Jon Leitheusser

Ronin Round Table: The Great Hero Poll

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While some of us have been working hard to get our second Kickstarter campaign going (Freeport: The City of Adventure for the Pathfinder RPG in case you weren’t sure), other Ronin have been working away on the result of our first Kickstarter campaign. Today we have some data to share about the Mutants & Masterminds characters that will appear that book:

One of the stretch goals for the Mutants & Masterminds 10 Year Anniversary Edition Kickstarter was the inclusion of ten characters from previous editions of the game. The fans quickly funded that particular goal, so then came the fun part—figuring out which characters to include.

Rather than picking them ourselves, we decided to have the backers vote on which characters they most wanted to see. Steve and I went through books from previous editions and picked 20 characters or groups we thought would be good options.

As part of this process, we checked with the folks who’d previously run Super Unicorn, the company that worked on the first edition of Mutants & Masterminds and the popular Crooks! supplement, to let them know we were thinking of including some of their creations on the list. They were on board with the idea and excited to see their old characters make a new appearance.

With those characters added to the list, the characters the backers voted on looked like this (in alphabetical order):

  • Argo
  • The Atomic Brain
  • Baron Samedi
  • The Bestiary
  • The Clique
  • Damoclese
  • Gepetto
  • Gimmick, the Gadget Girl
  • Jack-A-Knives
  • Knock-Off
  • Malador the Mystic
  • Omega
  • Orion the Hunter
  • Overshadow
  • Protonik
  • The Pugilist
  • Remlock the Rover
  • Scorpio Circle
  • Talos

We sent that list to the backers to vote on and we posted it in the Atomic Think Tank for the non-backers to comment on, just for fun. Based on the forum comments and when we started counting votes, we could tell who the front-runners right away: The Atomic Brain, Omega, and Gimmick. Each by a long shot! But the Atomic Brain was the most popular, with 38 more votes than the second-place finisher. The other seven top vote-getters all fell within 22 votes of each other.

When all the counting was done, the final list of the ten characters (or groups) to be included in the book looks like this (in order of votes):

  • The Atomic Brain
  • Omega
  • Gimmick, the Gadget Girl
  • Overshadow
  • Talos
  • Baron Samedi
  • Damoclese
  • Malador the Mystic
  • Jack-A-Knives
  • The Clique

Once we had the list, Steve went to work writing up the characters for M&M3, which he finished in a couple of days, then turned them over to me for development and editing and then it was off to Hal so he could lay them out.

M&M fans have been asking for examples of some heavy hitters for the newest edition of the game, and the list is full of them. There are a number of PL10 and PL11 characters because of the Clique, but then there are Damocles, Malador, and Talos at PL14, Overshadow at PL15, the Atomic Brain at PL18, and Omega at a whopping PL19—the highest PL character to appear so far!

So if you’re looking for villains to challenge some of your more experienced heroes, the bad guys included in the 10 Year Anniversary Edition are definitely going to deliver!

Thanks to all the backers who made it possible for these characters to be included and for voting! We’re excited to get these characters–and the book out to you and everyone else who’s interested. Keep watching the site for updates on the book!

Jon Leitheusser