Freedom's Most Wanted Design Journal #1
While superheroes are the stars of a Mutants & Masterminds series, supervillains are its lifeblood; without them menacing the city and the world on a regular basis, there wouldn’t be much for the heroes to do other than stop petty criminals and the odd natural disaster or the like. Supervillains are the “monsters” of RPGs like M&M, and an interesting villain can help to make the game fun and exciting to play.
Many M&M adventure plots start with the villain: what does he or she want? What is the newest costumed criminal in town plotting? Typically, the heroes catch wind of this nefarious plan. Perhaps the villain needs to acquire some things to put it into motion, or the heroes encounter the first steps of it. They need to piece together the clues and find out what their foe is planning. Does the villain have some new power or method of operation? Is there a new alliance in the criminal fraternity? The heroes run down the clues and either get one step ahead of their foe or the villain decides to eliminate them, giving the heroes a chance to escape an ambush or trap and confront the criminal directly.
The Freedom City sourcebook presents plenty of supervillains, but you can never have too many choices when it comes to planning out your M&M adventures. Green Ronin also hasn’t published a new “villain” book since the first edition of the game (with the exception of small collections of villains in PDF products). So we figured it was time to fill-in information on more of the neferious ner’-do-wells of the setting.
Freedom’s Most Wanted consists of seventy-four new super-criminals for your M&M game, split into two major sections. The first presents villain groups and teams, suitable for challenging an entire team of superheroes on their own. The second, making up the bulk of the book, describes individual villains who may operate on their own or form temporary alliances with others of their ilk to menace Freedom City and the world.
The individual backgrounds assume the use of the various heroes detailed in Freedom City, but you should feel free to modify them as you see fit to suit your own game and setting. If you are not using Freedom City, the villains adapt well to any four-color style superhero setting. Less four-color settings, such as the Paragons setting sourcebook, may require additional adaptation, and some villains may not be suitable for some settings, such as mystical or mythic foes in a world lacking those elements (unless the villains are not entirely what they seem to be).
Although the villains are integrated into the Freedom City setting, many of them have fewer ties to existing Freedom City heroes, making them suitable to become parts of the rogues galleries of the players’ heroes. A great many of the villains in this book are “at large” and present potential cases for the heroes to investigate, or simply threats the Gamemaster can use as the basis for an adventure.
Freedom’s Most Wanted also diverges a bit from Freedom City by presenting some villains from different periods of the city’s history, such as the Golden Age incarnation of the Crime League and some of the original Raven’s Silver Age foes. This has two purposes: first, you can use these period villains for adventures set in their respective times, either set-pieces or time-travel adventures using modern heroes. Second, the historical villains provide a context for the setting, and you can use them as inspiration for modern super-criminals following in their felonious footsteps, and naturally having a similar motif and game traits! The modern and Golden Age versions of King Cole in the book provide an example of this kind of thing.
The villains each have a “Learning About...” section, containing information characters with particular skills—like Gather Information and Knowledge—might learn or know about that villain. You can use these sections as guidelines when your players’ heroes investigate their new foes to find out more about them. Modify the information given to suit your own game, perhaps giving the heroes vital clues on how to overcome the villains the next time they run into them.
If the heroes lack the necessary skills, don’t forget about untrained skill checks (possible for both Gather Information and Knowledge checks with DCs of 15 or less); the heroes can at least learn a little. You can also provide some of the information from this section to players who spend a hero point for inspiration, representing a sudden flash of insight on the hero’s part or a clue from an unexpected source.
Each villain or group also comes with two or more “capers,” short adventure ideas for how you can use that foe in a Freedom City series game, although most of the ideas are easily adapted to other four-color superheroic settings. Each villain has two or more ready-made adventures, giving you more than a hundred new games to play!
