroes. (E.g., If the heroes are getting utterly swamped by the villain’s multi-target Pulsar Beam Projector, you could take a turn of the villain just monologuing about how weak their nemesis is while taking a basic Hinder action against them.)

A few villains have access to very powerful healing abilities, with the Domain archetype being the worst offender. Be careful about using these abilities to stall out the heroes until the scene tracker expires, as it can easily feel like robbing your players of a hard-won victory.

True, although this does make me get the idea for a villain whose entire gimmick is stalling. The Adhesivist, for instance, would likely have only abilities that Hinder.

Your musings on lieutenants led me to wonder about scenes that are all (or mostly) lieutenants. My first instinct is that that’s a bad idea. When = 4, for a hero team facing only lieutenants, the book recommends × ÷ 2 = 8 lieutenants, or 2 per hero. Unfortunately, I don’t believe I have enough play experience to judge how difficult that fight would be. At = 5, it’s 13, which is almost certainly too much. If we replace one squad of lieutenants with an environment or challenge, it becomes 6 at = 4 and 10 at = 5.

[Environments] are unusual because you’ll never use more than one in a scene unless something very peculiar is going on - maybe a string of major twists throws all participants into a whole new environment mid-scene?

Other possible peculiarities that could produce such a result include

• The scene takes place in two wildly different locations simultaneously, with villains and/or heroes constantly moving betwixt them. Teleportation would likely be involved. (In this case, I’d only count one environment when budgeting the scene.)
• One environment is the actual location where the action is taking place, while the other is a powerful entity (e.g., OblivAeon). (In this case, I’d count two environments when budgeting.)
• Both environments are actually massively powerful entities clashing with one another. (Ibid.)

That is certainly true, although to be honest I haven’t seen a situation where the villain(s) were doing so well that the GM needed to resort to basics with them to avoid a TPKO. It sure can happen through an over-strong combo of abilities (that Force Multipliers team almost qualifies thanks to being a crazy skew of spawners) or lucky dice, but for me my villains always get lucky when it’s too late to eke out a reversal. Someday I’ll roll all double digits on round one…

That does sound about right for the guy. I’d make the “cost” for the scene tracker running out lighter than usual for a scene built around a villain stalling it out.

It definitely seems to break down when there are an odd number of heroes, although as you pointed out you can diffuse it with an environment and one or more challenges. I tried running a scene sans environment with four heroes and eight lieutenants once (the concept being a simulation team-training battle with a bunch of D-lister villains) and the heroes did eke out a win with only one PC going Out, but if it had been five heroes and 13 baddies I think it would have been a lopsided slaughter. Most heroes can beat two lieutenants on their own, but only barely - and if the lieutenants have strong abilities even that might not be true.

Part of the problem is that the lieutenant damage mechanic makes them quite resistant to the traditional answer to being outnumbered, ie multi-target Min or (for the strongest Yellows) Mid die Attacks. Just can’t sweep them the way you do minions and you’re still behind on action economy.

Those all sound reasonable, assuming the powerful entities are each causing a twist of their own each round, either on their own turns or just before or after the environment turn.

In the case of a split-location dual environment situation you could probably just ignore the environment turn of any location that’s empty of heroes when it would go. Stuff is presumably still happening but the PCs are where the audience attention is focused, and you can just handwave the off-page events.

Another superhero, this time ported from a Tiny Supers character I did for a one-shot a while back. Also wrote up his nemesis so he didn’t feel lonely.

KO Clown & Mister Mean

Yeah, they’re living cartoon characters from a fictional series of B&W shorts from the 1930s. Not my most serious work.

Agreed. For the Adhesivest specifically, I think I’d probably make the only consequence him—and whatever allies he has—making a clean get-away.

Right. I’d most likely give each powerful entity its own turn, distinct from any environment’s. (The scene tracker would still advance on the environment’s turn, of course, provided there is one.)

True, although a possible exception to that that I can envision is some minions being added to an otherwise empty environment without the players knowing, so they’re surprised the next time they return there.

(Although this does bring up the question of why they’d return to a (presumed) empty location. I suppose an unresolved challenge or some other sort of MacGuffin. (Or, perhaps more likely, a villain (or the heroes themselves) are simply fleeing.))

KO Clown kinda reminded me of Kid Eternity.

Wait, so you’ve added another meta-layer to the whole thing? KO Clown is from a fictional cartoon that exists in a fictional comic book universe?

He can’t conjure up anything really complex or boring (comic books but not a dictionary)

Really? Not even for a gag where he bashes it over a baddie’s head?

He may express concern about catching cooties when fighting female supervillains.

Does he also display the Wouldn’t Hit a Girl trope?

Description: A cartoon bad guy. He generally wears a black suit under a black overcoat and a tall, crooked stovepipe hat - black, of course. Short and scrawny with a hunched physique and arms so long his spidery hands drag on the ground. Carries a six foot long fountain pen that he impossibly tucks away in his coat when it’s not needed.

Yes, but does he have a long black handlebar moustache with which to twirl evilly?

If Sentinels Comics can have an animated series I can have Clown Town. Besides, you know Wager Master has to have either brought the animated characters to life or thrown the “real” heroes into the show at some point - or more likely, had the two swap places. There’s probably guise story where he manages to get stuck in a TV too…

He might go for that, but anyone examining the dictionary would find all the words are a ten-year old kid’s vocabulary repeated over and over again. And some will be misspelled.

Going by the ten-year olds I’ve known (and been) he’d sock a gal while roughhousing and feel bad about it afterward. She’d probably have to hit him first, though.

Part of what makes him so mean is an inability to grow decent facial hair. Sometimes he’ll go for an obviously fake beard and/or mustache though, usually as part of a disguise.

Maybe the heroes need to do something in environment A, then go do something in B, then return to A to finish the job? Even just something like "open portal from Niceplace to Helljail, fight through the place, grab prisoner, return them safely to Niceplace and close portal is a possible scenario.

This probably isn’t what you had in mind, but your description reminded me of the infamous Super Dictionary.

Heh. KO Clown would have been thrilled to face a villain who was foolish enough to try stealing forty pies on his watch.

One of my lingering regrets is that I’m just slightly too old to have owned a copy of that thing. One of my younger sister’s friends got one through some school book club thing, but I was past the grades where they had those by 1978. On the plus side, I did get a bunch of those big oversized DC treasury comics that year as reading material for a road trip to Florida. To this day I remember Superman vs. Muhammad Ali and the Batman vs. Ra’s al Ghul stories better than going to Disney.

And another post on the blog, this time looking at Hero Points, alternate rewards, and a few house rules you might consider using with them.

It does seem like all three of the alternate options are probably more powerful than the default. Interesting . . .

I definitely agree that Sidekicks are the most narratively interesting alternate rewards. In general, I enjoy whenever a game system provides mechanics for players to “gain” allies — it’s not necessary, usually (as allies can simply show up without being connected mechanically to a PC), but it does encourage players to become more invested in them. GURPS, for instance, does this. (Although in a . . . less than elegant way, as that’s how GURPS does most things.)

One oddity about favors is that they can’t be used for Boost or Hinder actions. I assume something in playtesting caused a problem with them, but for the life of me I can’t see what it would be. A GM who wanted to make favors more versatile and a little better could let a hero use them to Boost/Hinder as well as Attack, Defend and Overcome as a house rule and I don’t think anything would break down - the game has plenty of reactionary mod producers already.

I can’t see anything wrong with allowing them to Hinder, but I believe that the reason they can’t Boost is because it’s simply sub-optimal — 5 Hero Points can either equal a +5 bonus, or a dice pool that, when rolled to Boost, will only create a +2 bonus on average. That’s a pretty crummy deal.

It’s really the third category (temporary ability improvements and dice size bumps) that stands out to me, although obviously sidekicks can easily be stronger than a 1-time exclusive bonus if they don’t get immediately blown away by a villain with a multi-target Attack. Favors are probably pretty equal - they’re less predictable in terms of what they’ll do but (even as just Attack/Defend/Overcome reactions) more versatile than straight bonuses.

That’s certainly true at the highest end of the scale, but at the low end 3d4 costs the same HP as a +1 bonus does and generates a marginally better average bonus (assuming at least two of the dice roll 4 and get you a +2) - and one that isn’t exclusive either, but at the cost of a reaction. The other three tiers aren’t as good for Bonuses, getting steadily worse the more you spent.

And of course a favor can be used for other things. Using a favor for a bonus is generally suboptimal but if you really need to squeeze out a little more oomph on a key roll the fact that the bonus could stack with an exclusive one and be applied as a reaction to own roll if need be is meaningful.

Still, favors might not need the help of more options. One of the people I play with has taken all their HP as 3d4 bonuses a few times and it seemed to work pretty well with just the official three action choices.

Narratively it represented a severed magical hand her PC cut off a demon a while back, with one of the digits curling up as each favor got used, all monkey paw style. Every now and then the GM has let her recharge the thing by thumping on cultists and other related mystical threats, whereupon she does another session full of favors. We are all terrified to see what happens if she tries to use one of the thing’s favors for an Overcome and has to twist for success. Hasn’t happened yet but we know sooner or later we’ll be desperate enough to try.

Huh. How did I not already do a hulking crab-man mutant villain bodyguard? Easily fixed…

Karkinos

And as long as I’m at it, how about a nice generic alien troop transport for all your world invasion needs?

Ro-Man Invasion Saucer

That last one’s designed to be easily re-skinned. Also an interesting Creator/Titan build that relies entirely on it deploying its payload of troops (minion and lieutenant creation abilities in game terms) for effectiveness. All its other abilities are defensive inherents and reactions that make it tough to take down.

Both of these are cool. Nice job with the “Ro-Man” name especially — 'tis very Silver Age. : )

Gender: Male Age: 74 Height: 5’7" Eyes: Glittering Red
Hair: Mousy Brown, Thin and Graying Skin: Wrinkled Build: Bony

I don’t think you meant to write that.

The pun was irresistable. Also a Robot Monster reference, of course. A wonderful terrible film.

Indeed not. Fixed. Copy and paste in haste, repent at leisure.

Yet another villain with an odd schtick, as well as a nod to fine old SPI solo game from the days of my youth.

Timetripper, Temporally Discombobulated Villain Who Fights Alongside Himself

And another “villain” in the form of high-end robotic guard for super-prisons and high-security facilities:

Series-7 Peacekeeper

Timetripper is certainly a unique way to make a duplicator villain. Most such baddies are Creators, Legions, and/or Overlords, of course, but having a villain without minion-making abilities who just shows up with multiple copies is quite new.

The Peacekeeper robots are also interesting in that one of their gimmicks seem to be that their AI is not smart, whereas most villainous robots have superintelligence as a schtick.

If my records are correct, I’ve done 25 different Creator, Legion, and Overlord villains at this point. Felt like it was time to try something different with the concept - and of course Squad is a good archetype for the idea, since it’s all about cooperation with allies, even if those allies are yourself from a slightly different point in spacetime.

He/they work fine with just two of them/him, so you don’t have to fill the scene budget with Timetrippers, but his sweet spot is around four villains total, like all Squaddies.

Yeah, they’re dopes, relatively speaking. Not Ed-209 levels of dumb but no match for tech-genius super-hacker or mecha-telepath or invasion of really smart nanites, and in a big confused riot what smarts they have can get tangled up by hard-coded protocols about “keep super-beings in cells” and the like. I can see them being quite apologetic toward heroes as they’re forced to attack them by their auto-targeting subroutines.

But of course if they worked properly all the time the heroes wouldn’t have as many excuses to fight them, would they?

In a dystopian alt-timeline they’d also be used as heavy crowd control backing up riot police, where their hypothetically non-lethal weaponry lets the local dictator (Iron Legacy?) claim they’re being merciful.

Another villain, this one a fanatical anarchist assassin with a bit of black magic on her side.

Red Vendetta

And three more villains, two different forms of a genetically-engineered atomic kaiju and the cyber-psychic symbiote that partners with the second form.

Ettin-class Mega-Mutate (original and refit forms) & Intellect Alpha

The first one is definitely the fault of my campaign’s Number One mad science practitioner. Jury’s still out on whether he’s responsible for the symbiotes that came later. They also raise a minor rules glitch that could probably use a fix if there’s ever a revised second printing. To whit, this Tactician approach ability:

I’ll Back You Up (R) When a nearby ally makes an Attack, you may also Attack the same target by rolling your single Quality die.

The catch there is what happens when the Attack you’re reacting to has more than one target. Pretty clear that the reaction isn’t intended to let you hit every target of a multi-target Attack ability, but the wording isn’t quite strict enough. Rephrasing it is easy enough, but still ought to get done eventually:

I’ll Back You Up (R) When a nearby ally makes an Attack, you may also Attack one target of that Attack by rolling your single Quality die.

pretty sure Christopher has mentioned having a list of rules update/errata for when there is a 2nd printing. make sure you send that one in as a question on The Letters Page.

I’ll do so. Not really a question, though - and there are probably some things that need attention more. Break the 4th Wall, for ex…sigh.

Anyhow, another work-for-hire villain, this one a trained pugilist who’d really like a good sparring partner. Hard to get a good workout with mundanes. Less of a sociopath than average, as supervillains go.

Southpaw

Bully/Predator is a surprising good combo for a boxer baddie. Nice Hinder synergies and they understandably work best against one foe at a time. This guy was intended to be a C-lister but I think he might be a B as long as he doesn’t get gang-tackled by the whole team.

Nifty. I especially like the kind-of Punch-Clock Villain thing he has going.

Southpaw’s still a pretty bad person - I mean, he didn’t have a problem playing along with the Mob by winning rigged fights, and probably would have taken that dive they wanted him to if his powers hadn’t manifested at the worst possible time - but he’s less greedy and/or sociopathic than many mercenary supers and mostly likes a good fight - as long as he doesn’t lose too often. Kind of used to winning bouts at this point, even if he knows a lot of them weren’t entirely honest.

Anyway, new villain today, this one a mutant warlord from a post-apocalyptic alternate future who’s brought his raider horde to our reality for some good old-fashioned pillaging.

Grand Marshal Grakko & His Blitz Company

Ugh, my allergies are crippling me, this took way too long to finish up. New Mastermind/Domain villain, the former control program for a heroic “danger room” training facility turned into a sadistic “instructor” bent on “testing” heroes. Remember, “F” is for Fatal.

Professor Peril

Also includes its signature “Doom Room” environment, three associated minions, and a Mastermind/Inhibitor variant of the Professor for when they’re out on a “field trip” for one reason or another.

Another villain, this one a flat-out monster of the type Nightmist usually deals with. Sadly, my multiverse doesn’t have a Nightmist…although I suppose that’s true of Sentinels these days too.

La Dama Sangre

This also marks a milestone for the blog. I started doing villains as an experiment to see if I could make one for every one of the 252 possible combination of Approach and Archetype. Lady Blood there is number 168, putting me two-thirds of the way done. Whether I’ll actually manage another 84 baddies is highly debatable, but I’ve gotten farther than I really expected I would.

I know I’m really late saying this, but I wanted to mention how it’s interesting that Grand Marshal Grakko is an Overlord villain lacking any ability to add minions to the scene, save for his upgrade. It certainly still works as a build.

Nice Job with Prof. P. The world needs more always-malfunctioning danger rooms/holodecks.

Yeah, Grakko was another experiment - his blitz-wagon lieutenants are effectively his minion-producers, which is part of why I stuck a limit on them so they should run out eventually. Overlords with Rapid Deployment punch so far above their weight IME I keep trying to find ways to tone them down a bit.

Pretty happy with Professor Peril, and I like Doom Room a lot more than Danger Room - heard it in a M&M play vid, of all things. Kind of Murderworld if Arcade was replaced with Brainiac.

Anyhow, new pair of partner-villains and the conspiracy of technocrats that created them;

Rush & Crush, agents of SIN

For some reason I struggle with acronyms that don’t start with the letter S. Happy with the wordplay of the organization’s SIN/OD and SIN/NER divisions, though - even if I couldn’t get a Y in for synod.

Well this took a while - largest multi-villain post on the blog to date, with some associated minions and lieutenants:

The Seven Seas, A Shoal of Aquatic Villains

Another alien menace, this one a “diplomat” and warlord from a galactic superpower, visiting Earth looking for an excuse to invade:

Synchron Supremacy Marshal

Also includes minion and lieutenant stats for all the troops he’ll be beaming in through the Supremacy’s interstellar teleportation network.

And while I’m at it today, a dynastic supervillain, the daughter of towering tough guy Mister Big Junior:

Little Miss Big

She’s out to prove she’s the better baddy to daddy, and she might just do it.

As a Skilled/Titan build she gets access to a phenomenally annoying ability combination that lets her stick a big persistent and exclusive penalty on a target, then follow up with that Titan trick that lets you deal some damage and then leave the victim unable to do anything but Overcome to escape confinement - which is a real joy with a big fat P+E penalty in place. Usually better off getting a teammate to break you out than dealing with it yourself, and having a Booster specialist on the team for support sure helps against her.

Start of a series on the mechanical aspects of designing new villains - probably be about twenty parts in total by the time I’m done.

Villain Design Analysis Part 1

Continuing the series:

Part 2: Bully and Creator Approaches

Part 3: Dampening and Disruptive

Part 4: Focused and Generalist

Part 5: Leech and Mastermind

Part 6: Ninja and Overpowered

Part 7: Prideful and Relentless

Taking a brief break from the villain series, here’s a random superhero writeup based on the art on page 134 of the core book, inspired by a comment over on the Podcast Suggestions subforum.

Major Patriot

Nifty. “Made In America” is a great ability name. I feel like Sentinels should have some sort of '90s-tastic super-team that includes this guy, Sk8-Blayde, and some others. (Possibly Alpha 2000 or Darkstryfe & Paynstayke.)

Thanks, pretty happy with him.

Also did some possible stats for the gal on page 170. Someone suggested using Emo G for a supranym, which is great wordplay but unfortunately claimed by a musician already. There was another suggestion for a Form-Changer, so I’ve done up two possible versions of the character in the art, one insnaely complex, one pretty straightforward:

Emo G and Vigilante Z, aka the page 170 gal

And also posted Part 8 of that villain building series I’ve been working on.

And Part 9 finishes off the Approaches with Tactician and Underpowered. Engagement on this series of posts has been lousy, so I’m going to be reconsidering whether it’s worth keeping up. I sure don’t need it for myself, and by the view counts precious few people do either.

Inspired by some chat about Gun Rat on the lore forum, I present my latest and greatest homebrew villain:

Deadeye Mouse - An anthropomorphic cartoon mouse with a gun, what more can I say?

I think that’s the wrong link. It should be this.

Weird, how’d I screw that up? Should be fixed now, thanks.

And yet another general-purpose “big monster” villain, because some of us re-watched THEM! the other day:

Mega-Roach - Pretty Much What You’d Expect

Resuming my series on villain design, although I’m still not sold on its utility to people. At least starting on archetypes lets me discuss what you might want to look for in your Approach pairing, since some mesh better than others.

Archetypes, Part 1 - Bruiser and Domain

Part 2 - Formidable, Fragile, and Guerrilla

Part 3 - Indomitable, Inhibitor and Inventor

Part 4 - Legion, Loner, and Overlord

Bunch of stuff today before I take a bit of a break. Three new villains and the last part of the Archetypes series:

Part 5 - Predator, Squad and Titan

Onslaughter - Physical powerhouse with metallokinesis, vehement anti-government extremist - and somehow still not Magneto

Plurality - Port of an old Villains & Vigilantes villain whose psychic powers are focused on duplicating his consciousness, either by overwriting the minds of others or forming psychoplasmic clones

Syzygy - Otherworldy mystic weirdo who uses supposedly-impossible mixes of opposed power sources for its magic

Damage typing is one of the less defined aspects of the SCRPG. I believe that the only real distinctions made in the rules is that there is “physical” and “energy” damage, and that each Elemental/Energy power has its own damage type, which are presumably sub-types under the energy umbrella.

However, on page 24, the core rulebook says thus:

An Attack is your hero attempting to inflict some kind of direct harm — that is, deal damage — to another character, whether it’s physical (a series of punches), emotional (mocking taunts), or mental (psychic blasts).

So, say a hero blasts a Legion villain with an Attack made using the Electricity power. Lightining is certainly physical, in the common sense, but would it count as such in regards to Divide and Conquer or Instability of Form? Or would it count as energy damage, and thus not trigger those abilities?

On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that socio-emotional attacks—like, say, a hero using Presence + Insight to ask a Legion villain an Armour-Piercing Question—would completely bypass the aforementioned abilities.

Uhm, it’s a villain ability, and since villains are almost always run by the GM, why would the GM need to grant permission to themself to use the ability?

Fair point. I have a tendency to hand off individual villains to a co-GM (or random bystander) at times for RP purposes and a combat assist and it warps my thinking. Still, the ability does call for the GM to consider how they’re going handle ambush tactics, going hidden during a fight and combat awareness in general. Overcomes are probably the answer, but no matter what you do some degree of consistency between how heroes and villains deal with the subject is likely a good idea.

Complicated further by the fact that some damage reduction abilities specifically call out “any physical or energy” (Armored and Powerhouse) while others only mention physical (Artificial Being) and at least one forces you to make a [physical or energy] choice (Power Suit). Bit murky - and presumably each Element/Energy power is a subtype of energy, but are all Material attacks physical, even Toxic with its partial overlap with Nuclear? Inventions or Gadgets could probably be either - frag grenades are physical, plasma grenades are energy/Fire, etc. Telekinesis is probably physical, but you could use it with the environment to (say) throw molten metal or liquid nitrogen or something for an energy type effect.

And a lot of villains have abilities that affect “any damage” so it doesn’t matter if you’re punching, zapping, mind-melting, or just being very, very mean, they treat it all equally.

My take is that Electricity is energy typed and bypasses those legion tricks, but you could probably find away to make it physical if you wanted, maybe by taking a twist or prepping with an Overcome so (say) your lightning blast knocks a telephone pole over on the victim or shatters the ceiling overhead and dumps debris on them.

I think you’re right, the way the many defensive abilities are phrased suggests that most attacks are either physical or energy types, with an unmentioned “other” category that contains bardic Savage Mockery, telepathic assaults, incapacitating intimidation, etc., etc.

New villain on the blog today, this one inspired by an old Dreamblade miniature of all things.

Bigg Gunn, Bioengineered Cyborg Killing Machine

Another new villain on the blog today:

S-Cape Artist, Providing “Exit Services” To Other Criminals Since 2022

When I introduced this guy to my campaign last year I was expecting him to be a nuisance gimmick villain my players would be annoyed by a time or two before they developed some countermeasures and walloped him good. Instead, he managed to become the most frustrating baddie in the whole campaign and has been making on-and-off appearances for the better part of three collections worth of stories. Thankfully the players finally got proactive about dealing with him, did some prep work and eventually lured him into a trap that led to one of their most successful busts to date.

Last session his trial was finally over and he’s now safely in prison, deprived of all the tech that made him such a pain. It took about three sessions worth of game time for that to happen. My group attendance is hit-or-miss and they had any PC whose player was absent that week providing coverage of the trial to make sure he didn’t escape before sentencing, and the one time everyone did show up they called in a bunch of favors from an NPC superteam to keep an eye on things at teh courthouse while they dealing with another problem. The level of paranoia was so impressive I was sorely tempted to actually have him make a plausible escape attempt, but Harold’s gotten a little tired at this point and I eventually decided to just let him go serve some time.

How long he’ll serve, well, that’s up in the air. The guy’s a real savant when it comes to teleportation tech, and there might be some former clients of his who’d bust him out as well. If he does get out I expect hunting him down again will be a top priority for my players.

All that hate for a villain who has literally never done enough damage himself to KO anyone, and he’s not even a Hinder machine like some of my villains.

Another baddie:

Rabid Wulf, neo-Nazi drug dealer and all-around awful person

Lore-wise, this guy ties in to a bunch of previous street-level villains, including the ever-popular Professor Pusher.

Mechanically, he’s one possible answer to the “my villains never manage to KO anyone!” complaints I see sometimes. The build is a glass cannon (or glass sledgehammer, I guess) but can reasonably deal 20+ damage a round to one target, or (if you ignore the way Relentless villains are meant to concentrate on one victim at a time) split that over two targets. If he spikes his Mid die 30+ damage is entirely possible, which can easily be a one-hit KO. That starts on round one, where fresh heroes will have to twist to use most defensive reactions or Hit the Deck!

It’s pretty scary, but also offers a tactical puzzle. If he sets his sights on you, can you get away from him before he lands a KO or use your Yellow/Red zone abilities to weather the storm while your team wrecks him or his allies? His mobility options aren’t great and he’s at his best in melee, or maybe some tricky Overcome could make him lose track of his target.

Never had much trouble getting the odd KO myself, but if this won’t do it I don’t know what will other a bunch of Inventors using the villain version of Charged-Up Blast repeatedly.

New superhero on the blog:

Storm Howler, Time-Displaced Werelock

This guy was written up for a surprise one-shot that may turn into an ongoing campaign. I was initially going to give Major Patriot (aka the page 134 guy) a test drive but the group already had a trio of tech-hero types and didn’t have anyone who could even sort of handle any mystical stuff that might come up, so I figured I’d make something different to fill the niche. Rather liking the roleplaying possibilities of being time-displaced from mid-1400s Eastern Europe so far, so I hope this goes long-term.

Mechanically, Ivan’s a borderline glass cannon built around a lot of varied offensive abilities and hoping he gets a chance to act in Red status to start the Health yo-yo with the familiar Eruption/Improved Immunity combo. In the two action scenes he’s existed in so far he got KO’d in the first one (got greedy for damage and didn’t heal/Boost myself enough) and then started the second one in Red and spent the whole scene bouncing between Yellow and Red while cranking out damage and self-bonuses like mad. Seemed to work okay.

I’d feel bad about being such a selfish build (no real team-friendly abilities at all, just some limited Hinders) but the group has a hero that’s so focused on pure support I’d feel like I was bigfooting their act if I dabbled in it myself. And hey, someone’s got to dish out the damage - and at least my self-Boosts are pretty solid, so I’m not a resource drain myself.

Fun times, haven’t played a new hero in a while.

Back on the superhero thing, today’s post is another Tiny Supers character translated to the SCRPG:

Leaping Lizard, Young Genius Gadgeteer Who Transformed Himself Into An Anthropomorphic Reptile

Because why should supervillains be the only ones who overdo the self-experimentation thing?

He came out as more of a tech-hero in the port than the nimble superhuman brawler he started as, but he’s still got the “jump around and kick you in the face” thing going and he’s a lot less fragile the his Tiny Supers incarnation. Takes full advantage of the Genius power source’s incredible Reaction and self-Boosting abilities to make the Armored archetype’s Mid- and Min-die effects do more than expected, and Push Your Limits really doubles down on the concept in a crisis.

First time I’ve ever built a hero that used their retcon to swap different die into an ability, but the difference between a d12 and even a d10 is huge when you’re using a single die to reactively defend and boost yourself - especially when you’re probably adding a persistent bonus to it as well. The odds of getting that big 12+ result wind up meaningfully different.

Keeping with the Syracuse Seven thing, today I’ve got two related characters. Literally related, since they’re the superhero parents of last post’s Leaping Lizard.

Longhair and Knack, super-intelligent tech-hero couple

Not that you can see much family resemblance since the retroviral genetic modifications and all.

Two-for-one villain post today, with both forms of the Parallel Man, a baddie who exists across countless alternate timelines. The “Infinite” version is a Mastermind/Legion type with a screwball time machine that calls on his possibly-infinite other selves for aid. The “Isolated” version is the result of his time machine getting broken, leaving him cut off from other timelines and hungry for revenge as a nasty Mastermind/Guerrilla type.

Non-zero chance that he was inspired mostly by silly villain villain names like the Many-Angled Ones, Triangle Man, and of course Angle Man (both Angelo Bend and Funky Flashman). None of them have any power at all over the might of parallels, of course. Presumably he has a nemesis called the Intersector, though.

Cue recurring Lieutenant, parallel version where he is actually a badass grandma, Parallel Gram.

Another new villain today, along with his signature minions and lieutenant.

Hell-Hawk, avian-obsessed techno-villain

Arno is a member of the technocratic conspiracy SIN, and you can find links to the earlier post with more of the organization’s members in the new one.

New villain on the blog with his unique lieutenant and minions:

Effigy of the God-King, Nurom-Ghat-Gaton - an antediluvian artifact that thinks it’s a god on Earth, bent on reshaping the world to its tastes

Inspired by all those old monster comics where some museum display turns out to be a slumbering menace. Marvel did a lot of those interspersed with random alien invaders like Groot, although DC had their share as well.

Nice. I like the usage of orichalcum for the statue’s material; did you intend that to imply that it has some connexion to Atlantis? Or did you simply use it in a more general, “ancient mysterious metal” way?

Also, I can’t help but feel that the feel of this villain reminds me of the Court of Entropy.

Could be either. I was thinking Shadowrun’s version of the stuff, but Atlantis or generic mystery metal works fine too. The real stuff is kind of dull, just an alloy of gold and (probably) copper the last time I checked.

Effigy might be an old ally or enemy of the Court, sure. Not all magical baddies are pals and the Effigy is pretty self-absorbed. Probably knew Ymum back in the day, and might have crossed paths with FourEver in my loose setting. If he existed in the GTG setting I’m sure Argent Adept (or one of his ancient peers) would have opposed him at some point, and he wouldn’t be real popular with Mistweaver or the Scholar.

What other folks do to make my villains fit their games is up to them. I mostly put in backstory because raw stat blocks are as boring as boring gets.

Another new villain, this one the field commander of a radical anti-supers paramilitary group. He’s built to act in concert with large die-size lieutenant-grade agents while being resilient enough to stay in the fight, although regular minions and other villains can benefit from him being around as well.

Commander Savage

I’ve included the stats for the most common types of his various troops and links to the previous SEVER post with its leader, SEVER Prime.

Another superhero added to the blog:

Big Mac, power armored hero from an apocalyptic alternate timeline

This particular build is better than most at showing off how heroes get more powerful as the GYRO zone advances. Pretty much everything about her scales up steadily.

While I love most of your builds, I am not so convinced about this one.
Not to rain on your parade, but to my experience, but I’d worry that this particular build would rarely, if ever, be able to go through those nicely escalating GYRO zones before the scene tracker does!
With no less that 3 damage-mitigating traits and an additional healing power, damage control seems a wee bit over-emphasized While this impedes MAC from using her advanced abilities early, all those redundancies also clog up most of her green zone, so there’s actually very little she can do before things generally start going south.

If a player came up with this sort of build, I’d warn them that Health is usually much less of an issue than time running out.
But yeah, she won’t be taken down easily - that’s for sure

Normal scenes you’ll spend one, maybe two turns in Green before the tracker ticks over. Unless you get dogpiled or are really fragile you’ll usually go to Yellow about the same time the tracker does, although some heavy hitter villains or bad minion management might push that earlier. She might get to Red later than more fragile heroes (or not at all) but her go-to Yellow ability is Atomic Beam, which has a significant chance of self-inflicting irreducible damage on doubles. She also lacks a Yellow defensive reaction, which is something most hero builds look for and really isn’t fully offset by the inherent damage reduction - which only stack with physical attacks, and are bypassed completely by mental/social/exotic damage. Atomic Beam is very strong as long as there are 2+ targets to hit, which is why it has such a savage drawback on doubles, good enough that twisting yourself to use it in Green might be worth doing. As long as she gets to Yellow she’s fine, and barring a strange scene tracker or a Calming Aura upgrade that’ll happen early enough.

There’s two Green inherent abilities (both with all the usual damage reduction issues - frequently bypassed, limited initial impact) and the Red zone reaction, which is as likely to be used covering a teammate as anything. That’s her big team support trick right there, and she will sometimes be using it in Yellow by twisting if it’s the difference between an ally going Out or not. The overall mitigation focus exists partly to avoid killing herself (or having to drown herself in twists) using high-risk abilities like Atomic Beam, Armored Rampage, and Damn Foolish Heroics.

Her Green Mobile Cover ability is more intended to be a Min die Defend for others than herself, although I suppose she could if she wanted. Not much help, but if someone’s vulnerable it might be a lifesaver, especially with bonuses to pump into it. Gives her something team-friendly to do before her Red reaction and mobility trick.

You could swap that out for Armored’s “Attack one target Mid, a second target Min” ability, but I’d only do so if the team was light on minion management - and even then, I’d seriously consider just twisting to use Atomic Beam early if the situation really called for it. With (probably) a Green d12, d8, d6 pool to use your Min die effects aren’t going to be terrific until you get some bonuses in the mix.

It really doesn’t limit her Green options at all, that’s just how a Power Suit/Armored build is going to be. The only other Green option for Power Suit is another inherent ability that might, if you’re lucky, remove a couple of penalties per scene. It’s real bad compared to the limited damage reduction option, and the Yellow reaction option is a self-Booster that doesn’t actually Defend. That might be worth taking, but I’d rather have the unique Mid+Min P+E Boost action. Her archetype has no Yellows at all and instead has four Greens, one fixed and three optional. The solitary reaction is pretty terrible (although it would quite decent if it was an inherent), and every other option is a Mid Attack with a rider. You could argue that I should use a different PS/Arch pairing, but within the limitations of the ones I’ve used this is about as good as it gets.

That’s probably the gist of it - this pairing is definitely leaning heavily into damage reduction. So I suppose you’re right; within a PowerSuit+Armored pairing, this is what it’s going to be.
If you can make it work in the wild (and it looks like you’ve already thought that through), all the better!

Well, let me see if I can break down what I expect her to do during a typical action scene using the 2/4/2 scene tracker.

Green:

• Look for challenges to Overcome with one of her Principles so you’ve got a Max die on a pool ranging from d12, d10, d6 (Suit, Tech, Status) to d10, d8, d6 (MAC-Pack, Tech/Leadership, Status). If you can’t justify those pools or no Principle will work I’d look for something else to do unless some ally can toss you a bonus - rolling d8, d6, d6 (RP quality, tertiary power, status) is asking for it.

• Pick a Green Attack ability with the best rider and sock someone. Rocket Ram with d10, d8, d6 will avoid defensive reactions and ignore any penalties on you while dealing a pretty reliable 4-5 damage. Mobile Cover will put a Min Defend on someone with d12, d8, d6. You probably don’t need to heal, but Charge and Recharge will be more useful later on. You could also swap one of those for the dual Attack Green ability for Mid to one target and Min to another - most likely if your team just doesn’t have any squishy heroes (letting you drop Mobile Cover) or desperately needs sweep Attacks.

• If the situation justifies it, grit your teeth and twist to use one of your Yellows early. Atomic Beam probably isn’t worth it with just a d8, d6, d6 pool (RP quality, nuclear, status) unless you are drowning in small minions, but getting a d12, d10, d6 (suit, tech, status) Mid+Min P+E bonus up round one will help a lot until it gets scrubbed off - probably more that the twist will hurt.

Yellow:

• If you haven’t done Reactor Overload or its bonus has been removed, start with that. It’s now up to d12, d10, d8 Mid+Min, which isn’t bad at all. You might even be able to justify doing it multiple times, either while the bonus is still active to establish a backup (with a slight buff from being able to use the existing bonus), or to replace the bonus if it’s been removed.

• Atomic Beam is now d6, d8, d8 and hopefully has a a P+E bonus from Reactor Overload to use with every shot, plus anything your team might contribute. This is probably your go-to Yellow as long as there are at least two targets that deserve an Attack, and you’ve got the Health to get bitten by doubles a fair few times.

• If there’s only one worthwhile target (especially if they’ve demonstrated a mean reaction) or if you’re having penalty woes, Rocket Ram may be a better choice. Mid die with no penalties, no reactions, and no Defend effects is often better than Max with all that tech in place.

• If your Health is dropping too fast (dogpiling, too much exotic damage bypassing reduction, or too many doubled Atomic Beams) Charge and Recharge with bonuses on healing will offset that at the cost of delaying you reaching the Red. Tough as you are, going to Red health on turn four or something is still not great for you.

• Mobile Cover can help prop up a vulnerable ally (or yourself if you’re greedy, I suppose - the wording is a bit odd), again with bonuses on the Defend rider.

• As before, if the situation calls for it twisting for a Red ability earlier is always an option. Armored Rampage is a big mass Attack even with “just” d12, d8, d8 Max+MIn. Thruster Rush with (at worst) d10, d8, d8 is a solid Max hit, a mass Mid Hinder and a sudden free repositioning trick for you and two allies - just the thing to get whether you need to Overcome a key challenge somewhere else right now, or to catch a slippery foe. Damn Fool Heroics is worded so that it gets its d10 Defend even in Yellow, and it can catch Attacks on anyone, not just yourself.

• And, of course, always look for chances to do Principled Overcomes. Challenges often happen throughout a scene, and your status die keeps getting better.

Red:

• You’re going be using Red abilities almost all the time now, and they’ve only gotten better as your status die is now d10.

• Your damage reduction abilities make it safer to use both Damn Fool Heroics and Armored Rampage. You’re down to a dozen Health or less at this point and every bit helps. Just be careful about jumping in front of energy or exotic damage types that bypass half or all of that reduction, and remember to put any bonuses you have left on the d10 Defend roll.

• If you reached Red early in the scene (like, say, before turn six), it may be worthwhile to resort to Charge and Recharge (hopefully with bonuses) to keep from going Out altogether. Juicy as Red abilities are, if you were taking damage that fast something is getting around your defenses reliably and twelve health will not last long at all.

• Similarly, Rocket Ram remains a viable option in the same circumstances discussed up in the Yellow zone. Some villains just drown you in penalties, others have reactions that will kill you (or an ally) in the Red zone if they get to use them, and a really solid Defend (maybe bolstered with bad guy bonuses) can deflect even an Armored Rampage hit.

• I can’t say it enough, but any Challenges still running need to be dealt with and you’ll never be in better shape to do it in terms of dice pools. If you’re somehow way out of your wheelhouse and rolling d10, d4, d4 that’s still not a hopeless Hail Mary if you can get a Principle involved (like, say, Detachment because I am not in the least concerned about the slavering hellspawn trying to devour my leg while I finish chanting Tatoo Baretta Nicotine or whatever that magic formula was) and maybe a bonus or two. Thruster Rush could let you move two more competent allies over to do it instead, potentially dragging them out of whatever bad situation was keeping them occupied in the first place - and leaving less-mobile enemies unable to chase and Attack them immediately to boot.

Out:

• If you have to go Out, you might as well be rolling a d12 to reduce damage on an ally every round thereafter. Odds are they’re hanging on by a thread too, and every point stopped will matter.

Of the stuff I look for most in a hero build, prior to Red she’s lacking a mass multi-target Attack or Hinder (both immensely useful for handling minion swarms), a defensive reaction (either for herself or allies), and anything in the way of party-friendly Boost or Hinder abilities (although she can provide her own decent P+E bonus in Yellow, taking some strain off support heroes). Her Red abilities were selected with those shortcomings in mind, even if they won’t always come up without self-twisting.

She’s also lacking a Max die Green Attack (always nice to have, but fairly rare) or any kind of Max Boost/Hinder ability, but as noted she’s got a marked durability skew as opposed to going hard on offense or mod support. And again, a Green ability like Rocket Ram is often going to outperform a vanilla Max Attack, so that particular missing piece doesn’t really sting much.

Giving a little more thought to Big MAC, if you wanted to optimize the build a bit, you could swap powers linked to her two Yellow abilities, putting d12 Power Suit on Atomic Beam (and maybe renaming it to Overload Integral Weaponry or something) and d6 Nuclear on Reactor Overload. That would have a fairly dramatic effect on her main offensive ability (Yellow lasts a long time), increasing it from dealing ~12-13 damage spread over three targets to ~15-16 damage, as well as increasing the potential Max die damage quite a bit, thereby making it better when there aren’t the full three targets to hit.

In exchange, your Mid+Min P+E self-Boost will suffer a bit, going from a d12, d10, d8 pool in Yellow to a d8, d8, d6. It should still reliably generate a +2 bonus, but reaching a +3 bonus goes from “fairly common” to “needs a lucky roll” and getting a +4 will require almost rolling max possible results. This will give you a bit less to work with for the same action cost, as well as making it easier for foes to generate penalties to strip away the persistent bonus altogether.

I don’t personally like the tradeoff, but I tend to overvalue bonuses a bit and objectively it’s likely the better build. This is even more the case if there’s a solid source of efficient bonus generation in your team. Having more damage output in Yellow is very meaningful when your overall job is to trade damage favorably with enemies, which is Big MAC’s schtick.

Going that route probably means you’d be better off also swapping the Green Attack+Defend ability out for the unused dual Mid and Min Attack option. With smaller and less reliable bonuses to augment Min die riders dinging someone for Min die is likely to be more useful, since even trivial damage will at least degrade a minion or force a save. Bit less versatile in terms of what you can do, but more emphasis on damage dealing.

New villain on the blog, although he’s a bit past his sell-by date since he was killed by the person who’s now using his supranym some time ago. Still, you know how comics are, so some stats for him when he was less, ah, inanimate might be helpful:

The Other Bodycount, deceased diabolically-empowered serial killer

Today’s menace answer the question “What if flesh-eating bacteria were big enough to bite your hand off?” Be careful where you point that experimental growth ray, folks.

Strain Zeta, An Outbreak of Dangerous Macro-Organisms

Also an experiment with an inversion of the Legion archetype, with a lieutenant that can sacrifice itself and some minions to “trade up” to a villain form. A really, really fragile villain, but still…

Belatedly getting back to my series of posts looking at villain design with today’s post:

Villain Design Analysis: Upgrades

Includes a couple of suggested homebrew ideas as well as covering the ten official options.

Penultimate post in this series, with one last wrap-up to come.

Villain Design Analysis: Masteries

Not much to say in this one, but there are a couple of suggestions for homebrew Masteries to bring the tally to a full baker’s dozen.

And the final post in my villain design series, which went a bit longer than anticipated. Just some final maunderings, so fairly brief.

Villain Design Analysis: Final Thoughts

Probably moving on to some scene design ideas next, as well as continuing the trickle of new villain writeups.

Today’s new villain is the result of some unusually muddled nostalgia nightmares.

Fnord Motors Model M, custom prototype hosting a deranged automotive industry AI

Comes with a selection of hench-vehicles as well, because someone has to drag all the scrap back to the factory. Undecided on whether they all target foreign cars first, or if all the metric parts are such a nuisance they go after US competitor brands as first priority. Probably depends on how the AI is glitching at any given time.

Think “less grandiose Omnitron with serious OCD and a car fetish” and you’ve got it.

Nice. You did a real nifty job on this one, @Chief_Lackey_Rich. : )

How have I done almost 200 villain writeups without a gorilla? Well, fine, easily fixed:

Mister Kong, super-gorilla heist artist

Also some of his gang, who may or may not be aware that they’re working for a gorilla. They’re pretty low-quality but he sure can bring a lot of them to a job.

Having been reminded that today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, I’ve put together a very silly (but mechanically effective) homage to nautical marauders.

Behold, the Purple Picaroon!

Nifty. That’s a pretty meta gimmick that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Now they just need a nemesis (or ally?) modelled after a very modern major-general. : )

I might have been browsing the Guise Book again. My stuff gets about 40% sillier whenever I do that.

Also can’t help but notice that lately I seem to going through the apocryphal list of things that improve sales when they’re on the cover - a gorilla, something purple - think I just need a motorcycle (the Fnord Model M doesn’t quite qualify), a dinosaur, and IIRC a robot to complete my Sales Boost Bingo card.

Clawing my way through some writer’s block with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek celebration of the start of October.

Behold, Pharaoh Robo-Tet, star of The Curse of the Mechanical Mummy!

No autographs, please.

Also ticks off “robot” on my Sales Boost Bingo card.

Huh, well according to Reddit, robot wasn’t on the list, but it did have the city in flames and the hero crying and a direct question to the reader.

Finally broken the writer’s block and health woes (gad, I hate sciatica) that have been limiting my blogging, so here’s a couple of lunkheads from space that were bothering my players in a couple of “filler issues” last month. Think Kirby’s New Gods if they were petty, vainglorious thugs and you’ve pretty much got the idea.

Brutallo & Brutalla - Twin cosmo-gods from beyond the stars, powerful but childish space thugs

Curious choice to give them both Above Mortal Concerns and Immortal Nature. They’re fairly similar in theme, but aren’t entirely redundant, I suppose, and they do combine to make the Brutal Twins extraordinarily durable.

Yep, that was the idea. I used each of them solo most of the time, with the scenes filled out with difficult high-priority timed challenges, environmental effects, and a smattering of lieutenants and minions to reflect the fools they’d bullied into working with them. That meant they were prone to be focused on, so they needed to be able to take a pounding and stay in the fight longer than anticipated. Their Ancient/Loner A/A combination left them a bit limited on the one thing I would have liked most - Boost abilities to burn penalties off them - but I skewed the environment twists toward that, keeping their inherent last-gasp ability functional more often than they might have managed normally.

The usual pattern I saw with the abilities was for the Above Mortal Concerns to reactively keep them from hitting zero if they had a penalty, and otherwise minimizing penalties so e-twists or follower Boosts could clear them more easily. If they were penalty clean, Immortal Nature would reset them to d12 Health ad infinitum, and they could still react to another another finisher Attack to reduce the damage to one, letting them get to a higher total Health after using Triumphant Rage for a solid Recovery. Not an impenetrable trick, but it frequently kept them fighting an extra round or two and my players had to think more about timing their Hinders right than usual. The team has a lot of mutual Boosting tricks that they’re very good at using to produce one really big hit every round, but Hinders are a much more limited resource before Red for them. A different team might find these two much easier to deal with, of course.

Their last appearance (to date - they’ll be back eventually, the players seemed to enjoy a good tough punch-up with some opportunities for heroic Overcomes as a distraction) used both of them, with the twins verbally sniping at each other for not beating the heroes on their own before this. By then the heroes were on their A Game when it came to coordinating damage and Hinders, and they wound up with a battered Brutallo into dissolving into starstuff while Brutalla escaped into a cosmic portal vowing to get even in the future. Grudges are good.

Another villain today, another option to explain where dunderhead villains and criminals get their supertech from and why some much supercrime involves stealing new inventions.

Savant - Ingenious if not terribly creative engineer with a bug about the supernatural

This gent also marks a milestone in my ridiculous “do one of every Approach/Archetype pairing” project, as he’s the 200th unique pairing on my blog. Just 52 more to go…sigh.

Nice anti-mad scientist. I like the “I’m sticking to normal science” mentality. It’s definitely a unique perspective for an inventor in a supers setting.

Also, cool idea including challenges in the write-up; that’s new. Although . . . the Grav Cage seems pretty fringe super-science to me. I mean, isn’t gravity usually one of the big things that real science can’t really do anything about?

52, you say? (Sorry, I just can’t hear that number without thinking of that.)

Conceptually he can copy and improve on even fringe science stuff, he just isn’t any good at coming up with ideas and theories on his own. A technological plagiarist, as it were. Big d12 Technology, no actual Science, strong on practical engineering and weak on theory. Flat-out magic leaves him stumped though, and he’s no good at biotech stuff. The synthetic lycanthropy the War-Wolves run on really makes his head hurt.

Last I checked there were still some theories that allowed for possible gravity manipulation, but it involved conditions that don’t exist without a singularity nearby so not exactly practical for testing.

It makes playing cards awkward, agreed. Stupid DC events…

Let’s get that down to 50 remaining so we can stop thinking about the number 52 and dwell on Hawaiian cop shows instead. A duo of ruthless vigilante “heroes” with a paranoid streak, ready to make things awkward for your (hopefully) more principled PCs:

Father Cobweb & Attercop

Attercop — Great pun!

There are a ridiculous number of old-fashioned slang words for spiders, as anyone who’s read the Hobbit can attest from Frodo’s improv poetry session.

A new villain with a silly gimmick, perhaps most suitable for Golden Age games - but a lot of fairly oddball characters are still going strong in 2023, so who knows?

Inspired in part by fjur’s villain Sirrush and his color-coded Health zones.

Rad. I like the in-universe lampshading that his “scientific” powers make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Also, I like the gyro double-reference. : )

Although I note that you chose to omit Versatile Strike, the Fragile ability that does different actions based on the villain’s zone. It seems an obvious choice for a foe with such a theme, but I assume you had a good mechanical reason to omit it, even if it’s simply personal taste.

Honestly, I mostly didn’t want to type out the godawful wall of text that ability involves. Such a pain. I know I used it somewhere that I could copy-paste from but didn’t have the ambition to find it. As you may have noticed, I tend to rewrite abilities for brevity and clarity when there’s a way to do so, but that one defeats me.

Also I wanted the inherent movement ability to go with the Approach’s Attack & Recover trick (hoping to trigger free moves going both up and down) and the Attack and lasting self-Defend Fragile ability was too helpful for mister low-Health to pass on. His other tricks both self-Boost efficiently, which is meant to build up bonuses to sink into the Attack abilities’ riders, either to Defend or Recover.

I should probably also have mentioned that he was popular with artists and colorists because he was stupidly easy to draw. Doc essentially stands in a single fairly static pose whenever he’s spinning (and he’s always spinning), kind of up on his toes a bit and with his arms in tight most of the time. Draw that once then you can paste it in anywhere at varying angles, sketch in a bunch of whirly speedlines (and regular ones if he’s moving rather than spinning in place), and then add as many gyrolight rays as desired and you’re done. The colorist gets to just splash a monochrome aura and some rays over him and they’re done - sometimes they don’t even pick his face out in flesh tones. Pretty common for them to get the specific GYR color wrong in some panels and wind up with fans complaining on the letters pages too.

“Dear Mister Editor, Doctor Whirligig is drawn in yellow colors on page six, panels four, five, and six. He’d clearly just recharged his gyrolight rays by absorbing Mister Dynamic’s electron flow in panel two and should have been green at that point. Please correct this in future printings.”

Yet another villain, this one a Titan with a rather different schtick than the usual kaiju-type. If given a serious power-up he could easily shift into “powerful entity” status rather than a villain you can beat with sufficient punching, but as it is he’s “only” killing people one crowd (or apartment building) at a time.

Samuel Hakes, aka The Black Miasma

Let the background fluff and trivia section get a bit out of control on this one.

Yeah, I personally think that it’s somewhat odd that Titan appears to be the only Approach or Archetype that prescribes some sort of physical attribute instead of just, like, fighting style or skill set. (“Titans are MASSIVE. Their sheer size makes them difficult to contend with and they require extraordinary measures to deal with.”)

Samuel Hakes (Prisoner #761-176) was facing a life sentence in prison without parole after being found guilty of multiple spree murders, so volunteering to participate in a research trial for better living conditions seemed like a risk worth taking. Besides, everyone had heard rumors of another con who’d been granted superhuman strength and durability in a similar experiment. Maybe Hakes would get lucky too.

Hah, yeah, if you’re offered a place in an experimental medical trial, you take it, because you will get superpowers. Although, I guess, in this guy’s case the powers weren’t worth the side-effects.

Yeah, this is certainly one villain that I don’t feel sorry for.
“Oooh, I’ve lost all my humanity! Sob!”
“Yeah, well, you know who else lost their humanity? All those people you murdered.”

This guy kind of highlights my problem with the “Density Control” power: density = mass / volume, so when you’re changing density you can change either of those variables. But “volume” is essentially the same thing as “size,” but we already have a different Size-Changing power. So, despite what logical definitions would mean, I guess “Density Control” is essentially “mass” control, and I guess that since Size-Changing implies that it doesn’t alter one’s density, it’s also changing one’s mass when one grows or shrinks. So, yeah, I dunno.

Also, how exactly does an amorphous cloud have “Fitness”?

He despises his supranym and using his real name might get you a break when talking to him, or it might enrage him as a reminder of his past depending on his mood.

Huh, there’s really no way to win with this guy. Besides just saying, “Hey you!” I guess.

It’s trickier than the rest to reskin/reimagine as something else. I haven’t found a good way to manage it, and with Miasma I’ve now done one of every Approach pairing with it. Still, it’s too useful an archetype not to have, what with monster comics being ancestors of modern supers books.

He’s meant to be a monster even before he became a giant murder-cloud. Realistically, he isn’t asking for sympathy anyway, he’s just pissed at the nuisance factor.

At this point I will paraphrase MST3K and point out that it’s just a comic and you should really just relax. Comic Science is ludicrous even when you’re not insisting light can be green-shifted.

Although now that you mention it, Z-Man over here has growth-only Size-Changing that’s also tied to his less-dense-than air Flight, so his version does actually seem to be slightly more realistic, if “being a human zeppelin” can be called any kind of realism.

Same way anyone can. “You are in top physical shape and can run long distances without getting tired.” He’s in good condition as giant murder-clouds go, and it emphasizes the fact that (like any jogger) he can move against all but the strongest winds and maintain a decent (but not superhuman) pace for longer than most people. Deliberately avoided giving him actual mobility powers so the heroes can save more of his potential victims. He’s likely to rack up a grim 90s bodycount as-is.

Yeah, he doesn’t even like listening to the screams of his victims anymore. Just wants everyone to shut up and die. Not a big talker unless you can convince him you might be able to let him turn his powers on and off at will. Good luck with that, but it does make him a potential (very dangerous) pawn for a mastermind villain.

And — at the risk of sounding obvious —what with giant monsters and other enormous foes still being incredibly common adversaries for supers.

Yeah, I know, I’m often one to use that same mantra against others, but this is a case of just really simple definitions used in an annoying way that’s hardly as useful as something like No Conservation of Energy.

I note that the alternative title for that trope (tucked away at the very bottom) is No Conservation of Mass. Which is the real issue with how density control and size-changing work.

Still, I feel like most comic readers intuitively grasp what’s meant by Size-Changing and Density Control, especially if you mention Ant/Giant-Man and the Vision. It’s weirder to me that Growth and Shrinking are folded together (another thing to blame Hank Pym for) and Intangibility is its own power when it comes so close to “turn density to minimum” in game effect rather than making Density Control Density Increase instead. I suppose it’s all the result of having so few dice to work with, of course - but it’s still odd.

Selective Intangibility, for everything but the soles of the feet so you don’t fall through to the planet’s core. Oops, there I go with that pesky physics thing again.

One could argue that gravity only affects things with tangible mass.

And Newton in fact did. One could argue many things in comic books, I suppose.

Hardly seems worth the effort.

Big sprawling five-villain team post on the blog today:

The Masters Family, rulers of the Domain of Sovereign Herralund

My setting is a bit light on the “villain-ruled fictional country” trope represented by Mordengrad and Latveria and the like, but I didn’t want to do the usual single dictator (which raises story questions if they appear to die or get jailed) so instead we’ve got a super-powered family council in charge of an island micronation. With five people to work with and more potentially getting inducted as they manifest powers I can “lose” a couple without having to explain why the government doesn’t collapse, and there can be some interesting roleplaying spun off the family dynamics. I don’t expect to ever use the whole Family at once, but having the threat of them in the background when dealing with one, two or three of them ought to provide some uncertainty for the PCs.

Think Latveria if it was run by the royal family of Amber and you’re in the right neighborhood.

Mechanically, it’s also an experiment in a bunch of distantly-related villains with shared family traits. They’re different flavors of Domain villains (again, rather Amber-ish in terms of how they can twist background reality around them), all with the same three Domain abilities and Approaches that differentiate them and provide different synergies with the Domain side of things.

They’ve also got a shared environment twist that gets added to whatever one they’re actually in, representing the fact that as proper VIPs they go nowhere without a security detail along, letting them call on minion backup anywhere even vaguely plausible.

Cool beans. I really dig the shared Domain-ness of all of them. It’s a neat way to keep different builds connected to one another. It also reminds of Mech-Stalin’s two iterations.

Yeah, that dynamic sounds neat.

Huh, it’s interesting that Majestra has power over both plants and animals; it makes sense, of course, but it seems that I can’t think of any other supers with the same ability — most simply control one or the other.

Given the opportunity, Marcus will happily pick a fight with foreign supers to test himself against them. He’s fairly good natured about it even when losing (which is fairly rare) and tries not to kill or seriously injure such foes, although his raw power can lead to unfortunate mistakes. He’s very good about sending flowers to the hospital or the funeral if things do go awry. Actually beating him one on one in what he regards as a fair fight will earn his respect, which is not an easy thing to do otherwise.

Wow. That is very surprisingly good-natured of him. If he wasn’t caught up in all this supervillain politicking, it seems like Marcus might not be that bad a guy.

Hmm, it seems like you have a thing for the name “Mordecai.” So much for the One Steve Limit.

Also it’s kind of interesting that, save for Mordecai, all of their first names follow Latin naming conventions, with the females’ ending in -a and the males’ ending in -us.

Conceptually, if it’s a living thing, she’s got some control over it, with Presence letting her compel humans to some degree. Works best at home, like most Family tricks - hence the way the upgrades generally work.

He’s a bit of loudmouth and way too full of himself, but running across someone who can stand up to him is so rare he enjoys the novelty and the challenge. The guy could probably use an actual friend beyond his relatives - Magnus and Mordecai play at it but they’ve got their own motives for doing so, and Majestra’s a little too distant to really show what affection she feels toward him as part of the older end of the Council. And he mostly just gives Minerva a headache, she’s always worrying about him wrecking some scheme by accident.

But he’s also kind of responsible about staying around and defending the Domain, so the odds of him ever getting to make other friends are pretty low.

Deliberate. The name variation hints at him being a bit of an outsider, although he’s still named for a former Council member from centuries ago. Most Herralunders are, largely out of optimism.

Doctor Mentallax has been absent from the game for months after his latest bout of No One Could Survive That Explosion Syndrome and my players are still paranoid about him making a comeback. Stumbling across something with the name “Mordecai” on it will give them fits.

Also, I lived across the hall from a Mordecai in freshman year, and I always liked the name. Better than Chuck when it comes to supervillainy, anyway.

More villainy, this time from the labs of the Science Integration Network.

Lash & Crash, Agents of SIN

These two aren’t quite as, ah, successful successes for the Q-radiation empowerment program as the earlier Rush and Crush were, but they’ve certainly got superpowers and they didn’t suffer molecular decoherence like the rest of the test batch so we’re calling it a win for SIN!

And now the organization can field a proper villain team for larger operations without having to rely on mercs or robots.

So is Guy Gardner, and he’s considered a hero. ; ) But I’m also just fond of Awesome Ego characters.

That just makes it sadder . . .

Hah, that’s fun, deliberately averting a trope that the players will expect to be played straight.

I think the first place I heard it was as the name of the thief lovable rogue in the Fantasy subtheme of Irregular Webcomic!

Yeah, Marcus is not a wholly unsympathetic guy - unless you see him sink a navy task force that makes the mistake of getting too near his homeland. He plays rough with mundane humans and doesn’t have much respect for them, another common family trait. The Masters are very much superhuman elitists through long tradition and their current lack of numbers (and Mordecai’s lackluster powers - Stone is usually up there with Storm as “national military assets” go) has them feeling more paranoid than usual. That’s one of the main reason they’re letting Magnus go ahead with his experiments delving into the foundation of the Family Holdings, and with Majestra’s aid no less.

That might come back and bite everyone if he finds a way to permanently absorb rather just emulate everyone’s unique abilities, at which point he’s likely to go full megalomaniac ala Count Nefaria. But that’s a ways down the road if it happens, I want the PCs to have some time to get to know them as individuals and mostly background threats. They’re pretty new to my game yet.

I am so far behind on Irregular Webcomic. Used to be regular reader for years and fell off somewhere.

Updating an old post with a new villain and a few minor tweaks. Carronade and the Brute Suit Boys have shown up a few times and most of them have been in and out of prison after getting trounced, but their leader Carronade has managed to avoid capture (once with a d4 villainous vehicle rolling the four it needed for Escape Plan to go off, no less). He’s not as good at prison breaks as a specialist like S-Cape but still manages to get his crew out and recover or replace their suits. I figure his mixed successes earned the team a new suit for next time, so they recruited another convict during the last escape and they have a new defensive specialist in the form of Cellblock, bringing them up five Squad archetype villains and their Inventor from the year 5000 boss.

Only 40 more Approach/Archetype pairings to go…

Okay, yeah, fair points, I’ll admit.

Well, it’s nice to chance upon another reader, although I suppose that that isn’t super unlikely in these geeky circles.

I’ve seen the Death of Overpowered Fireballs mentioned on other gaming forums, so yeah, it’s not unknown. Just the fact that it uses GURPS instead of D&D earns it a lot of gamer cred - and who doesn’t love math humor?

Well, lots of people, but you know what I mean.

Haven’t done a hero in awhile, so here’s another member of the Syracuse Seven, my super team that started life over in Tiny d6 Supers.

Mister Corundum, alien brick and team support

After writing him up I realized he was way too similar to an earlier S7 member, the Leaping Lizard. Since I struggled with his port in the first place, I’ve done a rewrite that switches him from an Armored archetype to a Wild Card, which seems more fitting for the kind of kid genius who’d transform himself into a giant lizard while his parents were out of town.

You can see him (along with the rest of the related posts) over at the Syracuse Seven tag.

As long as I’m doing Syracuse Seven stuff, here’s a villain tied to them through the Leaping Lizard’s family - although he should work fine in other settings if you introduce a mysterious miracle metal that’s become all the craze in the super-science community since it was discovered. Or maybe it’s made of unstable molecules and has come eat the Fantastic Four’s wardrobe.

The Awesome Agglomerator, Single-Minded Alien Robot

Crystal aliens are cool; and it’s a design that’s not super common.

As a member of a long-lived species he figures he can spare a few decades playing do-gooder for these frail aliens, It’s a fair repayment for being saved from a one-way trip to the spice mines or galactic gladiatorial arenas.

I like how that alien perspective gives him a unique motivation for heroism.

Corundum is frequently bemused by Earth customs, and asks a lot of awkward questions about everything from biology to politics.

Well, yeah, that’s pretty obligatory for an alien hero, right?

Common, but not universal. The Martian Manhunter never seemed to have a problem fitting in. Neither does Superman, but the guy was raised in Kansas so calling him an alien instead of an immigrant feels questionable. At least three of the many Captains Marvel have been aliens (and one was a android to boot) and they seemed to grok humanity fine.

Not too difficult when you can shapeshift and read minds.

Obviously. Not to mention being able to pull any other power you might need out of thin air whenever the writer says so.

Of course, his greatest power of all is spinning.

New villain, this one a hired stealth sniper with freeze-ray guns and and bunch of other high-tech gadgetry. He’s got a beef with the legal system’s many failings and makes a living by making it even worse, but also likes proving his point by bumping off or maiming those who’ve escaped justice because of those failings. Calling him contradictory is an understatement, but at least he isn’t trying to conquer the world or turn the whole city into mice.

Zero Justice, contract killer with an agenda

Presumably his upgraded version is Absolute Zero Justice?

Nifty. I really like the vibe this guy gives off. : )

But, why does he have the Mastery of Superiority if — as far as I can tell — there’s no way on his sheet for him to get a power?

Psst, also the background quality mentioned in his upgrade and the one in his quality list don’t match.

Yeah, copy paste error, I had that on the clipboard for something else. Fixed now - as you might expect it was supposed to be Power Upgrade, reflecting him having a big paycheck and getting Savant to do a second re-engineering pass on his gear.

Type in haste, repent at leisure.

Worth noting that this is my second unseen/stealthy Predator-archetype assassin, the other being Life-Ender. Unsurprisingly they share some abilities but their play style’s quite a bit different, with Zero Justice playing keep-away and sniping while Life-Ender stalks around staying unnoticed through psychic “nothing to see here” tricks as much as actual light-and-sound manipulation and stabs isolated targets when he can. L-E’s got a much better mod generation game, and can actually help protect any convenient distractions…er, allies he brings along for help against teams, while Z-J only care about his own hide. Z-J has better dice overall (although L-E’s got some dice-fixing) and way more mobility choices.

Interesting to see how different the two come out mechanically, and Z-J has his peculiar agenda for personality where L-E is a more basic jobber of a murder machine.

Another hero from the Syracuse Seven group, this one a classic FISS tipped toward the speed end of things. Just past the halfway mark now.

Meteoric - Multi-role speedster, flyer, and super-strong brick all rolled into one, member of the Syracuse Seven

Actually tried to tone her down a bit when it came to Red zone abilities. I’d almost forgotten how strong the Nature and Speedster abilities were in both Green and Yellow, and putting them together feels like having extra Y/R abilities that start a zone early.

Another villain, this one a psionic brawler with a nasty combination of TK and teleportation tricks. If you’re using the Syracuse Seven stuff, he’s a nemesis and former academy classmate of Meteoric, but he’ll work fine as a baddie-for-hire outside of that sub-setting.

Roughhouse, a psionic brawler

How about a freelance C-lister villain to play team support for ad hoc villain groups? Not everyone’s a mastermind or a simple leg-breaker.

Dead-Beat

now I am picturing Legacy/Heritage fighting Dead-Beat in Mexico City so they both feel obligated to speak Spanish, so the bystanders know what is going on and it is so awkward and stilted that the Mexican reporters turn off the cameras because of the crimes done to their language.

I imagine both of them hear “Que crees que significa eso?” from native speakers pretty regularly.

Another villain, this one more of a Golden Age horror-comic monster than a traditional baddie:

Corpsefire

Although as I noted in the post intro, the thing would certainly have gotten a revival in the edgy grimdark days of the late 80s and 90s as the Comics Code lost its grip.

And a villainous duo meant as a nod to the Mad Thinker and his Awesome Android, Professor Ivo and Amazo, and all the other “big brain” villains with a signature construct servant.

“The Mighty Mentomaton” is a name that is a work of pure genius. Like the genius who made it, obviously!

Woof, this was some work.

Five full villain writeups, representing a whole class (pardon, klass) of trainee villains plus their instructor on a field trip from another reality where English has no hard “c” spellings. They could, of course, be used as more conventional villains operating either as solos or with allies. They’re a real grab bag of weirdos if I say so myself.

I also sketched out enough of their home reality that you could do more with it if you wanted, although my campaign doesn’t seem to be headed that way.

Yet another villain as this project nears its end.

I had a lot of fun playing this guy (these guys?) in the couple of one-shots he’s made it in to. The obnoxiously British gentleman thief half of him is a good opportunity to practice my dreadful accent while sneering politely, and when the reigns slip his Despoiler half is gleefully bombastic.

Not enough alien space monster types in my villain portfolio, so here’s another. Easily used as a new variety of genebound for campaigns infested with Thorathians as well.

Includes a new lieutenant and minion to model different stages of maturity.

This was an interesting Approach/Archetype combination. I decided I wanted to try building a viable Creator villain who’d only summon minions once or twice a scene but when they did there’s be a lot of them in one surge. This mix of abilities works fairly well for that, although I waffled a long time on which reaction and which offensive ability I wanted to use. The other option (using Creator’s sole Attack ability and Guerrilla’s reaction) would have cared more about having a lot of minions out at once and had similar damage output, but it would probably be less durable thanks to the lack of healing.

In the end I went with the published version because you only get so many chances to name an ability Opportunistic Cannibalism.

I like the alt-reality that the Klass comes from; the huge number of supers reminds me somewhat of Kingdom Come. Also, Twofold’s backstory mentions “‘anti-superfreak’ bigots,” but that seems kind of odd in a setting that has so many supers.

Unrelatedly, Opportunistic Cannibalism is gross.

They’ve still got a version of SEVER stirring up trouble, although they’re even more secretive than the “normal setting” one. “Innate” supers still face more bigotry than ones who use technology (which a “mundane” could theoretically also access so it’s less “unfair”) and there’s a serious “mundanes first” movement that has all sorts of “replacement conspiracy” stuff going on. Just having to live alongside so many supers (with attendant higher risks of getting caught up in their affairs) has had bad effects on the public’s mental health in general. Familiarity has bred tension rather than contempt in this case. Heroes get treated better overall, but newly emerged supers (like Twofold was) are an unknown quantity and the bigots see them as fair game if they think they could take one out. It’s one of the reasons neither side in the supers conflict does more to block the other’s recruitment efforts - you risk getting a vulnerable super killed outright if you get to fighting each other.

Little bit. I’m amazed no one’s commented on the fact that the minion-form Hexxus are literally newborns. You’re beating up babies, you monsters! Admittedly, they’re babies that are actively trying to kill you, but still…you just watched the miracle of birth, hero.

At least I managed to restrain myself from calling Spawning Surge “Tactical Parturition” instead.

Okay, yeah, I guess having a large population doesn’t make a group immune to prejudice . . . as evidenced by real-world prejudices . . . bleh.

I got the sense that Hexxus Alpha mature quick enough that it’s more killing children than babies, if that makes any difference.

Surprise post-turkey superhero inspired by random web-surfing. I present…

Florida Man - Whatever you’re expecting is probably wrong

Another villain, this one kind of a special-use concept for taking a campaign in a new direction for a while or justifying major character rewrites. It also marks 227 different Approach/Archetype pairings, putting me just over the 90% mark for finishing this daft project.

Happenstance, She’ll Take You On A Far-Out Trip

Huh. Where’d that green text come from? I have been doing way to much of this stuff lately…

And following up from Thanksgiving’s Florida Man post, how’s about this?

I’ve done several vampire-adjacent villains, but they’ve all got their quirks. So here, let’s do my setting’s OG vampire:

A big one today, with the face of of a conspiracy bent on ruining your heroes’ reputations rather than just beating them up. Includes three tech-villains with their lieutenant forms, custom minions, and suggestions for using them in everything from a one-shot where their cover is blown immediately to a mid-length story arc with some buildup to a long slow-burn story where they gradually become part of the campaign and require some real legwork to reveal what’s going on.

And add one more (busy evening) in the form of a teleporting martial arts weapons master with an obsession for carving up select opponents and a nasty trick up his sleeve.

I like the inversion of the “Honourable Martial Arts Guy” trope. I also always enjoy superpowered martial artists in general.

Could the heroes try to find his arsenal to deprive him of his weapons? For that matter, does it even exist in realspace, or is it extradimensional pocket?

Also, him not even using his minion abilities until later in a fight kind of actually works out, due to it giving him such a great status die (as you likely intended).

Yeah, I haven’t really done as many of those as I should. There’s a master ninja (who’s also quite pale, although in his case it’s for disguise purposes - he essentially bleached himself so skin dyes have an easier base to work with) and a very angry nigh-immortal mysterious sensei type out to reclaim stolen teachings from his unique I-won’t-share style and a mutant boxer who might qualify if you’re generous (boxing is certainly a martial art, but he’s more about the mutation than being really skillful) but that’s about it. They probably deserve some pals before I wind down this project.

They sure could, although it’s up to the GM as to what they need to do to break the attunement that lets him teleport them. It might be on the room they’re stored in (in which case just moving them out of it might work, but he also might notice that) or you might have to “disconnect” each weapon. Or, knowing my players, the guy with d10 Metal turns most of them into a giant puzzle-ball and then the Fire thrower burns the wooden stuff to ashes. He probably has some spares somewhere but denying him his main stash is good for a big chunky penalty he can’t shake until he fixes the problem.

That would be telling. Personally, I was thinking a weapons hall in the creepy isolated palace/mansion/temple he no doubt has tucked away on some snowy mountain in the middle of nowhere, but it could be nonspace just as well.

Yep. The Legion dichotomy of simultaneously wanting minions and not wanting to cripple your status die is a fun one to play with. He does need to be a little careful if the heroes are slinging serious non-physical Attacks though. He doesn’t have great Health and his only defensive trick is a really strong one but also really narrow, although he’s a comeback king if he has time to back off and sacrifice a few minions to heal off of as they get defeated.

As I get close to the end of this daft villain project I’m trying to identify what I haven’t gotten around to but people (self included) might need, so here’s a fairly generic paramilitary militia group that can be easily reskinned to suit a wide variety of times and places and motivations. Whether it’s Captain America in the 1950s punching commies bent on opposing democracy in some fictional foreign country or 90s heroes fighting a narco-lord’s personal army or modern-day heroes preventing an attempted assassination on the US campaign trail, these guys ought to be suitable. Make 'em aliens and they’d fit on Apokolips too.

Genius villains often recruit more physically-inclined villains as muscle for their plans. This one reverses the concept and hires himself out to unstable or thick-headed baddies who have trouble plotting a simple bank robbery, much less something elaborate involving a doomsday machine and holding the city for ransom. He certainly doesn’t have ulterior motives for doing so beyond the mere cash, of course.

Sixteen more to go. Groan.

And as long as I’m at it cleaning up drafts, here’s a small post of gameplay suggestions:

Another four villains, this time a group of unfortunate oddballs who are currently working toward a common goal.

Twelve more to go.

The Odds…
Four members…

Sighs
The Thorathians are pleased but the mathematical punsters were hoping for something more (or less).

It wasn’t an accident.

You just know they have stories titled “Against the Odds” and “Beating the Odds” and “Bad Odds For Our Heroes” and that sort of thing.

Also a tangential homage to the Mads of MST3K, of course.

A pair of archery-themed villains, since I didn’t really have any beyond Crossbolt (who’s kind of a cheat with his custom weapons). Not my favorite villainous (or heroic) trope, but having a few seemed like a good idea.

Ten more to go.

Three anachronistic martial artists from 69AD China, which should give me enough to cover that super-trope when added to the earlier ones like Saitetsu, Fist of Shadows, and White Steel. Probably forgetting someone…

If 69AD China rings a bell, you’ve probably played original edition Feng Shui or Shadowfist. It is not an accidental homage, if the literal eunuch sorcerer in the trio didn’t make that abundantly clear. I used to be more of a Jammers fan than Eaters of the Lotus, but Atlas ruined the monkey-cyberpunks big time with 2nd edition. Pfui.

Seven to go. Single digits at last.

And how about an alien space monster, for those times when you want to mess with the heroes’ ride, force them to go save the ISS, deal with an invasive xeno-species left behind by stellar visitors, or break the wrong cage in a space zoo?

Six to go. It’s getting increasingly difficult to find pairings that work well (or even adequately) mechanically, and this one can really just fold up and die if the initiative goes wrong for it or the heroes deal with its squirmling minions too easily. Probably best used either as a “surprise” third party in a fight that turns out to be hostile to everyone, or in multiples (it’s a type of critter, not a unique entity) in an high-energy environment where these things would congregate. Having one show up chewing on your ship’s power feeds when you’re busy with space pirates or something is another possibility.

Noteworthy partly for needing to break the mold on how to use Legion minions. Its weak minions don’t lose much from using the worst of their dice and it desperately needs the bonuses to heal and keep the minions coming, but a big mass Hinder can really ruin the process.

And in a flurry of activity, here’s another one, this time a microversal “big game” hunter who’s embiggened herself to collect specimens from your PCs’ setting for some no-doubt nefarious purpose.

I rather like her, in large part because her varying degree of re-enlargement for her brainwashed specimen minions is one of the more reasonable explanations I’ve managed for the Overlord’s wacky range of minion die sizes. Going all the way from d4 to d12 is and watching it vary up and down throughout the scene is just plain batty game design, and one of the reasons that I’m down to five out of 252 villains and two of them are still bloody Overlords. Gah.

A networked array of specialized drones built for emergency response assistance in case of disaster or large scale accident? What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, right. Supervillains. Forgot about them when budgeting for network security.

Still filling in gaps in my villain tropes with today’s offering. A very, very stereotypical dictator of a nebulously Eastern European rogue state, just the thing for heroes to punch in the nose.

Probably most at home during the height of the Cold War, but he’s still an acceptable villain in 2023, if somewhat lacking in nuance. Then again, Kim Jong Un isn’t exactly nuanced IRL.

Cookie to anyone who gets the homage without reading the Design Notes section.

Nearing the end here, we’ve got a Domain villain designed to act as an unpredictable third party in otherwise “normal” super-conflicts.

The supranym’s a double entendre, since ze thinks mob violence and chaos (a real riot) are absolutely hilarious (a laugh riot). Not a nice person at all.

Two more to go.

Not quite enough supernatural horror villains yet, so here’s one more:

One more to go.

So close!

Quick note - the Visitant doesn’t have Qualities selected for its abilities.

Fixed, FWIW.

One more villain, just in time for New Year’s Eve.

And that, as the saying goes, is that. I’ve now completed at least one of all 252 possible villain approach/archetype pairings, a project that’s taken a couple of years and initially started as a bit of a joke.

With all my SCRPG groups on hiatus until well into January I’ll be taking some time to re-assess where the blog is going in the future. Both the groups I’m playing in are considering whether to switch to new game systems in 2024, and the steady group I run for is also losing a couple of people soon. Seems like a good time to ask myself if this game is really the best choice to spend my time and energy on, especially with GTG’s slow release schedule for KS fulfillment reducing general interest in the game.

Congratulations on finishing an absolutely intense set of resources! That is a truly amazing list of villains, and a hell of a long road. Well done.

Whatever the future brings for you, I’m looking forward to it.

Thanks, FrivYeti. Your own Venture Comics project was certainly an assist with both inspiration and motivation toward the end. Didn’t think I’d ever get through those last few when I was down just two or three archetypes…

As long as I’m trying to clean up ongoing projects, here’s number five of the Syracuse Seven hero team I’ve been sluggishly porting over from their home system of Tiny d6 Supers.

Asterope Jones got quite the glow-up in the translation process, which seems appropriate for someone who uses a lot of Radiant and Electricity in her abilities. She’s probably the most changed of the team so far, although Leaping Lizard is pretty close.

And how about number six - not the Prisoner, although they’d be pretty much at home in that setting too.

A surprisingly easy port this time, although a bit low on damage output to really be throwing down with supervillains in the SCRPG. Then again, that just makes him a more accurate port, since the Tiny d6 Supers Justifier did not want a piece of that kind of action either.

One more to go.

Interesting. May be just a coincidence, but @The_Justifier used to be rather active on these boards until about 7 months ago. I suppose it’s not too far a stretch that multiple people have used that handle, however.

Never heard of them. If they happen to be a crimefighting mystery man shapeshifter, that’s definitely a coincidence.

EDIT: Oh, I see why they’re unfamiliar. As far I see their last post on the RPG board was November 2022 (on a thread where we were both posting, but I have to see a handle quite a bit to recall it after a year and some change). If someone’s not on RPGs regularly or getting mentioned on the podcast itself we probably won’t cross paths, RPGs is pretty much the reason I’m on these forums at all.

And let’s have the last of the Syracuse Seven heroes:

That finishes that project up - at least until I get to see the new Tiny d6 archetypes in the Gallantverse book and the team grows three members. Syracuse Ten doesn’t have quite the same ring, though. Maybe I’ll just have some heroes get snuffed or “graduate” to less of minor team.

FrivYeti’s recent posts on his excellent History of Venture Comics thread reminded I promised to do a Ferris wheel-related environment way back when he was still in the Golden Age, so here’s one take on the subject.

This is more of a Ferristown landmark kind of ride than a little carny rig for Night Rider/Dawn Rider, and it’s got some mildly complex location rules, but it should still be useable for a variety of action scenes. I included one possible concept with some detail, and suggested a few others, but I’m sure you folks can come up with plenty more.

I dig the pulpy Golden Age street-level feel that this give off.

Hey, Rube!: Whenever you have to save versus damage, if the result after mods is 2-3 add one Carny Worker to the Surrounding Grounds location. If the result is 4+ add two Carny Workers instead.

Great reference.

If the scene tracker runs out, the villain who was climbing the wheel will escape, carried away by a flying craft (zeppelins are very appropriate for Golden Age games) that makes an unexpected appearance from the clouds above.

Reminds me of the climax of the The Rocketeer film.

stealing the wheel and other civic landmarks for ransom

And this is delightfully Silver Age.

Just a heads up for anyone reading this thread, unless someone has a vigorous objection I’ll be taking this blog down sometime next week for at least a while, and perhaps permanently. There are a number of reasons for this:

• More than half my hits are from bots out of Singapore, and the ratio’s gotten a lot worse in the last month. They aren’t actually being much of a problem to me other than making accurate view counts more difficult, but I still don’t like it.
• Both the groups I’ve been playing in broke up over the holidays, with one just scattering and the other moving on to a rule system by a White supremacist that I want nothing to do with.
• The group I’ve been running for a couple of years now has also decided to try some other games and give me a break from moderating for a while.

Between the last two I no longer have a steady group to test ideas with, and all three were starting to seriously struggle with the game’s scene design system falling apart at “high level” play, ie when the PCs are up in the double-digit range for collections. We didn’t find a good solution for that before things came to a head, and with none forthcoming from GTG I think it’s time to pull the plug. I may start up again at some point in the future, but I’m not making any guarantees. A lot is going to depend on how much the Starter Kit re-release spurs interest, along with whatever other 2024 products may appear.

I’ll give a 24-hour warning before turning out the lights so anything people want to archive can be preserved.

Sorry to hear it. Archiving issues are a huge problem for RPG materials, and it seems a shame to lose all of the work you already did, but I understand.

Makes me wish the SCRPG wiki had taken off, but on the flip side, I didn’t put in the web time to build it either.

If I’m reading blogger right I have 90 days from when I take it down to restore everything, and I’ll back it up beforehand anyway so I’ll still have the data. If nothing else I want to let it cool down and hopefully discourage the worst of the bots, they’ve been out of control this month.

Given my actual view counts over the last few years it shouldn’t inconvenience much of anyone. I’ve got blogs with a tenth the content with more visitors, and my almost-dead minis blog is many times more active thanks to all the photo galleries. Like it or not the SCRPG just does not have a large online community outside of perhaps the discord, which I’m not interested in using. Maybe the revised Starter Kit will help that.

It would be a real shame to lose the content that’s there, even if you’re not planning to make more.

That’s quite sad to hear.

If it’s okay with you, I’ll probably want to copy down a number of the villains for my own hypothetical future use, if / when I do ever get an actual ongoing game going.

I take it that no one wanted to reset everything back down to 0 collections, with or without narrative explanation?

Of course, feel free. This stuff was meant to be used, even if my decision not to try to integrate the characters into the canon Sentinels setting probably didn’t help that any.

It was one of quite a few ideas we’d bandied about. All three groups had been experimenting with limiting collection usage based on desired session difficulty already, which was pretty similar in effect and not wholly satisfactory. It fixed the “how do I challenge this group?” problem the rules stop answering as collection count climbs, but resulted in a feeling that we were just spinning our wheels in the long run without the opportunity to really cut loose and use everything we had “earned” through play.

Considering this old blog post of mine (which turned out to be severely overoptimistic in its final paragraph) it’s ironic that there were so many early complaints in reviews about lack of advancement. If anything, advancement turned out to be too fast for the good of our game, and without some designer guidance on “high level play” (for lack of a better term) addressing the problem was harder than we were prepared to deal with. Since even 6-8 months of weekly sessions starts straining the scene design system it’s pretty clear the folks grousing about lack of advancement hadn’t actually played the game much at all.

gosh, I’m sorry you’re having to deal with all that at once

Last day before I throw the blog on hiatus. Still struggling with Singapore bots.

I did copy down many of the posts into a Google Drive, so if anybody else here wants them — and if Chief_Lackey_Rich allows it — I’d be perfectly willing to share them.

I’d love to get them from you. Keep wanting to get them downloaded, but having issues making the time to do it.

Count me in for wanting them! I’ve downloaded a couple and was hoping to get more, but this month has been endlessly chaotic and I haven’t been able to make the time. Knowing what you’ve got might help me get others.

Okay, here’s the link to the folder: Villainy Unpublished Archive - Google Drive

(Let me know if the it’s not working.)

The folder has, I think, most of the villain posts — not all of them, though, as copying down those that I did took quite a bit of time already. Of course, if there are any missing that anyone particularly wants to save, it should be quite easy to get them.

No problem copying and sharing, folks. The blog may well be back at some point, but I’d like to let it cool down to try to shake some bots. Really not comfortable with them doing whatever they’re doing.

I do hope the blog comes back at some point, I really enjoy the stuff you create.

I’ve saved every individual entry to archive.org for those who still want to read them.

That should save some hunting while it’s AWOL. Also another backup if anything goes awry when I do try to restore it.

All right, I’ve restored everything for the time being at least. We’ll see how well a couple of weeks off shakes some of the bots. Did some minor editing while I was at it, mostly correcting spelling errors and the like.

Well, @FrivYeti’s enjoying his anniversary this week so I guess I’d better try to hammer my old campaign notes into something worth posting so there’s something new to read around here.

Today’s offering is an environment designed to be used as the aftermath of the heroes defeating a particularly grandiose villainous war machine. Also good for reskinning into a starship crashlanding, the demolition of a major base facility, a disabled kaiju’s remains, or even something as mundane as a battered naval warship beached to keep it from sinking altogether.

Mega-Wreckage Site

Got to actually play last weekend even if it was just a one-shot. The GM wanted a group of heroes with some kind of connection to the 60s/early 70s to go up against a Big Bad who’d time-jumped from the era, so Silver Age zaniness was in the cards. I came up with this lovely lass, at least partly because I’d been watching old honey West episodes again:

Go-Go Robo, Hippie Fembot Super-Speedster

Fun times were had by all.

I was reminded the other day that this villain hadn’t gotten posted when I was making my big push - he’d overlapped with the earlier Deadface as a Bully/Inhibitor build - but they have fairly different styles so there’s no reason not to put him up now.

Tirade, A deranged Conspiracy Theorist Turned Demagogue Supervillain

I occasionally get people asking about other online reseources for the SCRPG, so I’ve put up a brief post with links to things that I’ve found most useful/interesting over the last few years. As it says on the post, if anyone has has links they’d like to suggest I’ll take a look and update accordingly.

Other SCRPG Online Resources

on YouTube Brian Wolfhunt has videos I liked introducing the system for newbies.

Pretty sure I’ve seen them, along with quite a few of his other vids. There’s some other excellent breakdowns and playthroughs over there as well, of course. If you’ve got links I’ll be happy to add them to the post, but I’ve been avoiding youtube since they started insisting on users disabling ad blocks (which I wouldn’t do for my own relatives, much less a corporation) so fishing them up myself isn’t happening.

Not the right place to discuss it, but there are, of course, ways around that.

I’m aware, but unwilling. There’s more than enough truly free media content out there to sate my needs even if I became a Legion archetype villain, and many of the YT creators I was most enthusiastic are available elsewhere anyway.

I do rather miss Seth Skorkowsky, though.

A Player’s Introduction of the Sentinels RPG (youtube.com)

Guide to Creating Characters in the Sentinels RPG (youtube.com)

A Quick Look at Playing and Running the Sentinels RPG (youtube.com)

Thanks, updated the blog.

New series of posts starting up doing an overview of the gameplay loop and what actually happens in a session. Today’s offering examines the three types of scenes and how they work:

Sentinel Comics RPG Gameplay Overview Part 1: Basic Ingredients

@Chief_Lackey_Rich: Looks like the link is for your editing version? When we hit it, it goes to the Blogger main page.

Fixed.

Next part of the current series on gameplay. Probably be one more and then I’m done, unless something else occurs to me.

This one’s mostly an examination of how to prep and sequence different scenes types, with practical examples of starting points for a session.

So apparently I got this guy about 90% done, shoved the post in drafts and proceeded to forget about it for…almost a year? Which means I spent the last few months thinking I was done with my “one of every villain approach and archetype” project when, in fact, my Ancient Squad baddie was loitering in electronic limbo. Sigh.

Anyway, here he is with his band of signature lieutenants:

Cursed immortal doomed to walk the Earth till the final judgement, pawn of dark powers beyond his comprehension, pretty much done with the whole schtick and just wants to get it all over with.

A villain written up to resolve a lingering Major Twist effect from a campaign that ended before I could use him. Well, maybe someday…

Musclemind Maximus, Not As Dead As Expected

Seriously, when you stop the Doomsday Device on the last turn with a Major Twist to boot, that villain you dumped in a vat of boiling chemicals probably did, in fact, survive. What did you expect?

More villainy, this one the very worst kind - a trust fund baby.

Paycheck

His motto: It Takes Money To Steal Money, So Hire The Best.

Paycheck’s getaway vehicle mentions Baron Bowman apropos of nothing, so I’m guessing this could’ve been copy-paste overlooked in proof.

Dammit, caught two instances and zoned out on the third. Fixed. Thanks.

Digging through my campaign notes again, this weirdo villain was the result of a Major Twist in an older campaign and has been cropped up in others a few times since.

Meta-textually speaking, this one was probably popular with artists and colorists, since conceptually it’s drawn as a vaguely human-shaped void filled with zip-a-tone dots that doesn’t even need to maintain consistent dimensions. And you thought Kirby collages were time-savers.

Couldn’t resist filling in the backstory for a one-shot character I will probably never play again, so here’s a retro-writeup for the 1960s hero & villain pair whose shenanigans ultimately led to the creation of Go-Go Robo, along with some period-appropriate minions:

Really need to stop doing writeups for canonically dead supers that I’m likely to never get any use out of. Got some nice alliteration going on there, though.

Finally started playing in another campaign after a dry spell, so time for a new hero.

This guy’s still pretty new with just two sessions under his belt, and his personality’s still growing. Like many form-changer archetypes he’s a Swiss army knife of powers and abilities but can’t access all his tricks at once. His stupidly basic supranym doesn’t begin to make up for all the absurd Comic Book Science technobabble explaining (handwaving) how his abilities and forms work, but the game’s got a nuSilver Age vibe so that’s okay.

We’ll see how he develops going forward, assuming the game lasts long enough for some change.

A couple of connected villains from a short magic-focused game a couple of years back, dug up after FrivYeti’s Madame Calamity post the other day reminded me they existed. They’re a bit of a specialized duo as written because of how they were used in my game, but I’ve stuck some suggestions on how to use them independent of one another (albeit with different background fluff) down in the Design Notes section. A lot less versatile than Madame Calamity since they can only transform from small-to-Titan and not the other way, but still handy to have on the villain roster.

They were originally inspired by the Warner Brothers short “Show Biz Bugs” where Daffy blows himself up on stage and when an encore is called for his ghost laments that it was a great trick but he can only do it once, which is equally true for poor Hugo here. That was the last cartoon I saw before leaving for my first day of kindergarten way back when and it’s always stuck with me.

New hero for a potential play-by-post game. This guy’s young enough to be a Masks character, but he’s been through some rough times in his short life. Stay in school, kids.

Finally got around to putting together a coherent writeup for the secret magical conspiracy that was responsible for Hugo Hellbinder and his parasitical WMD. They’re bad people, even by evil wizard standards.

As an organization writeup, includes minions, lieutenants (which make up the actual leadership), and a bunch of magical creations or summons for heavier support against meddling heroes.

A gimmick villain from the first ongoing game I ran, which had a 1960s SHIELD-inspired super-agent theme. Think they first showed up about three sessions in and made return appearances for a couple of months before the heroes finally managed to catch them. If that game had kept going I had plans for them to eventually reappear, only this time working for one of US alphabet agencies (CIA, NSA, etc.) in exchange for being let of prison.

Wow, that’s one hell of a resilient villain. I hadn’t thought of combining “ignore the last hit against you” with “heal”; if the players don’t pile on really effectively, that can be hard to punch through, especially with all the Hinders in play.

Yeah, silly, isn’t it? The Hinders help too, they can really degrade incoming damage. At least it’s mostly reaction dependent so there’s workarounds, but you really don’t want them to get a turn in before the next hit after the failed “finisher” blow - that can easily be a 5 point swing, which isn’t hey when you’re on the ropes. I remember one player putting a 23 point Charged-Up Blast into Slink when they had 13 Health left and dealing a whole point of damage, leaving them to heal from 12. That was fun, once.

If you want maximum frustration, combine that Loner ability with an Approach that reduces damage. React to a finisher, change damage to 1, reduce damage by (probably) 2 or 3 so the end result is zero damage. Doesn’t make much practical difference in the grand scheme of things but man, it’s adding insult to lack of injury.

New environment, and a pretty wacky one at that.

Aside from some really demented twists, there’s also a trio of suggestions for plots that lead to this environment with accompanying scene element ideas.

Sigh. Let’s try this again with the links all right and everything. I’m like a drunken monkey on the keyboard today.

I guess if I’m going to do a cartoon environment another cartoon villain to go with it wouldn’t hurt.

Not everyone’s going to want to use Mister Mean or Deadeye Mouse, after all.

This Clown Town cartoon stuff’s getting out of control.

Dedicating this week the the worst excesses of the Nineties, a decade of comics that produced some real gems and a staggering amount of utter trash as the Speculator Boom (and Bust) distorted the entire industry. Half of our current table (self included) spent years behind the counter in comic shops back then, and we’ve been enjoying ourselves parodying the bottom tier books with a few one shots lately. Oh, the memories. The terrible, awful memories.

Starting off with a very metatextual environment reflecting the kind of nonsense you could expect to run into when perusing the more disappointing books of the period.

This is an absolutely brilliant and terrible meta-environment. 11/10, no notes.

Continuing Nineties Week with a villain who reflects two regrettably recurring features of the decade - petty, childish edginess and inadequate artistic skills. When you you just can’t stay on-model, creating a metamorph character to compensate just makes good sense. Taking a cheap shot at a major competitor, not so much.

Another thing the dark side of the Nineties produced a lot of were copycat characters. Some were more transparent than others, and there’s always a fine line between homage and ripoff, but I think I’ve managed to parody the worst of the trope with this hulking fellow - without quite copying an actual published example, of which there have been several over the years:

Just pure coincidence I’m sure that Ang-Gorr shares part of a name with Ang Lee, who directed the 2003 film featuring a character that is legally distinct and certainly not the reason behind a copyright infringement suit.

I’m embarrassed to say it really is nothing but fortunate happenstance. I’d managed to almost completely forget that film even existed, and sure didn’t remember its director after more than twenty years.

Nineties Week continues with a nod to one of the most notorious storylines of the decade. I’ve also managed to work in a bonus trope with yet another forcibly misspelled character name in the interest of being kewl and edgy. We didn’t actually use this guy for a properly sprawling saga (it was a parody one-shot, not a multi-year campaign) but he still got up to some shenanigans that would have had Biomancer calling his lawyer about copyright infringement if he existed in the same universe.

Today’s Nineties tropes aren’t entirely associated with lousy books, so it’s a bit of a cheat - but to make up for it you get both a superhero, a full villain writeup, and a lieutenant, all connected to one another. They aren’t even an utterly terrible concept, so for them to be a proper Bad Nineties Comic there must have been something wrong beyond the writing or art. I prefer to imagine the book was simply terminally late, never managing to make deadline and gradually becoming more and more erratic until the despairing publisher finally stopped pretending the creators could get it together and officially gave the title a merciful end. There were certainly more than a few of that sort of heartbreaker back in the day.

Cookie for you if you guess the twist before reading the blog post.

As Bad Nineties Week continues it’s time for a nod to fan service. Every era has its own brand of eye candy and that’s probably never going to change, but the Nineties produced some particularly off-putting attempts at portraying the human figure. Sure, it wasn’t all drawn by people who flunked anatomy and figure-drawing, but when the artists of the decade got it wrong they got it really, really wrong.

Also taking the opportunity to riff on several art tropes that mysteriously seem to affect primarily female characters, from absurdly fragile costumes to “artistic” rips and injuries to the anime-inspired naked transformation sequences. And all on one character who’s also a Mary Sue! What fun, I can’t wait to play her.

Although that Red combo she’s running will make me feel bad. Just silly.

And Bad Nineties Comics Week comes to a close with one last post offering some suggestions for tweaking pre-existing characters to mesh with the environment that started all this. Most of it is largely thematic, although there are some options to swap in some homebrew abilities for ones you’ve already got.

Another supervillain who didn’t quite make it into Bad Nineties Week despite his “Extreme!!!” name. Got bumped at the last minute by Ang-Gorr - I may work a rivalry into a storyline at some point as a nod to that.

Reformed villain superhero writeup today, mostly intended for use as an NPC, either in their heroic
or old villain lieutenant form. There’s a full hero writeup but I’m not convinced playing them would be much fun beyond maybe a session or two where the story is taking place at sea where they, well, suck less. A powerhouse this guy is not.

Can I just add that the Big Two are supranym hogs? Both of them have Cormorants, neither of whom have anything whatsoever to do with fishing birds. Marvel’s is some kind of cosmic entity’s OP servant who casually beat up the Fantastic Four, and DC’s was a nonpowered assassin who showed up in a couple of issues and promptly died. He wasn’t even working for the Penguin, which would at least have had some kind of vague connection - both seabirds, after all.

Sticking with the seagoing posts from yesterday, a big new environment/keystone challenge combo post reflecting a maritime disaster in the making.

Written to be as versatile and reusable as possible without needing much tweaking. Should be able to handle a super-pirate assault on a cruise ship as easily as some mad scientist sabotaging a science vessel to make off with an experimental gadget in the confusion to a kaiju trying to eat an aircraft carrier and more.

Very cool, and well-combined! I only have one question - you chose to have the villains be able to increase the challenge boxes, instead of the more usual advancing the scene tracker when something is falling apart. Was there a particular reason for the choice? Just game balance?

Partly variety, but also a desire not to make things too hard on the heroes.

Advancing the tracker effectively makes all challenges harder to complete at once (since the heroes have all just effectively lost an action) while just adding a box to a single challenge will only offset a single hero Overcome. You could theoretically have the core challenge, a fire, and even multiple smoke challenges running at once, and the smoke and fire are inflicting global penalties till they’re solved (or time out for smoke, but that just starts a fire or makes it worse if it’s already ablaze), which could already be a lot of pressure on them.

Of course, if they’re breezing through the scene anyway you could do the usual trick of advancing the tracker instead, although that has more impact if there’s smoke and/or fire going as well so the tracker might need some time to do its thing. Like usual, what environment twists you bring into play a big difficult dial to turn.

My reasoning might be wrong, though. Only ran this once in a recent one-shot and it worked okay, although the players didn’t feel too stressed. They won on the last round of Yellow when the last villain did the math and realized if he didn’t Overcome to escape instead of turning the sinking ship challenge back on he was going to get captured, and he didn’t want the ship sunk that badly.

I guess I could have been a little meaner about twists. The players were generating a bunch for using Red abilities early and I was mostly going with their suggestions for those instead of haggling. They were still being pretty nasty to themselves anyway. One guy managed to lose his d12 Telekinesis to a major twist while also dropping his d12 Science to a d6 with repeated minor twists while using Red Overcomes in Yellow. His die pools were looking awfully sad by round six but he’d gotten five of the six successes they wound up needing on the key challenge.

On an unrelated note, I did some busy work on the blog so the unwieldy supervillain sub-index now has four alphabetical sub-sub-indices with about a quarter of baddies in each. Easier to scroll through now, albeit not quite as convenient to just browse names. Too boring to link to, you can find them through the main index linked at the bottom of each post.

Prepping for some horror-themed October gaming my circle has planned with a new supernatural entity, a vengeful spirit hunting for her killers to drag to Hell with her.

Since I’m playing as well as running a Halloween game, I needed a suitable hero PC. This gent’s a supernatural noir detective who leans hard into thematic SFX. Transmutation is an easy way to make your own dead leaves, creepy fog and even iconic paraphernalia like skulls and bones and jack-o-lanterns.

Like most Divided heroes his action economy is kind of dreadful and he’s probably too defensive a build, but I know there’s a spooky heavy hitter coming to the team so maybe we’ll balance each other out some.

Ah yes, the old [Champaign City] listing in backgrounds and skill listings. My SCRPG game is set in Champaign City as a reference to it. A fictional historical governor made a champaign promise to build a new costal trade hub city. Probably northern California, possibly southern Washington (sorry Oregon) since the state and county name does not really matter in 80% of supers’ games.

I am writing these posts for general utility, so that will show up now and then. AFAIK the guy running it for us will probably be using Schenectady NY (his home, and a city all but one person at the table has lived in at one point or another). The real version of the city is decidedly lacking in both superheroic and supernatural activity, sadly.

Funny, I was having a back-and-forth on the subject of partially real vs. wholly fictional settings for supers campaigns over on the Hero Games forums just yesterday. I don’t think there’s One True Answer to that, but as I said on the blog years ago there are some advantages to mining real-world urban history for story ideas and to make the city feel more real. Even an invented city can benefit from pieces of real history being transplanted into them.

I’ll be needing two new PCs for our planned October games. Doctor October has been done and posted for a while, and now after much waffling I’ve got my second hero for what’s being pitched as a more gonzo Golden Age style story. Hopefully I’ll fit in okay with this concept. Practicing my Italian accent now.

always love it when immortals remembering to keep up with modern technology-
“of course, I know how to use a smart phone I was over 200 when Alexander Grahm Bell was born”

With Technology d6 he isn’t exactly a super-hacker, but being a very elaborate piece of magical clockwork has encouraged paying some attention to changing times. Helps that he can pretty much casually rewire electronics without needing tools - Metal d10 is pretty potent. I was tempted to get Principle of Clockwork on him but it seemed a little too narrow after ~four centuries of doing his own repairs.

Looked at my blog stats today after an anomalous spike in views and I have to assume the sudden uptick in readers from Italy is tied to the vagaries of search engines and using the word “corragioso” in the most recent post’s title. Hope I’m not disappointing too many people when the rest of the blog turns out to be English and rather lacking in supers with any connections to Italy itself.

But hey, the whole “Lion of St, Mark/Lion of Venice” design really is one of my favorite mythological critters, and Corragioso is a good name for one of them. I can actually imagine how it would move of the ground, which is more than I can say for griffins or hippogriffs with their weird eagle feet.

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!

Particularly appropriate invocation* of thread necromancy, since the new post is a hero who’s literally a living lightning bolt.

Behold, Levin-Brand! And some commentary on sub-par character build options.

*Because it’s an Altered Beast reference, which opens with Zeus chucking lightning bolts at a tombstone to revive some heroes to go do his bidding. And Levin-Brand is a similar divine lightning bolt, albeit a badly-aimed one. Get it?

Not bad. I’d be tempted to give him Intuition instead of one of his other powers, so that he can make better use of his various knowledge qualities, but as far as pulling those sets together he’s certainly useable.

I suppose he could swap that dinky d6 Teleport for it easily enough, but at the end of the day any fiddling just results in going from a default d4 to a d6, which nets a meager +1. Not meaningless, but I’m kind of hoping not to get stuck being an Overcome monkey anyway. Really nothing I can do about that godawful 6/8/8 status die spread unless I retcon the Red, and I’d rather take my chances on twisting to dump a minion swarm early in Yellow than try to compensate for a weak Overcome game.

Couldn’t quite reach Nanomax levels of minimal d8s on his character sheet, but he’s kind of close.

First game with him starts in about an hour, we’ll see how it goes.

Neat. Yeah, I’m definitely getting Thunderbolt Genie vibes from him. And the backstory of being something akin to Billy Batson’s lightning bolt before getting blown off course is certainly interesting.

Regarding his dependency on Electricity, yeah, losing it or having it degraded would definitely impair most of his tricks. He’s still got a few tricks in his bag he can use with Absorption, but none of them are win-con progressing.

I wonder: if a twist or something degrades or eliminates a hero’s power or quality, would you allow the hero to Overcome to restore it?

Bit less pink, though.

The Shazam bolts have been deflected and misdirected a number of times in canon, but it always just results in a dud or the wrong person getting the powers for a while (including at least one of the Sivanas, IIRC) rather than a free-willed being. When I first read Johhny Thunder as a kid I remember wondering if the genie was actually a rogue Shazam bolt or otherwise related to the Marvel Family mythos, but no, turned out he’s “just” another variation on the many extradimensional imps DC is plagued with.

Personally, it would depend on the situation and how well they can justify it. I really dislike just saying “no way” to clever Overcomes, but I wouldn’t make it easy. Levin-Brand couldn’t restore his Lightning die size just by sticking his fingers in a wall socket or even nomming on regular high tension wire, but if he had access to a power substation and was willing to damage the electrical grid that would be enough for me. Probably better if he can use villain resources instead. Giant robots and doomsday devices usually come with some pretty powerful generators, but they’re also usually well-protected against interference so maybe multiple Overcomes would be needed.

And really, the only way you lose P/Q dice completely is on Major Twists (which are supposed to be truly awful and last till end of issue) and a couple of villain upgrades (which are also supposed to be awful - they “cost” a whole scene element- but don’t last as a long). Minor Twists just downgrade die sizes, which is painful but you can cope with it for the duration of a scene if it doesn’t happen too often.

FWIW, L-B played fine in last night’s session (and we have another later this weekend), even with him down to a d8 Electricity for most of one scene after he twisted a couple of times to flood the zone with minions by using Spark Motes early. When you start with a d12 losing a step or even two isn’t totally crippling.

The big villain in that scene lacked sweep attacks and I wanted to see what it was like being on the other side of a minion swarm for a change. We had a hefty team Boost both times I did it so I was getting ~9 d6 sparks each time, which made it worth the cost even against a -2 damage reduction on the big guy.

Other than that Levin-Brand did as expected. Good damage output in fights, solid Overcome game for things involving electrical stuff, bounced in and out of Red Health five times in the course of two action scenes. It was a little embarrassing being outraced by a guy on a what amounted to powered roller skates. High point of the evening for me was a whimsical second turn Overcome on a teleport gate the environment had opened up where a lucky-ish 3d6 Teleport + Science + Status roll let me redirect it so everyone coming through got dumped in a nearby vat of “prototype containment gel” for a big fat penalty. Totally worth the minor twist on that one.

Notable quotes, all relating to my lackluster mobility powers:

“Slowest Lightning Bolt In the World!”

“Look, it’s not the length of your high-voltage arc, it’s how you use it.”

“I was thinking of Zeno’s paradox and it slowed me down, okay?”

Or just doing a lotta damage to whatever poor sap gets caught in the way (as happens with Superman in Kingdom Come).

True. Speaking of which, what would even happen to Levin-Brand if he completely lost his Electricity die? I mean, he’s entirely made up of lightning, yeah? So, what would his form even be like without it?

I’ll see if I can roll badly enough over the next few weeks to find out for you.

The story’s only going to run four-five sessions and poor Levin-Brand will probably get retired when it’s done, so a tragic ending where he just dissipates while saving the day with a key Major Twist isn’t off the table by any means. Don’t mind playing the guy, but I’m not real invested in his long term prospects.

you just know that if there was a cartoon based on your characters that L-B’s player would always take disabling a power or ability as a major twist and would always choose a major twist.
“O/o/p/s I s/h/o/r/t/e/d o/u/t a/g/a/i/n”

That, or winding up stuck in a battery and used to power some villainous gadget until he can get loose.

It’s kind of like the Human Torch. When you’re all about one thing and that one thing has a bunch of counters and exploits to use against it, you can expect to see them turn up with minor variations over and over again throughout your whole career.

In the plus side, some things that seem like they should work don’t. In our second session some jackass thought he’d disable L-B by summoning a rainstorm to short him out. Had a fun time explaining that lightning bolts and rain mix just fine while I was mildly electrocuting him. It’s like he’d never see a thunderstorm.

Which also led to an running argument about how it should be “lightning storm” and thunder deserves second billing because it always misses the cue and comes in a little late, which in turn led to us establishing that thun…er, lightning storms are actually the elements having a metaphysical jam session and meteorology is a crock.

I’m way behind on the January Character Creation Challenge, but I might as well use it as an excuse to finish a few writeups I’ve had sitting around as drafts. Today we’ve got a somewhat specialized super-thug for hire who’s a particularly tough customer one-on-one.

If you want to make him even more of a pain to deal with, drop his reaction for Ludicrously Durable (I) Reduce all damage dealt to you by (another) 2.

Bully + Indomitable is one the few combos that let you double up on that trick, and while Titans can still sport even higher damage reduction “just” 4 points is usually plenty to frustrate team interventions.

Gruji entering cosplay contests is a fun personality/hint to origin bit

I can also just imagine a group of game designers getting dragged along behind Gruji and B.G. Gruff on a bar crawl after Gen Con. I could also see a hero sending money to some game industry celebrity so they can keep the booze flowing until the heroes can arrange a sting to arrest them.

An orc’s got to do something with their time off, right? Can’t stand around in a 10’x10’ room guarding a treasure chest all the time.

Another hero today, checking off the last of the archetypes I haven’t done for the blog yet. Also cleared Unremarkable and Apathetic off my list, so that much closer to hero bingo.

Modular is by far my least favorite archetype, in part because the mechanical complexity doesn’t feel at all worth it, in part because the balance feels dubious at best (just look at those mode abilities), and in part because explaining why a hero is modular in the first place is a stretch. Just look at the time-travelling-alien-gestalt hoops I had to jump through here. Yeesh.

It’s enough to make me dislike Bunker in the card game just through association - which is ironic, because if you used Method 1 Bunker would be impossible to roll into. There’s only two power sources that can get a 20 for an archetype, and either one has a 1% chance of doing so. Certainly achieves the goal of keeping the compex character build away from newbies, I’ll say that for it.

The one Modular I threw together was not to play but to get a clear picture of an NPC ally hero and what he might be able to do if he was in the spotlight instead of a supporting character.
Character is a kung fu master that “realigns his chi” and “assumes a dedicated stance”
also, he is part of a group of reincarnate cycle kung fu immortals, so he has teammates to support the flaws in his fighting style.
He looks like a screaming Al Leong his partners are a cartoon-ish Gerald Okamura and a young Keye Luke (copy paste of an actual self-portrait)

Yeah, Modular isn’t weak the way that Divided is, but it’s just way more work than you really should need for the concept. Especially when Form-Changer exists and does the concept much more fluidly.

It’s really the most obvious case where an archetype was designed because they wanted to mimic a character’s card deck rather than their nature. Bunker would work fine as a Powered Suit / Form-Changer if you were allowed to use Technological powers as its form-changing (and you should be allowed to, it’s a silly restriction.)

edit And, like, easily. Powered Suit gives him physical damage reduction, a persistent boost (Lidar Intel) and a multi-target attack (Grenade Launcher).

Then he gets two Green Forms: Upgrade Mode (Clever Form) and Turret Mode (Strong Form). His Yellow Form is Recharge Mode (Regenerating Form), and in Red he activates his RIOT Cannon (as per his existing build.)

Absolutely. And while Bunker doesn’t generally seem to use Form-Changer’s power die reallocation trick, if you wanted that would also allow you to model custom specialist suits like the stealth model. Modular’s not weak (and might actually be too strong) and works better mechanically than some other archetypes, but it just feels so pointlessly complex and unneeded.

Funny, it never ocurred to me that there are restrictions that would prevent Bunker from being built as a Form-changer (and I actually never tried to find out).
Just whenever I read through the various forms, I intuitively thought ‘yeah, that’s basically the Bunker concept’.

Modular would seem to introduce much more drastic changes, transform-into-a-jet level.

Divided never really worked for me - hiding a very strong other form behind some obstacles would make sense mechanically. But hiding a slightly mediocre form in the same way just doesn’t.
But I guess that’s the same idea of balancing tradeoffs that makes me struggle with the Struggling background: the game doesn’t quite care much for that balance, and if I do more then there’s always houseruling (I grant Struggling a free third Principle, which works nicely - trading might for broader set of bonds as it befits the narrative).

I digress, sorry.

Divided fails largely due to action inefficiency issues IME. Also feels like it’s being charged a premium for the ability to take a 10/8/6 status die with the civilian personality and then a 6/8/10 for the heroic one, which is one of its few standout features. Certainly doesn’t do a great job of modeling the extreme power differences between classic Divided archetypes like Billy Batson/Captain Marvel or Rick Jones/Other Captain Marvel. Banner/Hulk is a little better, although the inability to resist changing or to calm down during a fight and shift back plays false to the many times where that happens on page over the years.

Struggling is miserably bad, but I don’t think it’s actually all that much worse than any of the Backgrounds that don’t offer a d10 or d12 power die going forward. Being stuck with nothing bigger than a d8 during Power Source really weakens the final character, and that makes Adventurer, Criminal and Exile trap choices you only take for the fluff. Dynasty isn’t much better, but having two d10 Qualities makes up for a lot in some builds.

Yeah, I don’t think I would use Divided for DC Captain Marvel; he doesn’t really have any skills as Billy that aren’t also available to him as the Cap, and he can change forms reflexively in the middle of an action. It’s just fluff that could occasionally be shut off by a twist. Rick Jones is a bit trickier; I don’t recall, but he might actually have Qualities that his Cap doesn’t.

But overall, Divided fundamentally fails because it provides fewer benefits than Form-Changer with increased restrictions and substantially more complexity. It’s not unfixable, but yeah, that action economy problem is severe.

Yeah, I think Rick knew stuff that an alien Kree soldier just plain didn’t (and vice versa), but I might be wrong. Been a long time. That sort of thing probably ought to be modeled with separate RP qualities, which is sort of implied by choosing two different personalities.

It’s strange how they got things right with the transformation abilities of Form-Changer and (though I dislike the archetype as a whole) Modular and then cocked it up so badly with Divided - which should have been simpler on the surface of things since there’s just a binary state situation going on.

But what can you do outside of dream of a proper FAQ/errata page?

New post on the blog with some thoughts about how to use full teams of villains in a scene or story, since they tend to cramp your scene element budget rather badly.

Neat post!

I recognise bullet point 1 as being used in “Off the Rails,” and bullet point 4 as being used in “Battle of the Bands.” It would be interesting to see what an adventure issue that used either of the other two options could look like. And bullet point 2 reminds me of the structure of many of the Silver Age JLA, JSA, and Avengers comics where they’d have to fill like five chapters and so have different members of one villain group go to different places and do things.

As a sort of combination of bullet points 2 and 3, one could throw a whole team of full villains at the heroes, even if it’s more than they can handle at once, but telegraph to them that they probably won’t be able to take them all down. Then the heroes can capture, defeat, or disable one or two of the villains before retreating, then rest up and maybe prepare a bit before confronting the remainder of the baddies again, and potentially repeating until they’re all taken down.

Another way in which one could mix up these ideas is to do bullet point 2 and have the heroes face off against a series of villains in different action scenes, and then for the big climax, use bullet point 1 and have the main baddie as a full villain and the others as lieutenants 'cos they’re less narratively important.

Or, do that in reverse order. Throw a scene with one big villain and a bunch of lieutenants at the heroes, but have the scene somehow involve the villains seizing more power, and then do a series of individual scenes with smaller groups of full villains, representing those who got away from the first scene powered up.

there’s nothing players hate as much as watching NPCs roll dice against one another.

Agreed. Another way to help minimise player boredom around this could be to just use average die values for the infighting villains’ actions rather than actually roll. (With something like saying that Mid = average value, Min = average – 2, and Max = average + 2 or something.)

Yeah, you can mix-and-match approaches pretty easily. Real comics see 2+3 combined pretty often, where an initial team brawl sees the heroes defeated or fleeing, then the overconfident villains split up to do stuff (often ruling the world for a bit) while the recovered heroes run around studying the weaknesses in their schemes and hunting powers-ups, followed by a grand climactic brawl where the odds have changed (and maybe the villains are less cohesive and more backstabby) and our heroes win the rematch. You can play around with points 1 and 4 while doing all that if you want to really get tricky with things.

Bullet Point 2 is essentially used as part of “Stolen Legacy”, with the introductory scenes involving Inductor and Tear wrecking havoc, and then joining Stygian in the third scene if they escaped from their initial scenes. There’s only the three of them, but the basic premise works pretty well there.

I mean, we’re all drawing from the same original source material. A good comic script will usually make a good framework for Sentinels adventures.

Rather wordy post today going through the process of designing a PC for someone else, showing how I translated a concept into game mechanics. Still a bit of a work in progress, but the crunchy stuff is done pending some decisions by the person who’ll actually be play the character.

EDIT: The player who’ll be using Doc has made his final decisions and tweaks to the character draft, and I’ve updated the post to reflect the changes in red text. Should be interesting to see how he plays out in action. I’m reasonably certain I designed a more mechanically interesting PC for him than my own (who’ll be up shortly).

Another wordy hero build today, this time for my own PC in the pay-by-post game Doctor Demiurge was built for. She’s kind of a rare case where most of my action abilities aren’t so compelling that I’ll feel bad about doing creative Overcomes instead, particularly if I can get a Principle involved.

Another new hero today, this one an experiment with the Struggling background, which really is pretty awful. Just look at those lousy die pools.

Be fun to roleplay this sap, though - with a little masochism.

I love that story and concept, so evocative and with just the perfect amount of humourous nods to established tropes.

(Without wanting to open that balancing discussion again, I’ve found it works well to grant Struggling background a third principle, to further that roleplaying depth while staying true to the shoddy dice pools. Just throwing it in again because it fits so well with this guy.)

I’ve seen a couple of experiments with improving Struggling in games other folks were running, including that one. The third Principle didn’t work very well in practice, since your weak dice pools make even Max die Overcomes pretty twisty. The player hated it anyway, which the GM “solved” by having them inherit a fortune during a collection rewrite and change the PC background to Upper Class. Not only funny, but they even kept their Responsibility Principle (Family, IIRC - one of those countless uncles turned out to be rich!).

The one I found most interesting was kind of an inversion of the Impulsive personality. Impulsive trades two steps of status dice for one step anywhere else (leaving them at a wretched 6/6/8 GYR status but probably turning a d10 into a d12), which is a pretty bad bargain. The Struggling mod traded its inherently bad dice for a die step bump to their Yellow status die, leaving them in the unique situation of having a possible d10 in Yellow, and no worse than d8. That actually seemed pretty okay, although I didn’t see it tested with the Struggling/Impulsive combo that would give you a 6/8/8 GYR and probably a d12 off of your archetype (assuming it had a d10 natively). I’d probably offer that to a player who wanted to go Struggling just to get some more testing in.

Haven’t done a villain in a while, so here’s a specialist design - a baddie whose abilities are specifically meant to put him on a death spiral of self-inflicted damage. He hits real hard, but the more he does so the faster his own Health drops. Bit of a puzzler for the players if they haven’t heard about him since he seems absurdly hard-hitting and impossible to slow down - right up until he runs out juice and short circuits spectacularly.

Oh my god, I love him.

I got to run him in a one-shot the other day and the players freaked out the second time in a row he hit someone for 2d12+d8 electrical damage - and for once there was no one with an electrical damage inversion ability looking for power lines to suck on during combat. When he did it a third time they were calling the fight unwinnable. And then he blew his own fuse the next round, and they proceeded to mop up the few d6 minions still standing with three hero turns remaining. Admittedly, everyone was in the Red by the end of it but that’s how it was supposed to work. Almost took one gal out but a defensive Reaction left her at 2 Health for the rest of the scene. Most memorable “easy tier” fight I’ve run in a long while.

When I tallied it up Omegavolt had done more damage to himself than anyone, but the team Gadgeteer had the second highest total thanks to a round one P+E penalty and a steady stream of “temporary” penalties that effectively became DOT effects thanks to his silly reaction. Penalties really become an exercise in factorial damage calculation with this villain.

I always like characters who start out from somebody just trying an odd mechanical build.

New hero writeup today:

This one started out as birthday request from a fellow player and got way out of hand. Much harder concept to explain than to play. Think “Emperor Augustus founded a super-soldier program that basically did what the God Learners did in Runequest’s Glorantha, and this guy wound up being their A Number One heroquester” and you’ve pretty much got it. He’s also temporal sinkhole so folks going back anywhere between the days of the Roman Empire up until yesterday are likely to run into him eventually.

New villain today, this one a demonstration of how much trouble Charged Up Blast can be when it’s on the villain’s side of a fight. We had a very impressive display of a PC using it in our PbP game recently, and a reminder that the baddies can do that sort of massive single hit was worthwhile.

Any Inventor villain can choose to take Empowered Destruction, but the way they use it in play can be quite different. KILL-A-BOT there relies on always having a bonus to fuel it thanks to her reaction, relying more on mass HInders and inventions (specifically her KILL-O-BOT minions) to keep her status die up and not caring so much anyway because she can generate a constant stream of fire if she wants. There’s some limited counterplay in the form of Reality Shaper’s Never Happened and some Red abilities, but those are rare or come too late to help much.

Contrast that to Carronade and his reliance on a reaction to charge up out of turn to do sustained fire. This offers more counterplay to limit him to(at best) alternate turns with the big shot. Don’t attack unless you have a no-reactions trick, and remove his bonuses with Overcomes and countering Hinders every chance you get.

And since they’re all massive single-target damage dealers, Omegavolt leaves Inventor out entirely and relies on Overpowered for an all-dice Attack instead. He winds with twice the base health as the other two, but he hits for slightly less and deals himself so much damage that he burns out very quickly indeed.

Another new hero today, this one another experiment in a “healer” build coupled with a really hard skew into team support in general. Costs them almost all their Attack options (as in only two of them, neither bigger than Mid die, and one is optional while the other is downright accidental. Probably would not want to play this one myself, but that’s more due to that Nurturing 6/6/12 status spread than anything else and that’s very easily fixed by swapping to any of the many 6/8/10 options.

There’s also a brief comparison with my other attempt at a “cleric” build in the design notes, which also didn’t thrill me but can at least kick some butt personally when he needs to.

Yeah, Nurturing is a tricky one. D6 Yellow really hurts if you don’t deliberately build around it.

And the inevitable high base Health means you have to suffer with it forever. 34 Health is not all that helpful when you spend 22 of it with 6 status.

I’m not convinced such a focused support build is going to pull their weight even with a 6/8/10 spread, The healing is almost a sideline most of the time, you really want the mass Boost going off again and again and I have my doubts how many chances you’ve have for that. Unless your allies can leverage that +3 or +4 as often as possible healing them constantly won’t matter, the scene tracker will time out on you too soon.

Couple more super-thugs I’ll be needing for a future post, so here they are in all their dubious glory. Includes the duo, an alternate solo writeup, and a lieutenant version for when they’re just background singers for the main villain.

OGRE himself is also an homage to the combat example in Champions 1e.

Today’s post is an experiment at porting a slightly oddball character from Supers RED to Sentinel Comics. Worked okay, although not as smoothly as my earlier Tiny D6 Supers ports.

Interesting mix of low Health and strong recovery, I wonder how it would work out in-game.

I don’t recall, maybe I’m just tired - have you done that thing where you specify what a character’s Conviction is before? I’ve always just left it as a die.

It’s not all that strong recovery since the likely pool is only d8, d8, d6, but the small gap between the top of Red (9) and the bottom of Green (21) it’s quite possible to spike back to Green in one middling-lucky roll, especially with bonuses. Which isn’t as helpful as you’d like, since the scene tracker has probably moved past Green itself, so you don’t get your nice d10 status die back

Looking back at it, I’m starting to suspect 10/8/6 personality types are at a real disadvantage compared to 6/8/10 or the steady-state 8/8/8 ones. You need you big status most in conflict scenes, and 10/8/6 types are guaranteed to lose theirs within (usually) at most two turns and can’t regain it once they do. 6/8/10 types will not only get their two turns from the tracker, they may well have extras from getting beat up early and can cycle in and out of Red multiple times IME if they’re built for it.

It’s more complex than that since 10/8/6 types perform better out of conflict (at least when healed up) and get their best status turns early where a 6/8/10 might not see the tracker even reach Red - but when that happens you’re usually winning anyway, and having your best status locked to Green abilities only is nowhere near as good as it being tied to Red ones. There’s reasons Bohemian would probably be dragging Yellows and Reds forward with twists, letting him get d10,d10,d10 for his P+E self-boost or do Give Time/Shared Trip (or even regenerating early to stay safer) in Yellow.

Presumably playtesting decided things were okay as-is, but a few years of play suggests that “Big Red” status arrays are much more popular (and probably more effective) than “Big Green” ones in my circles, anyway.

It’s one of those things I keep meaning to do consistently, and then promptly forget to more often than not. Figure it makes the character concept a little clearer for readers. Same goes for Formidable villains and their status weakness, and what the stages of a Titan’s status challenge are.

New game starting up, and that means a new hero PC for me. This one’s a bit of an experiment with the Power Armored source and its peculiar reaction.

This is a bit off-topic, but it seemed like it might be of interest to whoever’s still reading this board. While there’s nothing new on my usual SCRPG blog, my other, much older and long-disused miniatures-focused blog has been getting a few updates as I’ve been going through old photos and whatnot as a part of a general “clean up my trash before I die” effort, and yesterday’s post revolved around painted minis from years past - with some of the earliest (and most embarrassing) dating back nearly 25 years now.

There are two gallery posts now, the recent one with the oldest and most badly-photographed figures:

Really Old Stuff

And one from back in 2019 which ironically has somewhat newer paint jobs and images:

Somewhat Less Old Stuff

Hopefully you’ll find something inspirational there for your own games, or even decide to dabble in a super-skirmish mini game that isn’t HeroClix or Crisis Protocol.