Super-Vision #3: Bars and Roses
Welcome back to Super-Vision, your one-stop source for news about Mutants & Masterminds.
This month, we take a bit of a detour from our usual fare, to take a look at a "cousin" of M&M coming from Green Ronin Publishing, but first, let's talk about how things are coming on the newest products for the World's Greatest Superhero RPG:
Lockdown!
Foes of Freedom, the newest sourcebook for the Freedom City setting, should be in stores by the time you read this. It provides you with fifty new nefarious super-villains, some mentioned in the Freedom City sourcebook, others appearing here for the very first time. Each villain comes with adventure hooks, making Foes of Freedom a source for more than a hundred potential M&M adventures!
The Noir sourcebook is in layout, soon to head off to print, and should be in stores in November. Gimmick’s Guide to Gadgets has finished playtesting and development and is now in editing. Playtesters were pleased with the book’s array of gadgets, gizmos, and new rules for gadgeteers and construct characters. Gadgets is due out in January of 2005.
The biggest change in the upcoming schedule is the Super-Max sourcebook has been renamed Lockdown, to avoid confusion with another prison sourcebook called Super-Max. Just finishing up in development, Lockdown gives you a complete profile on a privately-run prison for super-criminals, its staff, its major inmates, and the nearby community that supports it. It also reveals the sinister secrets behind the prison and the organization running it. Suitable for use in any superhero campaign setting, Lockdown can provide a source for hero team adventures or a setting for innovative campaigns where heroes go undercover inside the prison, or the players even take the roles of inmates, either trying to redeem themselves, or just to survive when the secrets of Lockdown are revealed!
Blue Rose
Coming up around the same time as Noir is another Green Ronin product of potential interest to Mutants & Masterminds fans, although it’s not an M&M product, or even a superhero game! It’s the core rulebook for Blue Rose: the Roleplaying Game of Romantic Fantasy.
Blue Rose, written by John Snead, Dawn Murrin, Alejandro Melchor, Jeremy Crawford, and myself, is a fantasy RPG inspired by the works of authors like Mercedes Lackey, Diane Duane, Tamora Pierce, and Robin McKinley. It describes the fantasy world of Aldea, dominated for centuries by the corrupt Sorcerer Kings. An alliance of humans and intelligent animals known as rhydan overthrew the Sorcerer Kings two centuries ago. Since then, the nation of Aldis, the Kingdom of the Blue Rose, has become a bastion of freedom, fairness, and justice. But Aldis is surrounded on all sides by potential enemies, including the dark kingdom of Kern, ruled by the last Sorcerer King, the lich Jarek, and the totalitarian Theocracy of Jarzon and its Church of the Pure Light. To combat these threats, Aldis relies on its envoys, members of the Queen’s Finest, with their arcane powers and psychic rhydan companions.
Blue Rose may be of interest to players of Mutants & Masterminds because it owes some of its game systems to M&M. While Blue Rose is a stand-alone game (rather than an M&M campaign setting), it does "borrow" things like the Damage saving throw system (for quick and dramatic combats) and a version of Hero Points, known in Blue Rose as Conviction (with some unique twists to suit the setting). Of course, the two games share many other elements in common, such as skills and feats. So players interested in a fantasy application of some Mutants & Masterminds mechanics might want to take a look at Blue Rose when it arrives in a game store near you.
Green Ronin will be providing previews of Blue Rose in the weeks to come, including a fast-play game to get a feel for the system and the setting, all leading up to the core book’s release.
Mastering Masterminds
A couple things came up recently on the Atomic Think Tank forums I wanted to share with M&M players and GMs: a closer look at Surprise Strike and an expansion of the Extraordinary Effort optional rule from last month’s Super-Vision.
It was rightly pointed out to me by our sharp-eyed fans that Surprise Strike shouldn’t work if the target retains any dodge bonus while flat-footed, mainly by virtue of the Combat Sense power. So, consider that the official ruling: unless the target is denied his entire dodge bonus, Surprise Strike doesn’t work. This means one rank of Combat Sense makes you immune to Surprise Strikes, so long as it’s working, which balances pretty well in terms of cost (2 power points vs. 2 power points). Just watch out for those occasions when a villain negates your Combat Sense, and then takes full advantage of it. Now that is a Surprise Strike!
Another question is: How do you handle those occasions where a hero pushes his powers so far he actually risks injury or even death? If you want, you can take the guidelines for extraordinary effort from last month's Super-Vision and extend them: for each additional "level" of effort, the character suffers a damage condition: disabled, dying, and finally dead. So a hero using extraordinary effort could expend all his remaining Hero Points, all his fatigue levels, and then begin suffering damage as well, allowing for a serious increase in power! Of course, although it's a great trick, it’s not something heroes can pull off very often!
Superlink Spotlight: Devil's Workshop
This month’s Superlink Spotlight goes to the most prolific of Superlink publishers by far: Devil’s Workshop. They publish the popular Power Corrupts series of books (providing new powers for M&M), as well as the archetype and template series (offering new options for quick character creation along with sample characters you can plug directly into your campaign). The archetype series has recently been collected into one product for easy reference and use.
Devil’s Workshop also published the Headquarters & Hideouts sourcebook for Superlink, offering an expansion of the headquarters rules, along with plenty of sample headquarters and the characters using them, all suitable to drop right into your campaign or use as inspiration, perhaps even to provide a headquarters for your own hero team!
Drop by RPGNow.com to check out the entire line of Superlink resources from Devil’s Workshop.
