With the arrival of the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook, the world of Earth Prime has a few new heroes illustrating the eight heroic archetypes presented in the books. Four of these characters also appear in the upcoming Mutants & Masterminds Quickstart as pregenerated player character sheets, and so they needed names, personalities, and origins of their own. We turned to RPG industry legend and giant comics nerd, Amber Scott to help flesh out the new Crimefighter, Energy Controller, Gadgeteer, and Paragon of the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Heroes Handbook!

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Art by Alberto Foche

Ray Montoya was the kind of guy who could make Mount Rushmore crack a smile. Making others laugh, especially with a little self-deprecating humor or a harmless prank, felt like the one thing in the world he couldn’t screw up, and he leaned into it hard. Ray wasn’t trying to develop superpowers on the day of the eclipse. He was trying to show off to his friends. But with all the warnings on TV about not looking directly at the eclipse—as if anyone could be that stupid—he couldn’t resist the opportunity to play a little prank.

He met up with his friends on a rooftop patio for the viewing and prerequisite party. When the time came, and everyone pulled out their eclipse glasses, Ray simply whipped out a pair of designer shades. “These should be enough for me. I’m already a star.” He pushed the shades up his nose and turned his face innocently to the sky.

He grinned as his friends started freaking out, shouting at him not to look. None of them could see his eyes were closed behind the sunglasses. Ray was dying of laughter on the inside, right up until a server with a tray full of glasses tripped and crashed into him.

Ray’s eyes popped open. Without meaning to, he stared directly into the glorious eclipse, and it burned him. As if entranced, he reached up and removed his sunglasses, staring fixedly at the stunning astronomical event. A few seconds later, one of his friends spun him around, yelling for Ray to not be an idiot.

To everyone’s shock, Ray’s irises had turned pitch black, surrounded by metallic gold sclera. It was if the eclipse was burned into Ray’s own eyes. The sun still glowed bright in his vision, and then in his chest.

Since that day, the power of the sun shined within Ray’s body. He learned to control the bright yellow-white light that shot from his fingertips, and he also developed the ability to fly. Sometimes Ray still wonders how he gained superhuman powers from a solar eclipse, especially after news reports began mentioning other people who looked into the celestial event and only walked away with retinal damage. Some days he feels like the luckiest guy in the world, but other days beats himself up as a fraud, sure that his powers were intended for someone else who could’ve used them better. That lingering doubt drives him to better master his powers as his body continues to change.

What didn’t change was Ray’s showoff nature and desire to impress people. He loves being the first on the scene and taking out bad guys in the flashiest way possible. When the news vans show up, Ray’s always willing to linger for an interview. Given his ego, Ray couldn’t abandon his real name entirely. Instead he adapted it to create his superhero identity: Solar Ray.

As we put the finishing touches on the Rogue’s Gallery, the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook was slowly percolating in the background. Now that it is nearly ready to ship to the printers as well, I’m happy to show the results of several months of work and writing!

Mutants & Masterminds is a great game with a robust ruleset built over 16 years and three different editions. It’s flexible enough to handle almost any genre of comic book adventure, from traditional tights-and-fights books to street-level vigilantes to cosmic weirdness to mundane human agents facing off against the unknowable. But that flexibility brings a certain amount of jargon and a learning curve that can be off-putting for new players. Among the first challenges we decided to tackle to make a newbie-friendly rulebook was character creation. The Deluxe Hero’s Handbook offers a wealth of choices for fine-tuning your character to build exactly what you want to play, but for brand new players that freedom can be intimidating. Option paralysis is one of the most commonly cited problems players new to M&M report, followed closely by the amount of number crunching character generation required. The Quickstart Character generator is a perfectly solution for intermediary players, but we wanted a solution for those picking up Mutants & Masterminds for the first time.

Our solution is the Basic Archetype, which boils character generation down to a handful of choices about your character’s theme, personality, and history. With one of the book’s eight basic archetypes and a character sheet, even brand new players can be game-ready in ten minutes!

Each Basic Archetype starts with a brief overview of the concept. Each Archetype has a base suite of Ability ranks and Defense ranks, which you can tweak by selecting a character type. Most come with a few basic skills, but ask you to decide who your character is to determine the rest. Likewise, selecting Advantages is rolled into deciding a few personality traits that help define your hero. Finally, each Basic Archetype lets you select one of three Power Suites that define what exactly puts the “super” in your super hero.

Let’s take a look at one of my favorite hero concepts: the Energy Controller:

This is Solar Ray, or just Ray to his teammates. He appears—alongside his friends Anansi, Ultra, and Pinnacle—in the Basic Hero Handbook’s tutorial comics. The Energy Controller’s Ability ranks focus mostly on being tough and fast, with the cocksure attitude and powerful presence that usually accompanies the ability to throw fireballs. Their skills options give you some classic comic book staples for energy-wielders, letting you help personalize you hero as say, a lothario test-pilot or a watchful commander. Because Energy Controllers are more defined by their powers, they don’t receive as many Advantages as most heroes, but you still get some flexibility in deciding if your hero is a wisecracking brawler, a cool-as-a-cucumber tactician, or a terrifying force of nature. Finally, their Power Suite choices give you choice of what kind of comic book exploits you want to embody: The Avatar is your classic Human Torch, able to transform into a living incarnation of your element; the Blaster, on the other hand, is a classic one-trick pony who can only do one thing, but does it very, very well (and gets some extra Skills and Advantages, since they’re not out there hotshotting all the time); the Elementalist splits the difference as a master of energy, able to control and wield their element with extraordinary skill, but not transforming into it.

The Basic Archetypes are fast, easy, and flexible enough to make each hero feel personal, obfuscating the math and overwhelming choices while still giving players a standard 150 power point, Power Level 10 starting character they can bring to the table alongside veteran players who create their characters using the rules found in the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook!

The full basic Hero’s Handbook will be available in print later this summer at GenCon. Hope to see you all there!