I finished my Champions demo adventure on Tuesday. The players seemed to like it, though with eight, combats really dragged.
I'm reasonably pleased with the way it turned out. It ended up being a nice match to a four-issue mini-series. It was built primarily around the revelation that the sponsor of Megaforce, the superhero team, was actually a retired superspy secret agent ("Dr. Transistor", a nerd superhero) from the Secret Age of superheroes.* That went over well, though I was a bit rough on the scene transitions.
The primary antagonist was a secret organization called Spectrum, with color-coded agents (red = 100 pts, orange = 125 pts, etc.), and a supervillain group called Color Guard.** There was a secondary revelation there, too. The maguffin was a dingus Dr. Transistor picked up back in the day in the adventure entitled The Inscrutable Agents of the Thirteenth Floor.*** Said agents were impliedly aliens of unknown capabilities. Spectrum's agents carried weapons that incorporated alien tech. (In the Modern Age of superheroes, Earth has had some peaceful and non-peaceful contact with aliens, so tech specialists can recognize alien tech.) So the minor revelation was that Spectrum's purple agents are actually aliens (and, in all likelihood, the same as the inscrutable agents that Dr. Transistor met). That revelation also went over pretty well--enough so that, in the surprise round, when the superheroes burst in on the supervillains, they focused all of their efforts on knocking out the few high-level agents in the room, ignoring the supervillains.
*Take The Incredibles, especially production design and sound design, and move even more in the direction of Bond and Our Man Flint movies, and you've got the Secret Age.
**Name (and name only) swiped from Ridley's Those Who Hunt the Darkness, which I happened to read at exactly the time I needed a name, and it was exactly the name I needed. Led by Zenith (a perfectly evolved woman whose creator the Voyagers hated), Color Guard included my new favorite duo, Ultra-Violent and Infra-Fred, as well as Aurora (a Halo rip-off, without even the serial numbers filed off), Twilight, and the Polarized Man.
***It now occurs to me that I could have borrowed the phrasing from Alan Moore's GLC Annual story and called them The Unspeakable Agents of the Thirteenth Floor (cf. his "Unspeakable Children of the White Lobe"). "Inscrutable" describes them better, but "unspeakable" has a hell of a lot better kick.
Posted by Greg at June 10, 2005 4:54 PM
Who created Zenith? Inquiring Voyagers want to know.
Jack-of-all-Trades.
Just noodling around, Jack picked up this mousy personal assistant girl off the streets one day (think Michele Pfeiffer in Batman Returns), and turned her into a perfect being. Her values and expecatation of "normal" went a little wonky.
Jack's a force for chaos; he likes things to be interesting. "Interesting", unfortunately, often leaves a lot of human debris in his wake--folks turned into monsters or worse--which is why, of course, he's a supervillain. Jack's a true sociopath; other people aren't "real" to him.
From my doddering memories, the only villain we really "hated" was Jack (and he's the type to play with genes). I remember wanting to put the hurt on the Marquis, Lord Hawkwood, the Pan-STAR Board of Directors and the Brazilian Cabal, but the only one I remember the whole group hating was Jack.
Why? Because he was an arrogant jerk who we could never score a victory against. We foiled his plans, but we never got the cathartic frisson of putting the smackdown on him. I know the intent was that he was to be an ongoing nemesis like Dr Doom (crossed with the more insane incarnations of the Joker, maybe), but the FF usually got to beat the crap out of Doom before he turned tail and ran back to Latveria.
Now, let me say that it's not a slam against Greg when I make that statement. Doing a recurring villain in any RPG setting, even a super-heroic one where you don't get to kill the bad guy and take his stuff, is really hard stuff. I never managed to do that myself in my Champs games, and I salute Greg for trying.
Also, major faux pas on my part for never getting off my ass to work up the rest of the team's costumes in City of Heroes. I suck.
Jack was normally a Jonathan Crane-type (skinny, bookish, voice by Dean Jones), but when he wanted or needed to, he turned into George Pérez' version of Ripper (from Classic Enemies): Immensely muscled, mechanically enhanced, and with his skin inside-out, yech. (Voice by the 1970s 7-Up guy, with reverb turned up.)
I didn't really figure out how Jack managed to transform into a form that had mechanical enhancements, but I also didn't care, since it made a great visual.
Dude, you don't need a great explanation how he morphs from Nerd Boy into Perez's Ripper, it's a super-hero comic.
But, here's one: Jack has some pre-programmed biotech implants (or programmed nanites or some other handwave) that trigger the biochemical change. The allegedly "technological" implants are either biological changes that appear to be tech (those "tubes" are just exposed veins and such, and the metal is high density bone plates with some sort of metallic sheen) or he hasn't cracked the science necessary for it to be a completely organic change, and he has bionic implants that retract when not in "Ripper mode."
That does beg the question: can Ripper take other shapes? Maybe he's like The Head, and hasn't revealed the "Jumping Jack Flash" (fire control) shape to the public yet.
We don't worry about conservation of mass and energy because nobody else does in the Voyager-verse. (See: Microtech and White Lioness)
Or maybe a wizard did it.
Jack's a true sociopath; other people aren't "real" to him.
Cool. Does he have a giraffe?
Odd thought from a super-heroic game standpoint.
A telepath controls minds.
A cyberpath controls machines.
So a sociopath controls societies. (Cue heroes sitting around a table. "We've got to stop Jack. His Meme Generator turned RiotGrrl into a laughably retro concept.")
Okay, Grant Morrison could do something with this. I like the idea, but I can't go anywhere with it.
Michael: Giraffe?
Rick: A Meme Generator is exactly the kind of thing Jack would be interested in. Thanks!
If you figure out what the Super-Villain use of being a "Socio-Path" with a Meme Generator is let me know. I can see Evil Government Conspiracies using it to elect pawns to high office or creating Gordon Godfrey-style "outlaw the heroes" mobs, but that's it.
No, Jack would be using to inject memes like "bark like a chicken"[1] and "act like Marilyn Monroe" into the populace. Maybe even "distrust politicians".[2]
"We'd stopped Jack, cured his victims, and dismantled his Meme Generator, so life got slowly back to normal in Port Wilcox.
"Except my teammates are convinced that cheez doodles are a good snack food. Weird."--from the diary of Immune-to-Meme-Control Lad.
[1] I don't know what "bark like a chicken" sounds like. It would be amusing to watch people try to bark like a chicken would bark.
[2] Remember, this is a fantasy. In my America, elected officials are sincere and trustworthy.