Villains & Vigilantes: Search for the Sensei / Revenge of the Yakuza (Real Review)

I first learned about Villains & Vigilantes when I was on a backpacking trip one summer. Our group stopped at this little town somewhere in North Carolina so everybody could shower and gas up the van, and the place we stopped to do that had this little mom and pop shop that had, strangely enough, a display case of modules for various Fantasy Games Unlimited systems. No idea what that was doing there, and the only other one I remember is the Daredevils one that had the dinosaurs. Since I needed some reading material for the long drive out to our next stop I laid down two bucks for the one that had a superhero fighting a samurai on the cover, and that’s how I picked the suit colors for Kamen Rider Tarock.

Search for the Sensei was one of the last things released for Villains & Vigilantes before its multi-decade hiatus, and one of the things that endeared it to me back in the day was just how much of a relic of the 80’s it ended up being, when we first heard about ninja warriors and thought they were the coolest thing ever even though all we had to go off of were stupid low-budget action movies.

Part of it is the author’s praised for his obvious love and knowledge of Japanese culture on the inside cover. These days it’s a lot easier to look at names like Sin-Ting Kenokogi, Lotus Sawara and Chai-Li Shigetta and chuckle at the idea that they’re supposed to sound like the names of actual Japanese people. Or Tetsuya Kori. Yes, that is a real Japanese name. But it’s a man’s name.

Yeah, even with my shitty scanner...

There’s even a pronunciation guide in the back, with accents made in ink by hand. That’s dedication right there.

I should probably talk about the actual adventure at some point, shouldn’t I? Things open on one of the PC’s happening upon some thugs about to mug a teenage girl, “and who knows what else”. Luckily our hero is hopefully more than a match for a couple of two-bit gangbangers and can learn that the victim is Sin-Ting Kenokogi , who lost her ability to speak by the psychological shock of seeing her mother murdered. A gimmick that even the adventure basically admits will get really annoying if none of the PC’s is a telepath.

Besides just being accosted, she’s distraught because her father, diplomat Shiro Kenokogi, has disappeared without a trace. And unbeknownst to them he’s not only been kidnapped by super-powered yakuza, but was also formerly the masked crusader known as the Sensei, but put away his costume when his wife was killed. Hence the title.

The encounters and maps are designed pretty decently. For some reason the thing I still remember best is that Sin-Ting is apparently a big fan of Scott Baio. Also an encounter with a hero called the Rising Sun (the dude on the cover) where it’s setup for the PC’s to think he’s a villain and get in a bit of good old poorly-motivated hero vs. hero stuff. Once that’s resolved he can help them out as an NPC, although he probably makes a better meat shield than an actual helper in a fight.

Because of his big Invulnerability score, I mean.

Looking back, I think the villains were a little underwhelming after sampling more of what the game was like, though, with other modules typically having a great mix of really unique villains (if often kind of goofy ones). One is just Odd Job from Goldfinger, killer hat and all. A couple of the earlier ones are mainly just ladies who fight with gimmicked staffs, little different from the legions of ninja warriors who reinforce them.

They all have their own names even with recycled portraits. That's adorable.

And what kind of name is “Dowager” for a cloning villainess with a gimmicked staff?

If the heroes should triumph over the yakuza through the various encounters, piece together the clues and manage to save Shiro Kenokogi from the high-tech samurai, it promises that the main bosses, who make these guys look like Girl Scouts, will be out for revenge.

But then V&V went on hiatus for over 20 years, the publishers lost touch with a lot of their contributors, and the manuscript for the sequel got lost in the mail when Fantasy Games Unlimited moved their offices to a different state. Fortunately they eventually got in touch again and it turned out the author still had a copy in a drawer somewhere, and here we have the final chapter in the “Sensei” duology.

The sequel does open with some small disappointments. First is just a matter of personal taste, but it brings up a superhero team called the Alliance who were the ones who saved the day in Search for the Sensei if the GM decides to run the second module without the first. I was kinda hoping for character sheets for them, filling out their ranks from the heroes seen on the back covers of both modules. To have someone to crash in and come to the rescue if the players get in trouble, if you need a gameplay justification, maybe.

I just like having premade NPC heroes and especially hero teams sometimes that I can drop into my campaign to add some color, or maybe to have other heroes around the players can show up by saving the day and feeling more like they’ve accomplished great things at the end of a session. Or have to try harder because they themselves were outdone by some NPC’s in the end. Pre-Emptive Strike threw in a team like that for no real reason, I wouldn’t mind seeing it done more often.

Another thing is the kickoff for the adventure, where the yakuza send a trio of assassins to get rid of the heroes/avenge the organization’s previous defeat. Counters for them actually appeared in Search for the Sensei.

In the new artwork they just look like generic ninja, which is a bit of a letdown.

In fact, most of the new villains are basically ninja. The three assassins are ninja. A villain in each of the three other encounters is a ninja. Shiro Kenokogi will resume his heroic identity as the Sensei to help out the players as an NPC, yet another ninja. And of course there’s all the ones as faceless underlings.

So many damn ninja...

Where’s the imagination? Ninja are cool, of course, but you can have too much of a good thing. You can over rely on something even as cool as them to carry your work.

Also, no disrespect to the author, but I much preferred the almost woodcut-like look of the older artwork than the cartoony newer stuff. And I can’t help wondering if that’s tied into changing the assassins from supervillains to dime a dozen ninja.

Then...

...now

There are some interesting encounters in the sequel, and the big baddie is fairly interesting even if he feels like a scaled-back Mandarin (his main firepower comes from six magic rings, each with a different power). There are some cute little Asian additions to the V&V bestiary that the PC’s might need to contend with on their way to the boss’s fortress too (although frankly if they could handle the muggers at the beginning of the first module it’s damn hard to imagine these being a threat).

The big time lapse wasn’t especially kind to it, though. “Search for the Sensei” came out when we were just getting our first taste of Japanese culture here in the states, when it was so cool and mysterious and those of us who were interested in such things ate up anything we could get our hands on.

But now it’s 2017. Japanese cultural imports are almost as easy to get as if you actually lived there. We know what actual Japanese people’s names are like now. More potential readers will probably think that the use of “sama” as a title like “lord” or “master” is not exactly accurate (the big bad guy leader's villain name is "Ichiban Sama (Number One Master)"). And of course V&V itself has dipped its toe in the anime market in the years since its reawakening with stuff like the Great Bridge-twofer.

Stripped of cheesy nostalgia, Revenge of the Yakuza is a decent V&V module on its own merit. I particularly like the final villain, I liked the two villains who’ll try to lure an opponent into a weather-simulating chamber to give themselves the advantage. The enemy who might become an ally in the final chapter if the truth about the big villain comes out.

But seriously, you can have too many ninja.

Villains & Vigilantes - World War II Super Soldiers (Real Review)

World War II seems like an awfully ripe topic for adaptation with Villains & Vigilantes lately. This, the second in a series of such material from Darren Tenor after the “Homefront” collection of mini-adventures, promises four more in the foreword alone, with the author noting it’s something of a personal mission to make a cohesive wartime setting for the game. Hell, Monkey House might not be aiming for the same number of releases, but they promise to match volume with one of the rewards of their recent Kickstarter campaign being a WWII sourcebook running three hundred or more pages (I’ll let you know when and if I get it).

Anyway, while I admit “Homefront” didn’t do a lot to fire my imagination, “World War II Super Soldiers” is a different can of worms.

First thing’s first, which is that the cover artist and the author apparently didn’t coordinate, so the supers depicted on the cover were just a bunch of generic WWII-style heroes complete with names and a basic idea of their powers. Meaning none of them are actually in the book at all. That did bug me, and that’s not the only place this happens. Some characters from included characters’ write-ups don’t show up either, like included character Blut Engel’s buddy Donnerhammer isn’t in the book. Personally I would’ve tried to keep these mentions to the second book as much as possible so all the characters I’m talking about are already out there, but…eh.

There’s a fair bit of mentioning guys who aren’t actually written up, unfortunately, as the characters who are included are, not too surprisingly, divided up according to what country they’re loyal to. In describing what each’s general attitude toward superhumans in its military was (Canada's was to brand a lot of theirs into those scantily-clad ladies painted on bombers) and how invested each country was in creating its own, it lists off some of the most prominent ones, and a lot of them don’t actually follow with their character sheets. Presumably these going to appear in the next WWII roster book this one already announces. Between this and the serialized adventure packed in with “Villains Unleashed,” seems like they’re really trying to incentivize their wares lately.

But are the characters themselves good, that’s what you really want to know. In general I’d say yes, though it doesn’t have any I think I’d use as ongoing campaign features even if I ever did run a WWII setting.

I think my favorites out of all the characters in the book were probably Gypsy Queen and Professor Grimm, both spellcasters, and while they certainly had some interesting assortments available to them I found myself most appreciating the outlooks and the possibilities to play them off the PC’s. Gypsy Queen for instance is a good person working for Italy during wartime, but is loyal to her country without necessarily being loyal to its government. Grimm is a century-old sorcerer and mystical mastermind, but the type to manipulate others to carry out his grand designs and probably gate out if a bunch of PC’s tried to corner him into a fight.

  

The level of detail on the spells used by those characters really shows the care put into them (I liked how Gypsy can magically paint her weapons to make them more damaging), as well as skills on the ninja-type character, Yami. That such detail has to be created to represent skills honestly makes me wonder, though, if it might not be time to overhaul the rules FGU hasn’t really touched in over 30 years.

Other particularly interesting characters from the line-up include the Outsider, a high-tech soldier from a dystopian future sent to alter a disaster but doesn’t realize he’s not on his own Earth anymore. Lightning Rod is likewise displaced from his true time, but was the big winner on a superhero reality show and longs to get back, even if his actual powers aren’t that unique. R, the robot who’s the only survivor of a survey ship and who’s now a double agent for Soviet subversives against their own country. Robyn and the Hoods, the female bandit who robs from the rich and gives to the poor, but in a society where the authorities aren’t all a bunch of corrupt brigands and it’s not as clean-cut as she’d like to think.

Sadly the book does fall prey to some of the worn out stereotypes of the era and the various countries. If you were wondering if one of Germany’s supers would be a Valkyrie, give yourself a cookie. If you thought there’d be members of the Communist party who used a hammer and sickle as weapons and one who controlled ice (especially connected to Siberia), a Japanese samurai warrior and a German powerhouse called Ubermensch, well…at least there’s nobody based on origami or geishas. Yet.

Although I did get the feeling that the reason there’s no water-controlled named Tsunami is the fact that the setting already has two… (“Enter the Dragon’s Claw: Honor” and “Into the Sub-Realm”)

Another thing I wish the book might’ve done better was being more consistent when it referred to stuff in other modules. Sometimes it mentions where you can find somebody specific like Master Zero from “Most Wanted #3” in referring to a phenomenon where certain characters got their powers, or how exactly a character from the Zodiac got their enchanted gauntlets. Other times it makes mention of characters and settings but you really need to be familiar with the other products to catch them.

For instance, the listing of prominent American superhumans includes Captain Crisis, Lady Liberty and Mr. America, who are already written up in published material. It does not throw in a parenthetical comment telling you to look in “Vigilantes International” for their sheets, though. Likewise there’s nothing about how German villain The Stuka is presumably the one written up in “Super-Crooks and Criminals” (which came out in frigging 1986). In Professor Grimm’s background it mentions worlds with magical inhabitants like Vine and Razer. Vine I’m pretty sure is referring to the alternate world from “The Pentacle Plot,” but I’d have to go reading through my other sourcebooks looking specifically for the name to know what the hell Razer is. Supposing it ain’t from something Mr. Tennor’s planning to release but hasn’t yet.

Probably the most entertaining part of all is the detailed support organizations included for a lot of the characters. Like wife of Golden Eagle and surrogate mother of Kid Kestrel (and real soon-to-be mother to Golden Eagle’s kid, not that she’s told him so he won’t think about leaving the front lines). All the details on the dystopian future Outsider comes from and the line of robots he employs as personal bodyguards were great, and a ripe setting for a campaign all by itself.

Carmine’s Concubine’s and the Hoods were pretty cool, basically being like the listing of minions like say, Od’s Avant Guards from “Most Wanted #1” but going a step beyond to give their names and a basic idea of their place in each operation and a brief idea of how they played off each other. I enjoy the classic stuff, but going that extra mile here was definitely a good inclusion.

One of the included supers being a Valkyrie means there’s also a rundown of Valhalla works, since that’s the place where Valkyrie take fallen soldiers to fight for eternity. While it explains exactly how the compulsion to battle there works in game terms, it says nothing in particular about the Norse gods or why exactly Valkyrie collect dead soldiers and bring them to this place that mystically enables them to fight forever (Valkyrie actually select the greatest warriors from battles and bring them to Valhalla so the gods will have an army of the greatest warriors who ever lived when a war that spreads across all creation comes, and they fight constantly to keep their skills sharp). Then again I suppose most people who know what Valhalla is already know what Ragnarok is too.

All this, along with a big collection of counters of various soldiers, adds up to a pretty pleasing package. Really my biggest complaint is how the references to other material were kind of spotty, but all in all, this is one worth having.

Villains and Vigilantes - Final Fight With the Furies

***This review of an RPG adventure is for potential GMs’ eyes only***

Wow, how long’s it been since Villains and Vigilantes published a module with a sequel in mind? Death Duel with the Destroyers? FORCE?

Although if those adventures are any indication, I’m not sure how much to look forward to Black Souls’ Abyss, what with how none of those sequel adventures quite lived up to their predecessors.

But let’s start at the beginning. To help this adventure feel more epic, there are several scenarios for solo PC’s to have initial encounters with the various villains they’ll be meeting later as opposition in the main adventure. In fact there’s sixteen pages worth of this kind of stuff. That’s a pretty lengthy setup.

Then again this is a pretty lengthy adventure, and the villains have a bench deeper than the Crushers’. Not to mention these guys would eat a lot of the other villain teams in this game’s published material for lunch. Not just because of sheer power either, although they’re certainly not wanting for that, but because of the variety of unconventional abilities the Furies have too.

Villains aside, this thing goes all over the place. There’s plenty of encounters in the PC’s hometown, but then it goes to a ghost town in the boonies of Arizona, to the Middle East, into the depths of the Earth where creatures of a society long forgotten once trod.

And, as noted, this is only the first half of the adventure, and this one even takes space to explain that “cosmic” superhero adventures don’t only include the kind where the players are Thor and Silver Surfer, cruising around the universe picking fights with primordial beings (nonetheless it does include a list of powers that would be extra-handy to have out in space. Where was that in From the Deeps of Space?). Meaning that the rest happens out in space, and there are some general tips about how to create a properly expansive universe, mainly in terms of preexisting alien bad guys and the stories behind them (strangely, the list includes Extractor from Most Wanted 3, but seems to be forgetting he’s the leader of an entire team of alien villains) and the aforementioned list of useful space powers.

But I’m supposed to be talking about this adventure, aren’t I? Final Fight with the Furies takes the PC’s all over, and it provides a nice break from the “initial encounter with villains, track villains to their hideout for a knock-down drag-out fight” formula that describes a lot of older published adventures for V&V. It’s potentially a little overwhelming with everything this part alone contains, though, since it also has a rather elaborate internal mythology. Most of it completely original, too, with a few fairly minor ties to the Arthurian mythos. Depending on the group it might make the most sense to run it as a campaign on its own, rather than to insert it into a preexisting campaign.

I don’t know, but I just don’t find the module’s mythology particularly compelling. Stuff about the people of ancient Atlantis being part of a governing body concerning human civilizations on different planets, and plots of assassination by the disciples of an evil wizard, and the Knights of the Round Table tying their origins back to these people…I can’t see myself running this, or particularly enjoying the story behind what’s going on if I was playing in it.

 I do like a lot of the characters, and could definitely see myself using some or all of the Furies as well as the main villain and his personal flunkies in adventures of my own devising. But speaking of characters, if you’ve looked through the villains in FGU’s freebie section the name “Baen Kudarak the Dreadlord” may be familiar to you. Well, that’s him on the cover. As you can probably guess, Anarch, the villain from the freebie section, figures heavily into this adventure himself. I dunno, that seems like kind of a copout in something I paid for.

Not bad, but I’ve seen better.