Tag Archive for: Mutants & Masterminds

NEXUSES, NERIAN AND FAR (Ronin Roundtable)

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Assault on the Nerian Nexus

The next adventure in the NetherWar series, Assault on the Nerian Nexus, releases this morning. Following an unspecified number of years after the events in Master of Earth, Assault on the Nerian Nexus represents the first big event to kick off the villain’s diabolical plan to conquer not only Earth-Prime, but all the cosmos! The NetherWar begins with a bang, as Medea cracked open Adrian Eldrich’s now-vacant sanctum, the Nerian Nexus, to plunder the treasures inside! But secrets never stay secret among Freedom City’s villain community, and a half-dozen other villains wait in the wings to make their own run on the wealth and knowledge long protected inside the supernatural abode! The heroes will need all their strength and cunning to stand up against a rotating gallery of villains before they can escape with deadly secrets and powerful magic artifacts!

Adventure author John Polojac—who you might remember from Rogues Gallery and the SuperTeam Handbook — did a great job bringing the surreal world of the Nerian Nexus to life, with plenty of bizarre encounters beyond villain rumbles to vex and emotionally scar your heroes. John always overdelivers, and was thoughtful enough to provide some advice for Gamemasters who want to switch up the events of Assault on the Nerian Nexus for increased customization and replayability by adding an optional encounter with the villain Arcanix at the adventure’s conclusion.

I’ll let John take it from here:

The Arcanix Alternative

Arcanix

Having the far more self-interested Arcanix substitute for Warden in the conclusion sets up a potential confrontation for the heroes. While Arcanix desires the same prize as Medea—the multiversal guidebook Alternity Atlas—he realizes he arrived too late for that. But the mysterious mage will take a concession prize as his due, all the lesser items gathered by the Crime Leaguers on their sojourn. Heroes balking at this “compensation” must contest with Arcanix. The characters should justly be wary of giving over ANY of the Nerian Nexus’ prizes to the avaricious Arcanix.  While he has no genuine animus towards the team, he realizes they are unlikely to comply with his demands, so Arcanix will strike the instant any heroes voice objection!

Even if prevented from absconding with ill-gotten goods, Arcanix taking leave with Medea to parts unknown is obviously a bad idea. Should he escape with the immortal in tow, an adventure can be built around tracking Arcanix before he finds a way to add Medea’s secrets to his own. As memories cloud following his departure, the team must act quickly to discover a means of reaching Arcadian’s extra-dimensional bolthole!

The Arcanix Alternative takes the adventure’s conclusion in a very different direction, setting up a chase scene or rescue mission culminating in a confrontation with a power spellcaster. Depending on how the heroes handled other villains throughout the events of Assault on the Nerian Nexus, they may assist the heroes in freeing Medea or use the distraction as a moment to lash out for revenge! Tom Cypress in particular is likely to become involved to save his best friend, while Medea’s Crime League cohorts may likewise follow up on her kidnapping before they lose their only reliable access to magic power.

Arcanix’s statblock and background information can be found in the pages of Threat Report, alongside dozens of additional villains who might threaten your heroes!

The NetherWar doesn’t end with Assault on the Nerian Nexus, so stay tuned for further supernatural adventures!

 

Ronin Army forums update: All Good Things…

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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)

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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)

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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!

Idle Thoughts on Idol Pursuits (Ronin Roundtable)

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The shared world experience is an interesting one, something my earliest experiences with roleplaying games informed me about. After all, I started out playing around in imaginary worlds created by others, first as a hobby and later as a professional writer, so it’s a natural progression that now, other people are playing around in imaginary worlds that I created. One of the important things about shared worlds is that they’re like living things: They grow and change over time and, while you might help to create one, or even “raise” it, ultimately, it doesn’t belong to you and it can be better from a lot of different contributions.

Idol Pursuits, the Mutants & Masterminds novella from Nisaba Press, written by Michael Matheson, is an example of how those diverse shared-world contributions come together. Like the upcoming NetherWar adventure series for the Mutants & Masterminds RPG, the story of Idol Pursuits has its origins in the update of the Freedom City sourcebook (itself the origin of the Earth-Prime setting) to the third edition of the M&M rules.

One of the background elements that was updated in Freedom City is a change in the forces of magic in the world: The loss of Adrian Eldritch as Master Mage, followed by his successor Seven inadvertently becoming ruler of the Netherworld, forced to exile herself from Earth. Now sinister forces of sorcery that were once under control are rising in power. One strand of that story is told in NetherWar (NetherWar: Master of Earth is on sale NOW!), while others appear in M&M fiction like Idol Pursuits and the forthcoming novel The Doom That Came to San Francisco.

When there’s magic at work in the world of Earth-Prime, you can bet things are going to happen in Mystery, New Hampshire, a mystic part of the setting I first detailed in Altas of Earth-Prime, which is also the setting for Idol Pursuits. Just the place where you might expect a deathless vigilante dealing out harsh justice might come across a strange idol that everyone seems to want, and team up with a young sorcerer-detective and his sword-wielding barbarian protector. For me, it’s a fun experience to see Matheson’s Revenant, Kid Necro, and Ilkath, among others, meet up with some familiar Freedom City characters of my creation, mixed with other contributions to Earth-Prime like Scott Bennie’s specialists in magic and weirdness from Agents of Freedom, and some of Prof. Christopher McGlothlin’s creepy characters from Freedom’s Most Wanted, to name a few.

Intrigued? Well, no spoilers here, but if you’re interested in magic and misadventure in the Mutants & Masterminds manner, and maybe getting another perspective on the Rise of Dark Magic in the Earth-Prime setting, take a look at Idol Pursuits, the ebook and pdf are available today from Nisaba Press!

Mutants & Masterminds: NetherWar is Coming… (Ronin Roundtable)

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So what good’s an adventure if the story doesn’t roll on into the next one? What good is winning the battle while the war rages on? And how can real heroes keep the world safe when the position of the world’s guardian remains empty?

The NetherWar is upon us, to answer these questions.

NetherWar is a six-part adventure series for Mutants & Masterminds—five main stories and a prequel—that pits the heroes against the rising tide of evil magic on Earth Prime. The champions must prove their mettle by defending the world from newly-empowered villains and uncovering the legacy of protection Adrian Eldrich created before his terrible death. But they’re racing the clock as a diabolical shadow from the Master Mage’s past works to unravel those protections and rise on Earth-Prime as a dark god!

Over the coming months, you’ll run through the harrowing challenges and ultimately save Earth-Prime. The adventure begins with a flashback in this week’s Master of Earth, written by me, then continues next month with John Polojac’s Assault on the Nerian Nexus. The months to come will unveil The Pentagram Peril, Broken Strings, Bound by Gold, and finally conclude in Three Made One. There’s plenty of space in between each adventure to add your own adventures and plot points, or you can run the entire series back-to-back as an extended mini campaign, and each volume of the NetherWar arc will work as a standalone adventure if you only want little a magical peril. As a treat.

No Spells Required!

You can run the NetherWar adventure arc using your existing heroes, or build a new team to tackle the crisis, but magical powers aren’t necessary to save the world from the magic apocalypse. There are plenty of expert NPCs along the way to explain the magical history of Earth-Prime and plenty of ways to solve the various challenges without resorting to spellcraft, so feel free to bring your mutants, aliens, and cyborgs into the fight!

If you do want to use NetherWar as the kickoff for a magical campaign, NetherWar offers Bequests in each adventure—tiny bits of Adrian Eldrich’s legacy as Master Mage left behind for others to inherit. Your heroes can keep bequests in their trophy case as plot devices they can pull out for a Hero Point, or invest the Power points to make any bequest a normal part of their heroic identity. And the greatest bequest of all is up for grabs: The title of Master Mage of Earth-Prime! While bequests and the title aren’t central to the campaign, they provide a little something extra for players who get into the themes and legacies involved.

A Blast in the Past

With the Time Traveler’s Codex  available now, it’s appropriate that the NetherWar kicks off with a little trip to yesteryear in Master of Earth. A slight departure from our usual Astonishing Adventure offerings, Master of Earth flashes back to events we already describe in the Secret Past chapter of Freedom City, Third Edition and further details Seven’s climactic confrontation with the Dark Lord Una to save the earth after Eldrich’s passing. The players step into the roles of Seven and several members of the teenage Next-Gen to stop Una the Unrelenting from conquering Earth-Prime! You can play the adventure as a slice of history with the same outcome, or use the adventure with your own heroes to create your own spin on Earth-Prime’s recent past. While the heroes of Master of Earth—are set years in the past—don’t necessarily tie directly into those you might play, the adventure with help players understand the status quo of Earth-Prime’s magical community and how we got here.

Your Guide to Adventure!

 

NetherWar has a lot of moving parts and expectations, not to mention six parts stretched out over as many months. To help players and Gamemasters alike keep track of all those moving parts, we’ve assembled a FREE NetherWar Guide. This 15-page guide gives players the rundown on what they need to know and expect going into NetherWar as well as advice on what skills, Advantages, and powers might be helpful. If you’re building your team from scratch for this adventure series, it also offers five team ideas and five concept roles to help you define your place in the group. You can build your teams only using these concept roles, or combine them with roles presented in the SuperTeam Handbook to flesh out your place on the team and the story.

For Gamemasters, the NetherWar Guide also includes a section just for you! It includes an adventure-by-adventure preview of what to expect so you can start early seeding any plot points you really like. It also includes a brief who’s-who of NetherWar villains so you can read up on their history and start perfecting your voice-acting skills for the table!

 

If you’re worried about magical mayhem overload, don’t fret! We’ll have plenty of Astonishing Adventures to come that offer some mystical relief! Take off to the stars, battle aliens, and stop a supernova in the cosmic adventure Prodigal Sun, or take your campaign back to high school for a LARP gone terrible wrong in Bite Club, or confront a mischievous cosmic imp as you journey Into the Idiot Box! All these and more lie in the future!

The NetherWar has been a really fun project to bring to life, and I hope everyone has as much fun playing it. Hopefully this will be the first of many multi-part adventures yet to come for Mutants & Masterminds, so let us know what you think on social media and the Ronin Army forums!

Mutants & Masterminds: IT’S ABOUT TIME…(Ronin Roundtable)

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Alright, so Green Ronin has released the Time Traveler’s Codex for Mutants & Masterminds, and we’re all interested. Time travel is a big deal, but you look at this development and you think “What has this got to do with me? Surely time travel and Green Ronin are in the pocket of Big Chronomancy. How can I possibly make time travel work for me, the little guy running a hand-to-mouth wooly mammoth ranch?”

Well I’m glad you asked, friend, because the Time Traveler’s Codex has so much to offer you! It’s got advice and skills to help you survive down the timestream, with not one, not two, but THREE brand new optional skills to help bring history to life! Pair those with new advantages designed especially with the worldly time traveler in mind and you’ll never feel out of place even when you’re out of your era!

“But every book has skills,” you say…

You, the discerning player have your eyes open for value! As a wary consumer, you know that companies aim so much at Gamemasters and their deep, tearstained pockets. You say “Well the Time Traveler’s Codex gives my Gamemaster everything she needs to attack me with a cyborg and a sabre-tooth tiger at the same time! How do I stand up against that?”

With time powers, my friend, with time powers. While the indelible Power Profiles offers you an in-depth look at temporal powers, this handy volume introduces new uses like Time Tampering and every 90s kid favorite, Time Out!

“But Crystal”, you say, interrupting again. “I was never bitten by a radioactive sundial! I have no powers to call my own!” Lucky for you, this stark tome provides a veritable catalog of new equipment with which to kit out your character! And the list doesn’t just start with our top-of-the-line time machines (including the Time-Hopping Muscle Car; tell Sal I sent you to get a sweet, sweet discount and no money down), but indispensable tools of the time-traveling trade like the Chronal Scanner and the emergency Time Suit! Defend yourself with an array of time-traveling weapons, whether you’re freezing them in place with the patent-pending Chronal Sink or wiping out the past, present, and future of your obnoxious neighbor with the still-technically-legal Quantum Disruptor! And that’s before we open the back of the book and start exploring vintage innovations from Earth’s history. No extra charge for that; it’s a feature.

I can see it in your eyes: You’re on the fence, but still you wonder, Is. It. For. Me? Canny, friend. You’re canny and I like that, so here’s what I’m gonna do. Now don’t spread this around, because I could lose my job for what I’m about to tell you, but every single element of this book intended for Gamemaster use is available to you, the consumer! Certainly your Gamemaster can unleash a horde of flesh-devouring cockroaches from beyond the end of time, but with time travel on your side you can have that self-same horde as a loyal and colorful sidekick! Crack wise with a loyal Dread Pirate or have an Egyptian Sphinx prepare your eggs in the morning; it’s doesn’t matter, they’re you’re sidekick!

Now how much would you pay?

Well, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do! I’m gonna send you home—at no charge to you—with a hot sample to get you excited. One of the pre-made hero archetypes open to you: the Quantum Alien! Yes, that scion of an advanced race, whose very marrow is infused with the stuff of time travel itself! If this isn’t proof that your household is ready for time travel, then dear reader, you might as well stay in the 20th century!

Ronin Report, April 15, 2020

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tl;dr: Things in distribution are challenging; Green Ronin is adapting and new releases are on the way. Please buy our PDFs if you’d like to support us during the current crisis.

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Mutants & Masterminds: TIME FOR TIME! (Ronin Roundtable)

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Time Traveler’s Codex is now available in PDF format in our Green Ronin Online Store.

When you think about your favorite superhero teams—the Justice League, the X-men, the Ninja Turtles, the Sailor Senshi—what do they all have in common? It’s not masks or tights or even tragic backstories. None of those are universal.

No, to be real superheroes, you need to Travel. Through. Time.

Superheroes have flung themselves through the fourth dimension almost as long as comics have published their misadventures. The Fantastic Four were time-traveling by issue #5, and the entire Legion of Superheroes was kicked-off thanks to a one-off time travel story in the pages of Superboy. Even the world of cinema can’t resist the siren song of chronomancy, as (spoiler warning) the Avengers build a time machine to repair their scarred universe.

So where has the time travel for Mutants & Masterminds been? Right here.

Mutants & Masterminds Time Traveler's Codex PDF

Buy the Time Traveler’s Codex PDF today! (Even if you already bought it tomorrow.)

Time travel opens up so many new options for a superhero campaign, from the simple elegance of punching dinosaurs to the deep, characterful questions about their responsibilities and consequences for tampering in history. The Time Traveler’s Codex, which releases this week, gives you a smorgasbord of options for incorporating time travel as a side element or a major theme in your campaigns, including details on various eras of adventure popular in other time travel stories, new equipment and powers that revolve around controlling an traveling through time, a look at the tropes and themes that pop up around time travel, and plenty of advice for understanding how time travel works and determining the effects of your heroes’ actions.

There will be plenty of previews to come for this book, but for now here’s a look at the table of contents, so you know exactly what you’re in for!

I’ll see you… in time.

Mutants & Masterminds: Reign, Reign, Go Away

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Between last month’s new offering Rise of the Tyrant, and this week’s own The Reign of Cats and Dogs, the all new lineup of Astonishing Adventures is in full swing, with superhero action and adventure for your Mutants & Masterminds table. Rise of the Tyrant brought a sinister plot by an extradimensional warlord, using the puzzle-loving villain Conundrum as his pawn. Despite the high stakes, the encounters introduce new concepts one at a time, from combat to skill checks to investigations, making Rise of the Tyrant a great introduction to M&M for new players or players new to Third Edition.

The Reign of Cats and Dogs is about as far, conceptually, from interdimensional conquest as we can get. The heroes must keep the peace and find a solution as the city’s animals begin developing super powers in one of the weirdest adventures we’ve ever offered for any edition of Mutants & Masterminds, making the adventure a fun fit for any superhero team, but especially appropriate for Hero High teens hoping to keep things calm.

But this isn’t the first appearance of The Reign of Cats and Dogs. The adventure began years ago as a homebrew convention game I ran for various events and based entirely off a bade pun from my good friend, author and DJ, Miranda Sparks. When I was double-booked during one GenCon event, I needed Green Ronin to send a relief GM halfway through my game: None other than Steve Kenson, who managed to pick up my notes with no prep time and run with them. He later admitted that reviewing my adventure notes for that game are part of what convinced him I would make a good fit for the Green Ronin team and M&M in particular, so The Reign of Cats And Dogs is actually responsible for my current position as head of my favorite game line!

We have plenty more Astonishing Adventures lined up over the next several months to keep you entertained and the city safe, running the gambit from wacky fun to deadly serious confrontations between good and evil! I don’t know if this bizarre escapade will bring you the same good fortune it’s brought me, but I know it’ll at least bring you a few hours of goofy fun, and I hope you enjoy it as much as my convention tables have!