Tag Archive for: Mutants & Masterminds

Roadtrip to Ruin: a new Mutants & Masterminds novel (Ronin Roundtable)

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I love working on book covers. It’s not my primary skill set, but I’ve done enough now to feel vaguely competent, and I’ve gotten to work with some incredible artists, so I’ve learned a lot.

But this is the first time I’ve written “The Pomeranian is the wrong shade of green. We need him to look more radioactive.”

Thankfully, the artist, Dale Ray Deforest, took it in stride and did, indeed, make the Pomeranian a more radioactive green.

 

This book has been quite a lot of fun to work on in general. I first met Skyler in Austin, Texas, during one of the most memorable weekends of my life – I was at World Horror Convention, got the worst food poisoning of my life, was breaking up with a boyfriend, and had my first book signing for my first anthology (I did that signing half a bottle of Jack Daniels in, because it turns out whiskey can help calm food poisoning). I loved her work, and when I needed an author to write a Mutants & Masterminds novel for Nisaba, she was an immediate choice.

She had a strong concept almost immediately, and turned over a draft that had me laughing as I read it. The basic premise is a familiar one: a girl entering adulthood, trying to find her way into her new responsibilities.

In Roadtrip to Ruin, there’s nothing normal about Hannah’s life. Going to school with a rich social media celebrity, breaking people out of the hospital, trying to make friends with a demon, and embarking on a road trip to find out where she came from, that’s all just Monday for Hannah.

And yes, the dog is green.

Pick up Roadtrip to Ruin¸ a Mutants & Masterminds novel by Skyler Graye, from Nisaba Press/Green Ronin Publishing soon!

Spooky Superhero Times!

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With Halloween fast approaching, this is a time for seasonal merriment, and there are few things merrier than punching self-important super villains in the face! To celebrate this spooky time of year—a favorite around the Green Ronin offices—we’ve prepared a special treat: A free adventure for Mutants & Masterminds, Third Edition!

Nothing To Fear

Nothing to Fear is a short seasonal adventure set in Freedom City. As the heroes attend the city’s annual Halloween parade, sinister agents are afoot, looking to spread fear and chaos among the attendees. Only swift action can prevent a fun-filled holiday from mutating into a night of violence. Nothing to Fear is self-contained, with the major villain stat blocks provided for you. All you need to play is a copy of the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook and either the Gamemaster’s Guide or the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide! It’s also a stealth preview of our upcoming PDF Astonishing Adventures line, coming later this year. More details on that as we get closer.

Download Nothing to Fear here!

 

And check out last year’s previous Halloween Adventurer: Monster Mash-Up!
And for more holiday fun, (even though it’s still months away, despite what the seasonal aisle in retail stores might like you to think): Crisis on Christmas!

Nisaba Journal Issue 3 (PDF, mobi, epub)

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Nisaba Journal Issue 3Nisaba Journal Issue 3 is now available for purchase and download. For $6.99 you get three formats: PDF, epub, and mobi.

Nisaba Journal

Open the Nisaba Journal and immerse yourself in original fiction gathered from your favorite worlds. Issue 3 collects five tales from two of Green Ronin’s most popular settings—Blue Rose and Mutants & Masterminds—and offers ideas for incorporating the heroes, villains, and adventures from the stories into the ones you tell in your own campaigns.

Featured Stories 

Blue Rose:

“Nearly Perfect,” by F. Wesley Schneider

Whoever said your lover should never change you might not have had flesh-shaping arcana at their fingertips.

“Those Who Wait, Part 4,” by Rhiannon Louve

Marn and Kiyn continue trying to unravel the corruption spreading through Aldis while dealing with their feelings for each other.

“The Price of Mercy, Part 2,” by Clio Yun-Su Davis

Family and obligation continue to clash even beyond death and freedom.

“The Rhy-Horse,” by A. B. Neilly

A lonely young rhydan, burdened by the expectations of his herd, finds his bonded companion, but deadly trouble is brewing.

Mutants & Masterminds:

“A Great Day for Trepidation,” by Eytan Bernstein

Kevin’s built a team, and now the bad guys are coming for them.

Pick up Nisaba Journal Issue 3 today!

Height of the Storm, A New Mutants & Masterminds Novel

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Height of the Storm cover imageHeight of the Storm by Aaron Rosenberg is a new Mutants & Masterminds novel from Nisaba Press, available for preorder and in three formats of ebook (epub, mobi, and PDF), in our Green Ronin Online Store.

Lindsey’s life changed the night she saw her beloved grandfather in his superhero guise for the first time. It changed again the day she got caught in a strange storm, and she took up her grandfather’s mantle as a protector. Diagnosed at a young age with a rare chronic illness, she must balance her family’s protectiveness against her desire to carry on their legacy and prevent a bitter genius from taking revenge on those who slighted him.

Height of the Storm is the first novel to explore Earth-Prime, the setting of the hit superhero RPG Mutants & Masterminds.

 

About the Author

Aaron Rosenberg, authorAaron Rosenberg is the author of the best-selling DuckBob SF comedy series, the Dread Remora space-opera series, the Relicant epic fantasy series with Steve Savile, and the O.C.L.T. occult thriller series with David Niall Wilson. Aaron’s tie-in work contains novels for Star Trek, Warhammer, World of WarCraft, Stargate: Atlantis, Shadowrun, Eureka, and more. He has written children’s books (including the original series STEM Squad and Pete and Penny’s Pizza Puzzles, the award-winning Bandslam: The Junior Novel, and the #1 best-selling 42: The Jackie Robinson Story), educational books on a variety of topics, and over seventy roleplaying games (such as the original games Asylum, Spookshow, and Chosen, work for White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, Fantasy Flight, Pinnacle, and many others, and both the Origins Award-winning Gamemastering Secrets and the Gold ENnie-winning Lure of the Lich Lord). He is the co-creator of the ReDeus series, and a founding member of Crazy 8 Press. Aaron lives in New York with his family. You can follow him online at gryphonrose. com, on Facebook at facebook.com/gryphonrose, and on Twitter @gryphonrose.

Nisaba Press

Nisaba Press is the fiction imprint of Green Ronin Publishing, under the leadership of Editorial Director Jaym Gates. Nisaba publishes novels, anthologies, and nonfiction tied to the rich and varied worlds of Green Ronin’s tabletop roleplaying properties and the larger world of tabletop gaming. With the release of Joseph D. Carriker’s Shadowtide and Aaron Rosenberg’s Height of the Storm, Nisaba Press brings a new facet to Green Ronin’s award-winning worlds.

THE DELUXE GAMEMASTER’S GUIDE: ADVENTURE TO THE MAX

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In our last Mutants & Mastermind’s Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide preview, I showed off some of the new faces populating the game, including my beloved Jobber villain archetype. But the Deluxe GMG is more than just a new gallery of rogues! One area I’ve struggled with the third edition of Mutants & Masterminds has been adventure design. The original Gamemaster’s Guide delved deep into villains and plot and motivations and challenges, but never provided a chapter on stitching them all together into a full adventure.

So for this newly revised reprint, I added a chapter on exactly that! The new Adventure chapter provides some practical advice on planning an adventure, involving the heroes, and stitching together various scenes to help make compelling adventures with more to do than throw punches and busses. Mutants & Masterminds has roughly broken out the action into various “scene” types—Conflict, Challenge, Investigation, and Roleplay—for years in our official adventures without expanding much on what each of those scenes mean or how to make best use of them as a GM. Now each scene type gets a spread on how to write it, how to use the rules, and when to dish out Hero points, as well as a helpful random chart to help out if you get stuck.

The Adventure chapter also includes a half-dozen pre-built scenes for you to grab and drop into your own adventures on short notice. Anyone who picked up the Basic hero’s Handbook will be familiar with these, but if you haven’t, a pre-built scene has everything you need for an hour or two of interesting heroics above and beyond the beloved superhero slugfest. The scenes also show you how to use the Mutants & Masterminds rules in unexpected ways to play out some fan-favorite comic book tropes. The new scenes in the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide include shrinking your heroes down to insect size, handling massive invasions, and waging battles in the psychic realm, but my favorite is detailing how to play out a fun, high-speed chase!

 

You can download a PDF sample of the High Speed Chase right here! 

 

Of course, we wouldn’t leave you hanging with only a few sample scenes. Your group needs to save the day in more than just one scene at a time, so the Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide includes two new Mutants & Masterminds adventures. In “Power Play,” a new criminal organization is taking over the streets of your fair city and threatening to bring one of the most dangerous supervillains of the previous generation back into play to secure their hold. In “The Isle of Dr. Sersei,” you must infiltrate a mad scientist’s island full of monsters to stop her deadly “salvation” of mankind. You can run each adventure as it is, drop in some of the sample scenes from Chapter 6 to bulk it out, or just use each adventure as a whole pile of extra sample scenes to drop into your own adventures. Maybe you’ll never run Power play at home, but knowing how to run the PCs infiltrating an underworld meeting or battling atop speeding tanker trucks is always fun to have in your back pocket!

 

Pre-Order and PDF: Threefold and Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide

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It’s the first day of Gen Con, and visitors to Booth 929 are finding our latest releases and advance copies of our upcoming books for sale. But even if you’re not at Gen Con, you can get in on the fun, too! When you pre-order Threefold and the Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide through our Green Ronin Online Store, you’ll be offered the PDF version for just $5! If you prefer to spend your money at your local store, make sure they know about our GR Preorder Plus program. If they sign up, you can get a coupon for the same $5 PDF deal through them!

Read more →

Prepare for Gen Con 2019: A Green Ronin Guide

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It’s almost time for the Best Four Days in Gaming and the first sign of the end of summer, and we’re scrambling to see what new games we’ll be playing in September – but we couldn’t find anything! Every year tons of new games being released at Gen Con, or at least that’s how it’s been in the past, so we figured we’d give you a quick run down of what Green Ronin has to offer that’s new this year – each of these will be available in limited quantities at booth 929, and released later into your friendly local game store!

Also, be sure to check out our seminars and scheduled games!

Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide

The first is the new Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide. The original third edition Gamemaster’s Guide has been out of print for a while now, and the Deluxe guide is a hardcover version with 32-pages of brand-new material and is the best resource for new GMs right after the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook or Basic Hero’s Handbook.

Crystal Frasier had a look at the table of contents and even free preview PDF of a new archetype in Bigger. Stronger. Better. The Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide

If you’re not at Gen Con 2019 you can Deluxe your Gamemastering skills on September 10th.

Mutants & Masterminds Superteam Handbook

We also have the new Mutants & Masterminds Superteam Handbook which brings the focus on super teams. This book includes eight pre-made super teams with details and rules for both players and gamemasters to add more team dynamics to your game. This has been a long-awaited addition to the Mutants & Masterminds game – and retailers will have it on August 6th through their preferred distributors.

If you’re looking for more information about Superteam Handbook you can check out what SuperDev Crystal has to say about it in these links;

Fantasy AGE Campaign Builders Guide

Fantasy AGE has come a long way since its release, and now we’re proud to bring the Fantasy AGE Campaign Builders Guide! Whether you’re looking to make your own fantasy pantheon, advice on interesting locations, how to make effective of entertaining encounters, this book has advice, mechanics, and examples that are ready to plop into your game! 

This will be available in retail on August 20th. Jack Norris has more to say about what to expect in his blog posts

Threefold: A Campaign Setting for Modern AGE

Last year we released Modern AGE Basic Rulebook and seen lots of feedback and released supplements including the successful Modern AGE Companion which we sold out of in the first two days at Origins earlier this year. Now we’re releasing the original setting Threefold, a full campaign setting with secret organizations, multiple worlds, and the ability to change your setting and theme while maintaining the same tone and characters. Threefold aims to be the flagship setting for Modern AGE going forward and will have plenty of books in the future.

Threefold will be available in distribution September 3rd. Does that sound up your alley? Malcolm can tell you all about what to expect in his original setting in these past Roundtables;

Nisaba Press: Height of the Storm – A Mutants & Masterminds novel

Height of the Storm: The first Mutants & Masterminds novel, by Aaron Rosenberg!!Height of the Storm is the tale of a young woman who takes over her grandfather’s role as the protector of her town, working with his old rival to learn to harness the powers she so recently discovered. But not all enemies are as evil as they may seem, and Lindsay finds herself weighing the safety of the city against the redemption of a man caught in events out of his control.

Just check out what Nisaba Press line manager, Jaym Gates had to say about the book, in Nisaba Press Update Height of the Storm

2019 is shaping up to be quite the exciting year for us and Gen Con will be a blast! Keep your eyes locked here during the convention for a special announcement. If you’re at the show, swing by and grab your new favorite book and meet the team.

Mutants & Masterminds: BIGGER. STRONGER. BETTER. THE DELUXE GAMEMASTER’S GUIDE

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Longtime fans and frustrated newcomers alike have probably noticed that the Mutants & Masterminds Gamemaster’s Guide has been out of print for most of this year. Why retire such a critical rulebook for one of our most popular lines? Well, we didn’t. The original Gamemaster’s Guide was involved in a terrible test-pilot crash, and so we retrieved it and took it back to base, where we rebuilt it better than ever!

The Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide has all the material you love from the original but expanded with even more content and bound in a sturdy hardback to better stand up to table wear. So what’s new? Let’s take a look at the updated table of contents:

Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide Table of Contents!

That’s 70 new pages of content! Let’s take a look at part of that today!

New Faces

The Archetypes chapter has been expanded to add new villains and new minions! One of the best parts of running a superhero RPG is getting to put your favorite tropes and sacred cows into the game, and I always thought the villain archetype needed a little more weird. The new villains include the Composite—a villain made from small particles or creatures, making them flexible and tough to hurt. But my personal favorite addition is the PL 8 Jobber, the second-string loser whose powers have a theme but don’t quite match the PCs’. These are your Shockers, your Condiment Kings, your Captains Boomerang. They’re great support; backed by a ton of minions or assisting a bigger villain, they’ll make you sweat. But on their own, they don’t stand much of a chance against PL 10 heroes.

I love the Jobber so much, I want everyone to have her! So here she is for everyone to enjoy!

Free PDF Prewiew of Jobber!

The archetypes chapter also includes lots of new minions to help round out your adventure lineup. The big goal was to add some more unusual minion opponents and round out that PL7-8 “Lieutenant” range, so here’s the list of new additions: Devouring Swarm, Trickster Faerie, Jinx Faerie, Arcane Cultist, Mystic Ninja, Drone, Robot Jockey, Tulpa, and my personal favorite and noteworthy missing pet: the Hyena. The Deluxe Gamemaster’s Guide also includes a new section just for templates, with seven sample templates to let you adapt the preceding minions for your own stranger capers.

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Part of being a superhero means being responsible in both deed and language. Words can have power, carry unexpected baggage, or be hurtful, and even when you don’t mean to cause harm, they can still have consequence. The original printing of the Gamemaster’s Guide included some word choices that are common comic book tropes, but also carry some real-world baggage. So we’ve changed a few names in the archetype chapter. These revisions use the same statblocks, but the shift can be confusing if you’re using adventures or villain write-ups that refer to these minions by name, so here’s the rundown on what got changed:

The Savage villain archetype is now the Hybrid.

The Thug is now the Crook.

The Hit-Man is now the Hired Killer.

And the minion-level Crime Lord is now the Boss. This wasn’t a sensitivity issue; we’re just trying to avoid confusion with the villain archetype of the same name.

Charitable Giving Initiative: Freedom Sale For RAICES

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Select Mutants & Masterminds product 20% off; 20% of proceeds go to RAICESShop the Freedom Sale and make a difference.

From now until July 15th select titles from Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds line will be 20% off cover price, with 20% of the proceeds going to RAICES for the work they are doing to address the humanitarian crisis affecting asylum-seekers and detained children on the US-Mexico border.

At a time when it can feel like only a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist has a hope of success, it’s ok to remember that there are folks out there with none of that, who do what they can with what they have. What we have is a superhero game that we hope supports and inspires you in your fights to stay heroic and support justice on this fragile little planet of ours however you can. You don’t have to be a superhero to make a difference in the world but if you want to play one for a little while, we can help you with that, too.

Shop the Freedom Sale

Superteam Handbook Now Pre-Ordering!

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Superteam Handbook (Pre-Order)Superteam Handbook is now available to pre-order in our Green Ronin Online Store! As usual, when you pre-order the physical book, you can add the PDF version to your order for just $5, to download right away. If you prefer to shop from your local store, make sure they know about Green Ronin Pre-Order Plus, so you can get the same $5 PDF deal by pre-ordering through them.

No hero can stand up to every challenge alone—nor should they! Legendary heroics demand teamwork, and teamwork demands a team. Are you a super-powered minority fighting to protect a world that fears you? A family of gene-freaks trying to scrape by? Or super-powered ex-cons trying to do right? Whatever brings you together, your teammates are your friends, rivals, co-workers, and family all in one—with all the love and hate that implies. But together you can achieve incredible things none of you could alone. Whether a ragtag band of vigilantes falls in together by accident or Earth’s greatest protectors train to work as a single unit, heroes are always more than the sum of their parts!

The Superteam Handbook sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds puts the focus on the heroes and their team, with details for players and gamemasters alike to make their team cohesive, dramatic, and fun! Understand what it means to be a team and form a common identity and responsibility, and when to buck the system and rebel. Learn the ins and outs of not just cooperation. Heroes can work closer together than ever before with new, team-focused powers, advantages, and attack options.

In addition to new game material, the Superteam Handbook presents eight pre-made hero teams—ranging from PL 5 to PL 12—to serve as campaign-kickstarters, with guidelines, resources, and advice for running a variety of heroic campaigns, along with background and statblocks for their members to use as player characters, rivals, or villains. Will you save the planet as part of the globe-hopping UNIQUE, battle to keep the urban jungle safe as one of the street-brawling Ferroburg Four, or take on ancient aliens from the cockpit of your giant robot as a member of MagnaForce? Whatever you choose, your friends stand by your side!