Spes Magna Games

Whew!

I started back up as a full-time teacher this month. I’m at a Catholic boys school about eight minutes from the house. So far, I’m enjoying the new gig. It’s certainly a huge improvement over my last full-time teaching position.

Anyway, on 7 August, Terry, a friend and fellow gamer, suggested I stat up the Greenland shark as a monster. I did a bit of reading about Greenland sharks. They are one more confirmation that nature hates us and will eat us given the chance. Seriously scary animal. Don’t let its goofy smile fool you. It’s hungry, and you’re lunch.

And so, here’s my take on the Greenland shark as a amphibious horror for use with Savage Worlds Deluxe Explorer’s Edition. (N.B. That’s an affiliate link also.)

Drukkin

We saw the blunt dorsal fin break the surface a dozen or so yards from the edge of the ice shelf. The seals must have seen it too. Those in the water flopped up onto the ice, and all of them moved away from the edge. None of could identify the shark, and we became a bit excited at the thought of stumbling onto a new species.

“Um, it’s picking up speed,” Roberts said.

He was right. The shark surged through the water, straight toward the ice shelf’s edge. Just as it was about to hit, rather than veering or diving, it burst from the water, it’s eyes flashing with an unearthly green light. Before it hit the ice, its pectoral fins changed, lengthened, became segmented. Monstrous three-toed paws with yard-long talons burst from the end of each limb.

“Run!”

We ran, desperately trying to avoid the panicked seals as well as escape the horrid fish. When I heard Roberts’s scream end abruptly, I knew it was gaining on us….

Attributes: Agility d8, Smarts d4 (A), Spirit d8, Strength d12+4, Vigor d12
Skills: Fighting d10, Notice d12, Shooting d8, Swimming d10
Pace: 8; Parry: 7; Toughness 12

Special Abilities
Aquatic: Pace 10.
Bite: STR+d6.
Eye Bolts: Range: 30/60/120. Damage: 1-3d6, based on range. Rate of Fire: 1 or 2. The drukkin can fire bolts of burning energy from its eyes. After using its eye bolts, the drukkin is -2 on Notice checks until the end of its next turn.
Fear: -2. The drukkin inspires fear when it attacks or transforms.
Hardy: The drukkin does not suffer a wound from being Shaken twice.
Large: Attackers add +2 to their attack rolls when attacking the drukkin due to its large size.
Size: +4. The drukkin can grow up to 25 feet in length.
Transformation: As an action, the drukkin can transform so that it can function on land or revert back to its aquatic form.

Tags: monsters, Savage Wednesday, Savage Worlds

A bit more than six years ago, I presented Shaolin Beaver, illustrated by the phenomenal Darren Calvert, as a hero for the second edition of Mutants & Masterminds. You check him out at this link. Here’s the short version: Edward is a humanoid beaver with remarkable kung fu skills. He’s not sure if he’s the last of his people, and so he travels the land, doing good deeds and searching for others of his kind, all the while trying to avoid the xenocollectors.

Here’s Shaolin Beaver for M&M‘s third edition. (Nota Bene: That’s an affiliate link.)

Shaolin Beaver
Strength 1, Stamina 3, Agility 5, Dexterity 5, Fighting 11, Intellect 0, Awareness 5, Presence 0

Powers

Humanoid Beaver
Shrinking 4 (Extras: Continuous, Innate; Flaw: Permanent) [Cost: 2/rank, 9 points]
Speed 1 (Array, 4 MPH) [Cost: 1/rank, 3 points]; Swimming 3 (Alternate Effect; 4 MPH) [Cost: 1 point]

Shaolin Strike
Strength-Based Damage 4 [Cost: 1/rank, 4 points]

Advantages: Agile Feint, Contacts, Defensive Attack, Defensive Roll 4, Evasion 2, Favored Environment (Aquatic), Improved Critical (Unarmed), Improved Initiative, Languages (English and Mandarin), Power Attack, Set-Up, Skill Mastery (Acrobatics), Takedown 2, Uncanny Dodge, Well-Informed

Skills: Acrobatics 10 (+15), Athletics 9 (+10), Close Combat: Unarmed 4 (+15), Expertise: Philosophy 5 (+5), Insight 5 (+10), Perception 10 (+15), Treatment 5 (+5), Stealth 6 (+15)

Offense
Initiative: +9
Unarmed +15 (Close, Damage 5, Crit 19-20)

Defense
Dodge 13
Parry 13
Fortitude 10
Toughness 7 (3 without Defensive Roll)
Will 10

Power Point Totals: Abilities 68 + Powers 17 + Advantages 20 + Skills 27 + Defenses 18 = 150

Tags: Mutants & Masterminds, superhero games

Back in the day, one of our favorite games was TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes. It was a simple, flexible system that handled heroes and villains of various power levels, from street-level crime fighters like Moon Knight to galactic defenders like Silver Surfer. TSR published several adventures for use the game. Almost all of them were pretty sparse if not closer to horrible, but they featured a variety of comic book characters. Part of the fun of the game was collecting the stats for published characters.

In our games, we never ran published heroes. Instead, we made up our own heroes, who the GM-of-the-Week pitted against a combination of original characters along side Marvel’s plethora of supers. In one fight atop a Manhattan skyscraper, my character, tired of Captain America’s moralizing, grabbed the Star-Spangled Avenger and tossed him off the roof. Another character went to toe to toe with the Rhino in a bare-knuckle brawl that ended in a draw.

And it’s that last point that leads to what I think is the one big flaw in the system. A hero with an Excellent (20) Strength does 20 points of damage with a punch. It’s simple. No dice roll required. Did you hit? 20 points of damage. You might get a Slam or Stun result, but you might not, especially if your foe has too much Body Armor.

Which was the problem in the fight with the Rhino. My character (an early version of the Mighty Jethro) was a nigh invulnerable cello player. He was kind of strong and sort of handy in a fist fight, but he wasn’t superhuman in either regard. Jethro squared off against the Rhino. Jethro couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt Rhino, and Rhino couldn’t hit hard enough to hurt Jethro. There were some clever moves (such as impaling a fire extinguisher on Rhino’s horn to temporarily blind him), and Rhino knocked Jethro through more than one wall, but, when all was said and done, neither character had inflicted a single point of damage on the other.

To an extant, this fits the genre. In a fist fight, no matter how hard he tries, Daredevil isn’t going to put a scratch on the likes of, say, Annihilus. Some villains are just too tough for some heroes to face head-on. That’s why the Avengers have relative light-weights like Black Widow fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with folks like Thor and Iron Man. Those two deal with the major threats, leaving Black Widow free to mop the floor with mooks and put her espionage skills into play.

In MSH, a d100 roll determines success or failure. The higher the number the better. I’ve been mulling over a way to add some variety to MSH’s static damage (and defense) values without adding more dice or dice rolls to the game. Here’s my initial idea:

Roll the d100. Determine success. Subtract the one’s digit from the ten’s digit. The difference modifies the acting character’s static value.

For example, the Mighty Jethro has an Excellent (20) Strength. He swings and hits with an 84. 8 – 4 = 4, and so Jethro’s punch does 24 points of damage. He throws another punch, and gets a 59. Still a hit, let’s say, but 5 – 9 = -4, and so his punch does 16 points of damage. Then, on the third round, he really connects with a 100. 10 – 0 = 10, and his punch does 30 points of damage.

I think this is a pretty solid idea. I’m also toying with the idea that the color result on the FEAT table would further modify the value. A white would still be a failure. A green would be no modifier, whereas yellow would equal +X and red would equal +X+Y. I’m not sure what X and Y would equal. Probably +5 and +10, respectively, just to keep the math a bit easier to mentally calculate.

Thus, with that 100 dice roll, Jethro would score a red result with his punch, adding 20 points to his Strength damage. For that one punch, he’d hit as hard as Spider-Man does with an average result.

Tags: Marvel Super Heroes

Thanks to the generosity of a friend, I got me a copy of the Mutants & Masterminds Deluxe Hero’s Handbook by Green Ronin Publishing, LLC. (Nota Bene: That’s an affiliate link.) It’s a lovely book. Great art throughout, easy-to-read double-column format, et cetera. It’s got some neat stuff, including a spiffy Quickstart Character Generation section, which I’ve used to help me figure out hero creation. The MMDHH is the third edition of Mutants & Masterminds, and it bills itself as “The World’s Greatest Superhero RPG!” It’s not, but it’s still a solid system that I’d love to play, but probably less-than-love to GM.

The first and second editions of Mutants & Masterminds are both too fiddly and too slow (in my opinion) to be a really enjoyable superhero RPG from a GM’s perspective. Those editions aren’t as fiddly and slow as Champions, but few games I’ve played over the past four decades can match Champions in slow fiddliness.

The third edition Mutants & Masterminds resembles the first two editions in big ways at first glance. It’s still sort of a d20 System game, but it deviates from that system enough that it’s closer to its own system than not. It feels like gameplay would be faster than the earlier editions, but only once the differences are learned. I’ve only run a short trial combat with one player to try to get a feel for the new edition. We both had plenty of questions about how to do this, that, or the other thing. Thus, our brief playtest had numerous interruptions, but, like I said, that’s more due to the newness of the edition as compared to what we’re accustomed to with Mutants & Masterminds.

One thing that’s still the same is how much I enjoy making up heroes using the system, and I do think the third edition improves on the earlier ones in this regard. There’s still more math and accounting than I’d normally want to bother with to make up a character, but it’s math and accounting that’s kind of enjoyable. It’s fun to come up with a character concept, to take 150 points, and then to figure out how to turn those 150 points into that character. This is, I think, the strongest feature of the system in any edition, especially when I consider the system as a GM.

I am not a fan of having to crunch numbers in order to come up with adversaries and what not for a group of players. That sort of ciphering is the major factor that turned me off on GMing Pathfinder. It’s too much like work, and, for me, the simplicity of an AD&D stat block wins the day against the complexity of a Pathfinder stat block. I’m also not a fan of systems in which adversaries are built using the same rules used for player characters.

But, because I enjoy making up Mutants & Masterminds characters, that sort of number-crunching doesn’t bother me with Green Ronin’s superhero game. Taking a villain from concept to finished product with Mutants & Masterminds both amuses and relaxes in ways that creating a level-appropriate NPC in Pathfinder ceased doing months before I retired from that game system.

I want to play the new Mutants & Masterminds. If that happens, it probably means I’ll end up having to GM the game. My gaming group’s track record with superhero games is spotty at best. The most success we had was with the excellent Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. That campaign went on for a good while (and then we lost half the players). Our two or three attempts at superhero campaigns using earlier editions of Mutants & Masterminds and even my own Four Color Hack all fizzled out pretty quick.

But I digress.

The main point of this point is show off that great picture of Double-Header. The artist is Chris Schweizer, who graciously agreed to let me use the piece for this post. This sentence is a link to Mr. Schweizer’s Patreon site. This sentence links to an article about Mr. Schweizer with links to places related to his work.

Double-Header stands out in the category of wannabe superheroes. He had the will but not the ability. Among Double-Header’s liabilities? In addition to his complete lack of superpowers or noteworthy skills, Double-Header was a member of an alien race who “twin” as they mature, eventually separating into two adults. Double-Header isn’t a guy with two heads. He’s two guys sharing a body until such a time as they reach a level of maturity resulting in separation. Among Double-Header’s people, twins love and help each other. Not in Double-Header’s case. They couldn’t stand each other.

My version of Double-Header can function as a superhero. They’ve got powers and abilities suitable for the gig. While they’re not terribly fond of each other all the time, they do get along well enough to function as a team. Also, my version isn’t an alien. They’re human mutants, super-powered conjoined twins.

If you click on the pic of Double-Header, it opens up a PDF of their character sheet.

Tags: Mutants & Masterminds, superhero games, TFCH