DUNGEONS & DISINTEGRATORS: Netherwar part 3 – Broken Strings

Netherwar part 3: Broken Strings

The newest installment of the Astonishing Adventures NetherWar series, Broken Strings, releases this week, taking your heroes across Freedom City to battle transforming robots and investigate a string of bizarre, toy-themed robberies. But what’s a magic-oriented series of adventures without a crawl through a traditional, fantasy-style dungeon? So Broken Strings eventually takes the heroes into a network of tunnels and prisons filled with traps, puzzles, and supernatural opponents itching for a fight!

If you’ve been following along with the NetherWar story, your heroes are in for a few revelations and some deeper mysteries, but even if you haven’t played the previous installments of the storyline, Broken Strings includes ideas for running it as a standalone adventure!

Delving Dungeons Deep

Mutants & Masterminds has a very different approach to character resources and scarcity—particularly health—than traditional fantasy roleplaying games. Heroes generally shrug off their injuries and conditions after every scene. Just like in comics, a superhero can take a thorough beating but be fine in time for their next encounter with a villain, and when an injury persists, that’s a temporary complication for which the hero earns a Hero Point. Meanwhile many fantasy RPGs limit characters’ access to health, class abilities, and equipment to add an element of resource management and risk assessment to each encounter. Fantasy RPG encounters like those in Fantasy AGE run a gamut of difficulties from trivial to deadly to slowly whittle away characters’ resources until they must rest, turn back, or perish. Superheroes on a dungeon crawl don’t capture the same mood as fantasy adventurers because they never need to track hit points, count arrows, or manage spells per day.

If you’d like to capture the spirit of dungeon-crawling fantasy adventure for Broken Strings or your own M&M adventures, consider to following optional adjustments:

  1. More Encounters

Mutants & Masterminds generally only tracks the big, bombastic battles much like a comic book storyline might, with small, quick encounters relegated to background flavor and montages. But fantasy adventures rely on low-difficulty encounters to build tension and tax resources—a swarm of giant spiders might not present any genuine risk of death, but they still deplete your limited pool of health and possibly spells. To emulate this in M&M, sprinkle in an extra 4-5 encounters with less powerful opponents like Animals, Monsters, and Zombies from the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide and 1-2 encounters with less-potent villains like the Jobber or the Psycho. You can also borrow all sorts of classic fantasy monsters from the Super Powered Bestiary, available from Rogue Genius games. Consider interesting terrain for each encounter and how the villains or the heroes might use it to their advantage. Don’t forget about challenge sequences that you can use as traps, such as those presented in The Pentagram Peril.

  1. Maps

Maps add an element of choice and exploration to a dungeon crawl, while Mutants & Masterminds focuses on dramatic scenes. The difference is showmanship vs. simulation. There’s no wrong answer for which you prefer, but each captures a different mood. If you want your players to struggle, suffer consequences for making wrong choices, and feel triumph for correct guesses, consider mapping the dungeon out and putting encounters at the ends of some dead ends. In this case, the heroes should have a few chances to learn some basic elements of the dungeon’s layout, such as the option of taking a dangerous shortcut or a longer path with more encounters, but less-challenging ones.

  1. Limited Recovery

Mutants & Masterminds hand-waves most healing. Heroes recover one damage condition per minute of rest, meaning they effectively heal entirely between encounters and face each new opponent fresh as a daisy. If you want health and healing to be a more scarce resource, consider replacing the normal recovery rules with Vigor. Vigor provides heroes with a limited pool of recovery they must spend to heal in-between encounters.

Each hero gains a poor of Vigor equal to their Stamina plus their Presence, representing their physical toughness and their force of will. When not actively engaged in combat, a hero can rest for one minute and spend one point of Vigor to reduce the severity of a condition by one step (from Paralyzed to Immobile, for example) or to reduce their accumulated Toughness check penalty by 1. Heroes can still recover from obviously simply conditions (such as standing up from prone) without spending Vigor, with the pool more intended to reflect recovering from damage, resisting poison, and shaking off diseases; the Gamemaster is the final arbiter of what conditions do and don’t require spending a Vigor.

Heroes can only regain spent Vigor by resting for 8-10 hours somewhere safe. The Treatment skill can be used to diagnose illnesses, stabilize dying characters, can revive Dazed or Stunned characters, and provide a bonus against diseases and toxins, but doesn’t provide any direct healing. Powers like Healing and Regeneration provide one additional Vigor per rank and dictate how often a hero can spend Vigor. For example, a hero with Regeneration 5 has 5 additional Vigor and can spend a point of Vigor every other round to heal. Under these rules, Healing allows the healing character to spend their Vigor to heal another character.

  1. Limit Resources

Part of the risk in a dungeon crawl is that heroes don’t have the immediate ability to replace lost or broken gear or reach out to allies. Devices, and especially equipment, are vulnerabilities that the environment can exploit. Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of minor antagonists destroying a hero’s weapons or armor in an encounter with the Smash action, as collateral damage from a trap, or randomly as a complication (awarding the character a Hero Point). A hero should be able to repair a Device as part of an 8-10 hour rest. Equipment can’t be repaired or replaced, but a hero should be able to scavenge temporary replacements with effort and/or skill use, though it might not be as good as what they have been using—a hero who loses their armor, for example, can still benefit from borrowing a defeated foe’s leather jacket.

You can temporarily impose these rules to simulate the harsher nature of a magical “dungeon dimension,” or to reflect the time pressure and stress of a supervillain’s gauntlet-style “carnival of calamity,” but make sure to keep in touch with your players about any changes—even temporary ones—you want to make to the rules. Whatever the scenario, the goal is for everyone to have a good time and tell a fun story.

Tune in next month as the NetherWar heats up and serpent people step in to make things really complicated!

MAKE MINE MINIONS

One of the fun but oft-overlooked elements of Mutants & Masterminds is the minions that some villains bring to the table. What’s the point of fighting a Malador the Mystic without plowing through a horde of zombies to reach him? Who even is Grandmaster if he’s not backed up by a fleet of chess-themed cyborgs? Minions can help develop the character of a villain, increase the threat they pose to heroes, or let the heroes unload and feel unbeatable, depending on how you choose to use them.

As a basic refresher, minions are opponents that are quick and easy to take down, and pose very little individual threat to superheroes:

  • Minions cannot score critical hits on non-minions.
  • Non-minions can make attack checks against minions as routine checks.
  • If a minion fails a resistance check, the minion suffers the worst degree of effect, regardless of the actual degree.
  • Some traits, like the Takedown advantage, work specifically against minions.

Punching... minions... is very satisfying

Minion or Not a Minion?

One of the first questions you should ask yourself when building an encounter is whether or not the villain’s henchpeople are minions or full characters. Some minion statblocks—such as the Robot Jockey, Elite Soldier, and Mystic Ninja—are powerful enough they can pose some risk to superheroes, especially with a critical hit! Others—the Colossal Robot, Tyrannosaurus, and Dragon—are as powerful as PL 10 superheroes. You can easily use these statblocks for lieutenants and treat them as normal characters. While not as powerful as a PL 10 superhero, a PL 7 lieutenant can take more than one solid blow from a hero, might get a lucky critical, and can take 10 on attack checks against any minions supporting the heroes.

On the other side of that coin, you may want to apply the minion rules to a villain archetype to represent extremely dangerous opponents that the heroes can confront quickly, but not without some risk. Applying the minion rules to any of the sample PL 10 hero archetypes from the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, for example, can provide a small army of deadly alien invaders, potent robots, or ninja assassins whose threat comes from their skill rather than their staying power. You might also apply the minion rules to “C-list” supervillains who might have potent abilities, but largely serve as easily-defeated comic relief in your campaign.

Finally, the minion rules are something you can apply gradually to help reflect the heroes’ growth. If your adventure focuses around a secret government program producing robots to police and victimize people with powers, you might treat the robots themselves as normal characters for the first few encounters, presenting a formidable threat the heroes must push themselves to confront, and eventually begin treating the robots as minions to reflect the heroes learning more about their tactics and weaknesses, allowing them to tackle much larger groups.

Remember, the minion rules exist to speed up combat and to reduce the swingy-ness that critical hits can cause. If you want an encounter to run faster—often as a lead-up to a bigger encounter—the minion rules are your friend. But if you want to slow an encounter down to emphasize tension or increase the risk, then toss them out and use standard character rules.

Customizing Your Minions

The minion archetypes presented across various Mutants & Masterminds supplements are generic ideals. Like the hero archetypes in the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook, they’re blank canvasses you can paint any sort of costume or personality on. Your ninjas may be standard silent warriors in black outfits, or with a fresh coat of paint you can use the same statblock for a music-focused street gang who fight with capoeira or criminal circus acrobats. How you describe your villain’s minions helps define the villain as well. Your Brute villain might be backed up by a team of Goon minions, but those minions wearing black suits and sunglasses sends a different message about who their boss is than if they dress like wrestlers or who are spliced with bear DNA.

If you want to put in a few extra minutes, consider the villain and what abilities they might provide their henchpeople, particularly in the form of equipment (though a criminal geneticist or cyberneticist might grant other, more permanent boons). A villain like Chakram from Rogues Gallery is a cool-headed professional who probably hires Soldiers as her team, but provides them with scaled-down versions of her own trick throwing rings rather than the rifles described in their statblocks. You can use the exact same ability description—Ranged Multiattack Damage 5—but describe it as throwing disks rather than a hail of bullets. You might also provide a few other trick rings like her crash-foam ring or knockout ring, lowering the effect rank to 5 but using the same Affliction effects. Other villains may provide entire suites of abilities; Madam Zero from Freedom City might provide “Ice Chests” to the generic Goons she hires. These technological breastplates grant the minions immunity to cold and the ice ramp power like Madame Zero’s, and replaces their Pistol attack with an Ice Blast with the same bonus and damage rank—it may even provide other powers like those in Madame Zero’s Cold Control array as alternate effects, likewise limited to rank 3 or 4. You don’t need to track the Power Point costs for these changes, just make sure you keep any new effects within the minion’s existing Power Level.

More Ways to Use Minions

Chapter 3 of the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide includes a sidebar with recommendations to get the most out of your minions. Ideas include using them as ablative villain armor by granting them the Interpose advantage or pooling them for Aid action and team Attacks. Here are a few more ideas that don’t quite use the Mutants & Masterminds rules as written, but can still add fun variety to your game table.

Minions! How Do You Defeat Them?

With their low Power Levels and the heroes’ ability to take 10 on attack checks, minion encounters can just be fun opportunities for the heroes to describe how cool or powerful their abilities are. Rather than rolling dice, you can simply turn to each player and say “There are 12 minions left. How do you defeat three of them?” Let players be creative in how they use and describe their abilities or skills; this may even be a chance for rarely-used powers or features to come up. This approach allows players to define more of their character than just rolling dice until everyone stops moving; they can be as skilled, powerful, sneaky, clever, or merciful as they want.

If you don’t want a minion encounter to serve solely as a Roleplaying scene, or there are some consequences to not taking down the minions quickly—perhaps taking more than one round means any surviving minion trips the alarm, for example—you can split the difference. Have each player roll an attack check or effect check of their choice, instantly taking down one minion with a successful check and one additional minion for every additional Degree of Success. The Takedown advantage plays a slightly different role here, automatically granting a hero one additional minion subdued per rank. This arrangement still lets heroes describe how exactly they take down multiple foes while still leaving room for consequences.

Boss Boosters

While trifling on their own, minions can augment a villain’s abilities, making them a far greater challenge to the heroes. Rather than attack the heroes directly with the minions, describe them as coordinating with their boss, using attacks to distract and herd heroes or coordinate the villain’s defenses. Mechanically, the minions make Routine Checks each round to perform Aid actions. A single minion can boost their villain’s attack check or active defenses by +2 each round. Two minions working together can boost both attacks and defenses. Three minions can work together to provide three degrees of success, increasing the bonus to +5 and six minions coordinating with their boss can increase both their attack and defenses bonuses by +5 each round. This approach takes some liberties with the Routine Check rules (which normally can’t be used in combat, except against minions) and the Aid rules (normally, the Defense bonus only applies against attacks from a single opponent), but greatly simplifies the math involved in minion-heavy fights. It also creates a scenario where villains surrounded by their henchpeople start out very dangerous and gradually become more vulnerable as heroes peel away their allies. Heroes must decide if they want to focus on the more vulnerable minions, gradually reducing the villain’s threat, or strike directly at the mastermind who can more readily avoid their attacks and more reliably strike back. It’s an effective tactic for villains specializing in cunning, like Conundrum or Killshot, or villains who rely on armies of loyal soldiers like Overshadow.

To increase the danger of this tactic, combine it with the Ablative Minions recommendation from the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide to prevent the heroes from defeating the mastermind until all their assistants have been dispatched. This combination transforms minions into a “health bar” for the villain, creating extremely challenging encounters with villains who might normally pose little threat to an entire team of heroes.

Unit Tactics

Villains aren’t the only ones who can benefit from assistance. Teams of minions can coordinate to great effect. The simplest way to track multiple minions working as a group is to group them into batches of four, then increase the attack check, defenses, and damage by +2—the assumption being that one minion acts as the leader, with one augmenting their defenses, another aiding their attack, and a third using a Team attack to improve their damage. The unit fights as a single opponent, and every failed Toughness check by the unit eliminates one of the upgrades—attack, defense, or damage—while a failed save against any area effect wipes out the unit. You can push the limits and use a group of ten minions to augment the same statistics by +5; in this case, two failed Toughness checks reduce a single bonus to +2 before the bonus is lost entirely with another failed check; an area attack wipes out half the minions from a large unit rather than all of them. For this use of minions, the Takedown advantage lets you knock out one additional minion per rank rather than its normal function.

Like the Boss Boosters technique mentioned above, this plays a little loose with the rules for Routine Checks and Aid, but greatly simplifies the math in running large groups of minions, effectively transforming a large group of minions into a single supervillain whose abilities gradually weaken over time. Heroes face a deadly opponent up front, but things get gradually easier as they wade into the fight and start knocking out goons. For tactically-minded villains, you might even combine this tactic with the Boss Booster, with one squad of minions intended to protect and augment their leader and remaining minions broken out into smaller units. The villain can use a Move Action on their turn to issue commands, reorganizing any minions left into full units once again so long as enough of them remain.

 

However you decide to use minions in your game, have fun tinkering with what the system can do and the new ways to threaten—or bolster—your heroes.

Mastering Time Travel (Part 2)

Gamemastering Time TravelIn the second part of my Ronin Roundtable guest-spot on the Time Traveler’s Codex (part 1 is here, in case you missed it!), let’s look at how the sourcebook talks about Gamemastering time travel, the nature and use of time travel in the Earth-Prime omniverse, and a peek at the Silver Age time period and some familiar faces found there.

As Chapter 3 of the Time Traveler’s Codex points out, Gamemastering time travel stories can be a challenge. The chapter looks at a number of considerations, building on the intro material from Chapter 1, including deciding how changeable the timeline may be, what methods of time travel exist, the various hazards of time travel, and the important question…

Who Controls the Time Machine?

A major element of a time travel story or series is: Who is in control of the means of time travel? If it is the Gamemaster, then time travel can be largely a plot device for getting the player characters to a new era for the start of a new adventure. They might need to figure out exactly why they are there, but how they get there is taken care of. The same is largely true of time travel is under control of a non-player character, particularly some powerful patron who sends the heroes back and forth through time. The characters might occasionally be able to request some “bending” of the rules but, otherwise, the mechanics are out of their hands.

On the other hand, if the heroes are in control of their means of time travel, the Gamemaster will want clear rules as to how time travel works in the setting and the limits of the heroes’ means of travel are, if any. Be prepared for players to come up with unexpected uses of time travel and to test the limits of that ability. Having some type of limit in place, such as only being able to make so many “jumps” before having to recharge or refuel, or a need to avoid excessive stress on the space-time continuum by spacing out the use of time travel, can provide some boundaries.

The Omniverse

The Earth-Prime setting for M&M is not just one world or even one universe but a vast omniverse of parallel realities and alternate dimensions, of which your own series is a part. Whether it diverges only a little from what’s seen in sourcebook like Atlas of Earth-Prime and Emerald City, or diverges a lot, there’s room in the omniverse for everything! The Time Traveler’s Codex looks at time travel as a phenomenon in the context of the Earth-Prime setting, from cosmic beings like the Time Keepers and their Cosmic Clock, to characters like Doctor Tomorrow, Zeitgeist, and the notorious Tick-Tock Doc and his Counter-Clock Culture.

A Silver Age Retrospective

Since a guidebook to time travel requires times to visit, the Time Traveler’s Codex also looks at a wide range of historical eras, including the Golden Age, Silver Age, and Iron Age of the Earth-Prime setting, focusing on Emerald City, Freedom City, and New York City, respectively. Even if the only “time travel” that interests you is setting your M&M game in an earlier era, this part of the Codex has a wealth of material for you!

The Silver Age section looks at the heyday of the original Freedom League, from their founding after Hades’ attempts to invade Freedom City with an undead army in 1960 up through their first meeting with Pseudo during a secret invasion of the Grue in 1969. It also looks at the original Atom Family and their eventual “discovery” of Farside City, and important Silver Age villains like August Roman, Queen Khana, and Set the Destroyer (along with the slightly less important but still notable Red Death and Bee-Keeper).

And don’t forget, alongside the Time Traveler’s Codex, we also have the amazing bonus content PDF “All Time, No Space!” available FREE for download.

Even More Perilous! (Ronin Roundtable)

This week sees the release of NetherWar, Part 2: The Pentagram Peril, the segment of the mystic-themed campaign for M&M that I helped to write. I say “helped” because Pentagram Peril wasn’t originally planned as part of a series at all. It was a stand-alone adventure involving the Factor Four and Hellqueen going after some magical treasures when I originally wrote it. But when M&M Developer Crystal Frasier came up with the NetherWar series, the concept fit right into it, so Crystal worked her own particular magic upon my original adventure to make it suitable as a chapter in the series and … voila! The Hellqueen’s scheme now fits into a larger plot involving Earth’s magical power and legacy.

Pentagram of Peril!

Art by Alberto Foche

Peril Times Two!

Speaking of larger plots, Crystal and I were talking for a Mutants & Masterminds Monday broadcast a while back about other magical villains who could fit into the NetherWar series, and Pentagram Peril would be an interesting place to include Dr. Azoth and his Homunculi (from Threat Report, also featuring in the M&M novel Roadtrip to Ruin) as additional or substitute foes. While it would be possible to replace the Factor Four with the evil alchemist and his minions, an even more interesting option is to have Dr. Azoth after the Bloodstones of Vhoka as well!

Perhaps the confrontation at the museum with the Factor Four plays out as-written, but the earlier theft of the other bloodstone from Freedom City University was actually carried out by the Homunculi, leaving each faction with one bloodstone each to start.

This turns all of the middle scenes of the adventure into a three-way competition for the bloodstones between the Factor Four, the Homunculi, and the heroes:

  • The stealthy and shape-shifting Takwin is dispatched to Dakana to infiltrate and steal the bloodstone from the treasury there.
  • The mighty Man-Drake is sent to Agartha to contend with the Terra-King and take the bloodstone from the grasp of Granite and Pyre.
  • Petra is sent to the Antarctic to retrieve the remaining bloodstone from Nullatempus, as easily able to survive the bitter cold there as Sylph.

Do the heroes try to play the villains off each other? Do the villains cooperate to deal with the heroes first before they settle who gets the bloodstone?

Since it’s likely only some of the stones will end up with each faction, the final confrontation at the Maw of Vhoka is both for control of the artifacts and to cast them into the Maw to release and control their accumulated power. It’s possible for multiple villains to gain additional power from the bloodstones, or maybe it is a struggle just between Hellqueen and Dr. Azoth, each using their minions to run interference, as well as summoning bloodstone gargoyles to aid them.

You can also decide if Dr. Azoth is an interloper interfering in the larger scheme of NetherWar or just another part of the larger plan, perhaps a “back up” to ensure the scheme involving the bloodstones is successful, should the Hellqueen and the Factor Four not prove up to the challenge. Either way, the added villainy is sure to make Pentagram Peril even more perilous!

What Even Is Time (Travel)? (Ronin Roundtable)

With the 20th anniversary of Green Ronin Publishing and the 18th anniversary of Mutants & Masterminds this year, we’ve been doing a lot of looking back at the past. But what about visiting the past or, for that matter, changing the past? Well, that’s where the Time Traveler’s Codex for M&M comes into play, arriving “just in time,” so to speak.

Time travel is a favorite sub-genre of mine, and the superhero genre is especially fertile ground for it, given the “anything goes” approach of my comic book universes. It’s not all that unusual for a character to be someone else’s potential offspring from an alternate future, or for one’s nemesis to be someone you haven’t even “met” yet, but who is trying to erase you from history! Naturally, when M&M Developer Crystal Frasier proposed the Time Traveler’s Codex, I was first in-line to write part of it!

Time Traveler's Codex on sale now!

 

The parts of the Codex I got to write include: The overview of time travel as a sub-genre, temporal mechanics and rules options, the role of time travel in a series, creating characters with time travel in mind, Gamemaster advice on handling time travel and running time travel adventures (or series), time travel in the Earth-Prime omniverse, and a revisit to the Silver Age of Freedom City as a time travel destination. Here on the Ronin Round-Table, in this installment and the next, let’s take a sneak-peek at a few of these in more detail.

Infinite Possibilities

Well, there wasn’t room in the sourcebook for infinite possibilities (if there is later, maybe I’ll jump back and revise). Still, the beginning Time Traveler’s Codex takes a good look at how time travel might work, and at the various staples of the sub-genre, including alternate timelines (and alternate selves), non-linear time, paradoxes, fixed points in time, and temporal enforcement agents (both natural and supernatural). Gamemasters can decide for themselves what time travel options exist in their own games, with some guidance as to the possibilities and repercussions.

Temporal Mechanics

The first chapter of the sourcebook also looks at optional rules systems for handling things like temporal navigation, temporal drift, temporal mishaps (complications specifically related to time travel), temporal transformations (either from revisions in history or exposure to chronal energies), and retroactive continuity. It’s a place where some of the M&M game systems get to shine, from transformative afflictions to time-related complications. I particularly like the following extension of the hero point mechanics for time travel:

Hero Points and Retcons

Temporal manipulations allow for an additional option for hero points, using the Edit Scene ability to “retcon” changes in history! Essentially, so long as the player can come up with a time travel scenario that explains it, they can spend a hero point to edit the scene to make it the case. For example, heroes might find themselves trapped and without their devices; a player suggests their hero will, at some point in the future, come back into the past and leave an extra set of equipment behind a false panel nearby! The GM approves, the player spends the hero point, and voila! The heroes open the panel to find the gear that they need.

In addition to the normal limit imposed by the number of hero points they have to spend, the GM may wish to impose temporal consequences for an excessive use of this option, perhaps causing a character to start to develop time sickness (following) with the DC of the resistance test based on 10 + the number of hero points spent retconning that game session (or over a certain number that session).

Next Up: Mastering time travel, time in the Omniverse, and a look back at the Silver Age!

ASSAULT ON THE NERIAN NEXUS: WEST COAST EDITION

Nerian Nexus in Emerald City!

Assault on the Nerian Nexus is out and ready to run your heroes through the gauntlet! And while it’s packed with excitement featuring your favorite Freedom City baddies, an observant fan of our weekly Mutants & Masterminds Monday livestreams raised an excellent question: How do you jump from our previous adventure series, Emerald City Knights, to the events of NetherWar if your group wants to keep the same lineup?

There’s nothing saying you can’t just transplant the personalities and histories of Freedom City directly to Emerald City. Like any comic book series, simply give your heroes a few “villain-of-the-week” style adventures as a palate cleanser, then you can lead right into the events of Assault on the Nerian Nexus. But Freedom City and Emerald City have very different themes and casts, and with the events of Emerald City Knights delving so deeply in the west coast city’s obscured history and establishing the new status quo, you might want to recast the events of NetherWar to fit the west coast flavor.

Re-inventing the NetherWar adventure series to fit Emerald City requires a little more legwork if you really want to lean into the charm and mood of the city established during Emerald City Knights:

Step 1: Pick a Theme

Freedom City’s is inspired heavily by the long comic book histories of major publishers. It’s a melting pot of silly and serious, combining many genres of superpowers and comics with an eye more toward earnest heroics as the unifying theme. Emerald City, with its deliberately concealed history and modern, tech-oriented power boom, is more rooted in modern film and television, drawing inspiration from television shows like Heroes and movies from the new cinematic takes on classic comic mythologies. These sources look for a common and scientific (or believably pseudo-scientific) origin to superpowers and often ignore magic or else describe it like a scientific force not yet entirely understood.

All this is to say: Magic isn’t a major force in Emerald City as depicted in Emerald City Knights, even if the city itself has several noteworthy magical villains.

You as the Gamemaster need to decide if you want to keep the original magical overtones of NetherWar, or convert it to one of the power archetypes more commonly seen in Emerald City, like aliens or psychic ability. Rather than use NetherWar’s existing big-bad, you could use a powerful psychic like Koschei or the Cosmic Mind—who has become disembodied and is now trying to merge with the collective human unconscious to rule the world! Alternatively, you might run NetherWar as an extension of Emerald City Knights, with many of the magical threats being replaced with technology and nanites unleashed by Tellax as the alien robot continues its quest to transmute the Earth into a cosmic weapon.

Step 2: Decide the Histories

The events of NetherWar turn heavily on the actions of Adrian Eldrich before his death, with his old foes re-emerging to threaten the world now that no Master Mage opposes them. If you stick with a magical theme to the series, you’ll need to decide if Adrian Eldrich operated out of Emerald City and left much of his legacy there . If not, you’ll need to cast a replacement. With the Fraternal Order of Evil deliberately concealing much of the city’s superheroic history, it’s entirely possible another powerful mage made their home in the city, and whose legacy was forgotten and stronghold lost upon their death. In this case, it isn’t wards keeping villains from plundering the Nerian Nexus (or whatever you decide to call it), but simple ignorance. The gold rush to reclaim the lost treasures might begin when a Silver Age villain like the original Mad Machinist might babble about the lost stronghold in their old age, or the rediscovery of another Silver Age lair like that of Guild of Justice headquarters in The Reign of Cats and Dogs might point heroes and villains alike to this lost trove of magic.

If you instead decided on a theme other than magic, you’ll need to pick histories and locations to replace the magical ones featured throughout the NetherWar series. The Nerian Nexus might instead be a secret Ghostworks of Majestic-20 lab or a Preserver ruin hidden in the Atlas Mountains or deep below the Pacific Ocean. Peruse the Emerald City sourcebook for inspiration and don’t be afraid to create your own lost legacies in Emerald City to explain the how and why of strange locations.

Step 3: Cast Your Villains

To round out your Emerald City remake of NetherWar, decide which villains from the original adventures you want to keep and who you might re-cast with Emerald City natives.

The menacing Madame Macabre makes an excellent substitute for Medea. While nowhere near as ancient and a good deal more sarcastic, Madame Macabre is still bitter at the world failing her and relies as much on trickery and manipulation as she does brute force to get what she wants. For more powerful magical opponents to replace Malador in later adventures, you might look at Doctor Azathoth or Professor Jackanapes, or the chaos goddess Eris might insert herself into events to complicate everything. The obsessive collector of secrets Arcanix might stand in for Warden, while Toy Boy’s role as the ever-loyal spy might be replaced by another terminally-ill villain like Doubletime or Mosquito.

You can round out your gallery of rogues with magical adjacent villains, such as the Looking Glass Gang and various magic-themed Stormers like Chain, Epiphany Jones, Ghostlight, Lord Etheric, and Silver Sorcerer.

In the end, Astonishing Adventures are tools to help you and your group have a good time. Take what you like, replace what you think will work better, and otherwise customize the adventure to fit your needs!

All the villains and organizations in this post can be found in the pages of the Emerald City and Threat Report sourcebooks.

Powered UP! A Mutants & Masterminds fiction Anthology

Next week we are proud to release a collection of Mutants & Masterminds short stories from Nisaba Press, in an anthology entitled Powered Up!

Powered Up from Nisaba Press

Time passes, some things change, and other things remain. If you could go back in time nineteen years, and tell me in 2001 that the characters I created for Freedom City (the first sourcebook for what has become the Earth-Prime setting) would still be around…well, I might well have done some things differently, knowing that, but overall I’m glad that I didn’t. Because time passes, and things change, and we and the world change with them.

Comic books are very much a shared medium. Even the great creators, who set the stage for generations to come, eventually passed the torch of the wondrous worlds and characters they created onto other creators, who have done the same, on and on for generations now. While not-yet twenty years is a small comparison to a publishing history easily four times that, I can look back to the earliest days of Mutants & Masterminds and Earth-Prime and the tremendous number of people who have contributed to it: writers, artists, editors, developers, and other creatives, as well as countless players and Gamemasters. They made what started out as “my” world into a truly shared world.

I was recently told by a reader that one of the things he liked about Earth-Prime is that we have allowed time to pass in the setting, largely as it has passed for us. Characters from almost twenty years ago have grown-up, retired, moved on, and even died. Young upstarts are now married with kids. Young kids are now young adults and the Earth of Freedom City has grown—oh, how it has grown! This book is just the latest chapter in that growth.

Powered Up is a whole different view of a living, changing, heroic world, because it is a collection of stories. For a tabletop roleplaying game like Mutants & Masterminds the stories need to be incomplete, unfinished: They are implied, hinted-at, or only half-told—offered as dangling threads you can pick up and follow, or briefly summarized histories of the epics of the past. They’re incomplete because they await players, the storytellers, to finish them.

This anthology lets us step inside those stories in a different way, not as players but as readers, and we can follow along with the heroes and people of Earth-Prime as their stories unfold before us. The diversity of stories in this collection shows just how rich and living a world Earth-Prime has become and, if I may indulge the role of “proud parent” for a moment, just how well it has grown-up over the years. I’m excited to be able to share these new stories with you, and looking forward to all of the stories—and changes—to come.

 

Ronin Army forums update: All Good Things…

Hello Green Ronin fans,

Today we have guest post from our stalwart forum moderator Fildrigar, on the status of the Ronin Army forums that have been down for the last week.


Ronin Army Gamer Badge

Green Ronin Gamer Badge

Greetings!

I’m Barry Wilson. You might remember me from such internet places as That One Wargaming With Miniatures Forum and Esoteric Prog Rock Fans Online.

I have a long history with, and a deep and abiding love of internet forums. Since I first discovered them in the Nineties, I have whiled away many an hour reading and posting on them. I never had the patience for IRC, far preferring the slower, more thoughtful discourse (and formatting options) forums usually provided. I’ve been moderating Green Ronin’s forums for around eight years now. 

Unfortunately, the time has come to shut down the forums. While it wasn’t an easy decision, it was necessary once we discovered a rather serious security vulnerability that made continuing to support the forum software an untenable position. We have reached the tipping point where the security risks involved with maintaining the forums outweigh the benefits. We tried to find a solution that would allow us to maintain the existing forums in read-only mode, but just running the forum software on our servers would pose too great a security risk. 

Forums have in the past provided a place for people to discuss our games. Increasingly, those discussions have moved to places like Facebook, Reddit, and Discord (and many, many others.) Places like these are allowing us to reach more fans than our small forums did. Searching Facebook for the names of our games will direct you to groups available there. There is also a very robust and friendly Discord community called the Green Ronin AGE Appropriate Discord. You’ll find some of your favorite Green Ronin staff regularly hanging out there to talk about the latest Green Ronin happenings.  

In closing, remember that we love you, keep on gaming, and we’ll see you on the internet.

THE TIME TRAVELER’S CODEX: ALL TIME, NO SPACE… (Ronin Roundtable)

It’s Monday, and we’ve got a lot of things going on we wanted to share, so we figured: “Why not host an impromptu live-stream?” So, we’re inviting you to join Green Ronin Publishing today at 2:00 pm Pacific/5:00 pm Eastern for a special test-run of our live-streaming capabilities, featuring Mutants & Masterminds Super-Dev Crystal Frasier and designer Steve Kenson! They’ll be streaming from our Facebook page, talking about all things Mutants & Masterminds, including the Astonishing Adventures line, its exciting new NetherWar adventure series, and the newly-released Time Traveler’s Codex. Barring any unforeseen technical challenges, they’ll take your questions, too! So come hang out with us as we dip our toes into the world of Facebook live streaming! See you at 2:00 pm Pacific/5:00 pm Eastern, today!



One of the weird truths in any publishing industry is that you often pay for text you can never fully use. The reality of publishing, especially anything highly visual like textbooks, manuals, and game books, is that graphic element of the book needs the text to stop in specific places or only take up so much room. You order your text hoping for a perfect fit, but all too often you need to trim all kinds of interesting tidbits to finally make your book fit. And while the Time Traveler’s Codex gave us access to the End and the Beginning and all ticks on the clock in between… we still ran out of space.

But all good things in time! The miracle of the internet means we no longer throw out babies in the trash, but instead package them up into a free bonus PDF for you to enjoy, whether you purchase the Time Traveler’s Codex or not! Obviously you’ll get a lot more utility out of the content provided if you have the sourcebook in hand, but when push comes to shove, this eclectic mélange of equipment and minions from up and down the timestream can find a home in just about any Mutants & Masterminds campaign. It includes some of my favorite bits, like the centaur and mermaid, that had to be cut from their respective eras—while fun, they’re far from historically accurate—as well as a few fun pieces of time travel gear that can expand your arsenal or provide a handy power boost to your favorite villain!

So download it and… take some time for yourself.

The Time Traveler’s Codex: BACK FOUR SECONDS! (Ronin Roundtable)



Fools!

You flipped through the sacred text of the Time Traveler’s Codex  and now you think yourself an equal of the Chronomaster?! You thought your petty time travel shenanigans were any match for true villainy? I was weaned on chronal energy, with all the timestream as my playground. They think time is a realm for heroes? But villainy is relentless! Unyielding! Immortal! Your paltry acts of goodness are waves crashing against a beach, thinking they achieve something by sweeping sand into the tides and ever unaware that mountains stand beyond their reach.

Every era across space and time has its villains, from ruthless Gladiators of the Roman Empire to the Cyber Ronin prowling the neon kingdoms of the cyberpunk dystopia, I have eager minions ready to throw themselves in harm’s way. Even outside of time, loyal chronozoids—the Time Elemental, the Temporal Weaver, even the Chrono Predator—bend to my will!

But by now you’ve bested my minions. You think yourself safe. But I’m only just beginning. Can you face not one but SIX diabolical villains, gathered from the far-flung corners of the omniverse?! The Future Perfectionist, a diabolical mastermind who will use your own powers to shape the future to fit her ideal; the Immortal Conqueror, a master of the crudest form of time travel who has waged war since time immemorial; the Living Gateway, a fiend unmoored in the timestream, able to gallivant anywhere beyond the reach of your finite law; the Temporal Wizard, a master of chronomancy who bends past and future into potent weapons and reshapes his own body with evolutionary trickery; or the terrifying Time-Hopping Tyrant, a warlord evolved beyond human concerns and bedecked in technology far beyond your petty, 21st-century understanding! But first you must survive my personal pet—a silicon soul, forged with only a single purpose: to wipe you and your pathetic cause from the history books! Behold, the eXterminator!

Download the eXterminator preview PDF now!