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 & Vigilantes - Ancient Evil

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


With Villains & Vigilantes’s resurgence, seems like a lot of the old talent’s getting back into things. This combination of comic books and Lovecraft comes to us from Stephen Dedman, author of the ‘eh’ Pre-Emptive Strike and its more imaginative semi-sequel The Great Iridium Con (get this! People at a comic convention dressed like superheroes who actually ARE superheroes! Sure, Assassin did that first, but breezed right over it).

Now, having the players take on some absurdly powerful evildoer capable of decimating the entire campaign world if not stopped is a fun thing to do. If handled carefully. The problem I’ve found with a lot of these “monstrous horror from beyond” storylines, however, is that you just look at most of them and think “Lovecraft” right away. And his style really doesn't jibe that well with the superhero genre, where the main characters of beings of awesome power themselves who, rather than doing something small to contain some of the damage wrought by monstrous sanity-blasting evil, do take on and prevail against the most intimidating of menaces.

Sadly, I didn’t think Ancient Evil had a lot in the way of pretty clever ideas in the body of its main plot. Profundis is really nothing special as ancient, all-powerful monstrosities go. Plus, that’s not exactly a name that inspires terror in the hearts of men. From a statistical standpoint he’s scary, sure, but he just looks like a big purple lump with a big lavender eye. Not very scary or memorable for an aesthetics standpoint. And honestly, Lovecraftian terrors work best in games like, well, Call of Cthulhu, where getting into straight-up fights with supernatural enemies is a pretty bad idea, and stopping the ritual or finding the magic spell that banishes the eldritch horror is more in the style of how problems are resolved. In superhero games, the players are loaded up with beyond-human abilities themselves and blasting the hell out of a problem is an option more often than not, even if it's not always the best solution. As a result confronting danger head-on is often the order of the day, and horror elements doesn't work as well and the impulse to find a less direct solution may only work after a harsh beating or two.

I also wasn’t too crazy about the source of the only weapon that can destroy him, the Spear of Daedalus, since Greek mythology’s an even lazier source of inspiration than Lovecraft. If done well, mythological touches can be a lot of fun, but it seems like a lot of authors are quick to turn to the days of Zeus when they need a source of gods, monsters and mayhem (think about it like this: the Ninja Turtles were named after Renaissance painters. What were the Cheetahmen named after?). It’s more significant because should the players fail to recognize the spear’s use and let the villains destroy it, they have to actually go back in time and get Daedalus to make a new one. That part was done fairly well, though, as it mentions that Daedalus’s neighbors are scared of him (after all, the guy did scald the dreaded King Minos to death when he wouldn’t leave Daedalus alone), and that it gives a brief outline on other adventures they could go on while back in time. What heroes and monsters are around during that time, and what major quests have and haven’t happened yet.

I just wish the meat of the adventure was as interesting. A lot of the villains have no backgrounds. They’re just demonic androids in wetsuits created directly by the eldritch horror the heroes have to defeat. One’s a crazed fire-and-brimstone preacher, which might not be so bad, but he reminded me a little too much of Cardinal Rule from For the Greater Good for me to be really impressed with the character concept. I suppose that isn’t an archetype with a lot of wiggle room, though. And maybe I’m being unfair, but it feels like the other villains hired rat-controlling superthug Gutter more because he fits in with the motif of death/decay than anything else.

The adventure doesn’t really go anywhere interesting either, unless your players need to get the spear replaced, since the only other locations in it are an isolated town and the villains’ spaceship. Ancient Evil isn’t a bad adventure. I don’t wish to imply that, but there were only a couple things that made me sit up and take notice, among them the author providing a GIANT scientist (the agency that enlists the PC’s in his other adventures) as a scientific advisor if the players don’t have one. I don’t know, I just like it when I see the authors of these adventures creating a little world, instead of just cranking out a product for the bucks.

Villains & Vigilantes - Attack on the Poseidon Line

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

An adventure that starts as a working vacation on a cruise ship. Have to agree, yeah, that’s a first for superhero role-playing. Things sort of started like that in For the Greater Good, but even Jack Herman admitted the whole reason that got published was thanks to its envelope-pushing villains.

Anyway, things get started with a Greek shipping magnate (is there any other kind?) appealing for help when his cruise lines keep getting raided by modern pirates. Seems Manta-Man hasn't been discouraging this kind of thing too effectively. What to do but send a bunch of superheroes undercover on the next cruise and hope they can do something about it next time.

Gotta say, that’s not quite investigating the disappearance of a supermodel after a bungee, but it’s one of the more unique hooks I’ve heard for this kind of thing. The chance to role-play against the rich and famous of your campaign world, or the handy list of thinly-veiled parodies of the rich and famous if you haven’t bothered to establish any, is a nice touch too. In my opinion, the best adventures always give you something more than just a new group of villains to pound.

Not the villains in this module are just another bunch of thugs with a couple of garish powers thrown in. I could definitely see involving most of the villains in further scenarios after wrapping this adventure, particularly the likes of Delphi with her mysterious awareness and Ajax with his power to melt and come back in a new body to menace our heroes anew. My favorite little tidbit about the villains was finding out they get more use out of Midas’s golden touch than just some interesting statuary. Nobody ever thinks of doing more with a power like that than just changing something into another substance, and then maybe throwing it at a character they don’t like because now it’s heavier.

I suppose this review’s shorter than other ones I’ve done for V&V material, but that’s mainly because so much space and effort’s devoted to laying out the floor plan of the cruise ship, plus the mansion that conceals a villain base, that the actual adventure sometimes seems a little brief. The floor plans are amazingly intricate, though, and could easily survive this adventure to see use in others. Plus, with all the role-playing possibilities between the PC’s while patrolling the ship and the celebrities and their varying degrees of sanity, though, a good GM can make rubbing shoulders with celebrities last as long as it’s entertaining.

If I have to complain about anything, it’s that it’s kind of trite that this happens around Greece, so the villains all have a Greek mythology motif.
 

Foe Files

As I noted back in my In Broad Daylight review, with the revival of Villains and Vigilantes, Jeff Dee and Jack Herman have been getting back into the game, as it were. Lately, by going ahead with a rather strange idea for a product line. That idea being that for a buck apiece, you can buy a villain for your superhero RPG.

So far the line consists of three villains, and the first to be released was Omni-Primus. He was the villain seen fighting the Indestructibles from In Broad Daylight on the cover of the revised rulebook for the old version of the game (the one Fantasy Games Unlimited’s still using).

He’s meant to be a galactic overlord capable of threatening the entire world and fighting entire teams of player characters, the kind every superhero campaign needs every once in a while. He’s properly powerful and leaves a lot of room open for a resourceful GM to use him, but given how the Foe Files clock in at five pages counting the cover, no space at all is given to detailing the resources at his command. I’m not sure that was really wise, seeing as how in my experience villains like Omni-Primus are ones the players might never actually fight, let alone be in any shape to fight after getting past all of his flunkies. I guess I’m mainly thinking of Island of Dr. Apocalypse, which suggests to the GM that the PC’s might need some kind of miraculous healing treatment to be in any shape for the adventure if it’s run after Death Duel With the Destroyers (as it’s meant to be). Mine did.

The second pack consists of Rune, an exiled alien meant to be something of an ultimate assassin. Rune’s formidable enough, I guess, but I didn’t find the meaning of the name and thought the bird-like long nose on the suit to be pretty stupid. Particularly for this terrifying master assassin. Worse, Rune has that most reprehensibly cliched of villain quirks: pausing in pursuit of their evil plans to chat with their enemies. I could never see myself using Rune, at least not as-is.

Last for now is easily the most bizarre idea to come of this product line, the Jackal Jester, sort of a cross between the Joker and the wolfman. Yes, he combines the lycanthrope schtick with the killer toys schtick. He even shows some of the silliness of the real names used by characters in Dee and Herman’s earlier work (like Dreamweaver’s name is Donna Weston, Bull is “Big” Bill Buckford) in that his real name’s Eric Gagnard. The more I think about him, though, the more I think the two gimmicks are just a little too weird to use when combined.

The Foe Files are something of an interesting idea, but while they’re certainly affordable, the characters they contain just aren’t as fun as I’ve gotten used to seeing in these guys’ older work. I don’t think they’ve lost it or anything. Like I said, I really liked In Broad Daylight. I just don’t know that the Foe Files are the best way they could be applying themselves. Assuming these characters haven't all been sitting around for ages.

By the way, if that's supposed to be a display of the Crusaders' computer, which Crusader's mask is that?

Just asking.

Villains and Vigilantes - Great Bridge

As noted in my review of The Centerville Incident, it was probably inevitable that anime influences would start finding their way into the new material for a superhero RPG with a loose universe like V&V’s. So it wasn’t really a surprise to see one of V&V’s trademark villain books released with a selection of anime-inspired malcontents for your campaign’s heroes to battle should the GM come up with a reason for them to be in the Land of the Rising Sun.

The whole thing seemed a little lazy to me, though. For one thing, not counting servants or alter egos or even power suits used by other listed characters like the roll call on the “back” does, it contains 20 villains. Whereas the previous villain books for the system have always had 30. Also, while the idea behind the book is the villain profiles are taken from the files of the Department-88 agency, D-88 just sounds like a Japanese version of CHESS from the rulebook, with samurai-esque names for ranks replacing the chess piece-based one (ronin, bushi, samurai, shogun, etc.).

The villains themselves will look very familiar to anyone who’s up on their anime. Maybe a little too much. There’s a robot built by a scientist to replace his dead son, a kid whose power is owning a bunch of monsters in little containers, a catgirl, a bishonen, two characters in mech-suits and frankly something of an overabundance of embittered otaku given powers through contact with a mystical object considering how few characters the book contains in the first place (four, maybe five if you count the bullied kid who found the monster boxes). Including a withdrawn overweight guy who turns into a feisty super-strong girl, and one whose powers come from her school uniform and is afraid of perverts seeing her panties.

For that matter, given the tone taken toward the book as being a dossier on file at an anti-supervillain organization, I don’t really get why it’s specified Agent Stone was in her underwear when she got the offer from the guy willing to give her a more exciting career (especially how Department-88 would know that and think it worthy of mention).

Maybe I’m taking this book too seriously, though. After all, on the table of contents there’s a little blurb in the bottom left supposedly from D-88 correcting Americans on various cultural gaffes like the proper way to eat sushi and that geisha =/= prostitute. It even shows the Japanese are capable of cultural errors by thinking the phrase is “when in Greece.” Since this book was put together by Americans, though, it falls kind of flat as a joke.

And while I’m still on the subject of culture, was it some kind of comment on how we’re Not So Different that the markers for the American and Japanese reporters in The Centerville Incident were just recolored versions of each other?

But back to Great Bridge, as with The Centerville Incident I’m just not that impressed with the characters inside, and I blame that mainly on not automatically being impressed by anime-style art anymore. Few of the characters inside fired my imagination or held my attention for long. Plus, the creators added another qualifier to their target audience, which already included “superhero fan” and “gamer,” and with this now also included “anime fan.” And I just don't imagine there are many people who are still fans of a game that's been dormant since the late 80's that are excited by the sheer existence of anime.

And to harp on D-88 again, the ranking system sounds like it was written by a fanboy who watched a couple Lone Wolf and Cub movies and wrote down all the "ethnic" words they heard. That kind of stuff was sort of okay back in the days of Search for the Sensei and Enter the Dragon's Claw: Honor, when we were excited about ninja but knew nothing but what brainless action movies told us about them, but seems kind of lame here in 2011.

It makes me think of a Champions product called USA-50 West, where, bland as it was, they specifically made a point not to make each state's local hero some kind of ridiculous stereotype based on the area. I had respect for that, if nothing else.

Characters are trite, you only get 2/3 as many as usual, and if you want to run an anime-themed RPG, you probably already have one. Not recommending this one.

Villains and Vigilantes - The Centerville Incident

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

With the revival of Villains and Vigilantes in the 21st century, perhaps it was inevitable that anime influences would start finding their way into the new material. Speaking personally, while I was something of a glutton for this new and exotic take on animation when the invasion proper started back during my high school years, nowadays anime’s like any medium. If a particular one looks good I’ll watch it, if it turns out not to be I’ll stop. Unless I’m planning to make a snarky review out of it, but that’s another discussion entirely.

A strange object makes ground near Centerville, Anywhere Convenient. As will be revealed one way or another regardless of how thorough your players are, that object was actually an invisible spaceship (a real one, and not a basement in Ladysmith, Wisconsin) carrying a Crushers-sized load of super-powered alien fugitives. They attack a lab to get the parts they need to fix the ship and make it to space-Cuba, but even if the PC’s don’t stop them the lab doesn’t have enough of what they need. But the branch in Guess Where does! Road trip!

The PC’s aren’t alone, though. There’s also the one (1) space cop on the trail of these galactic ne’er-do-wells who’s set up to disappoint any of your players hoping to hook up with a catgirl. And a group of mysterious Japanese heroines that are somewhere between a Sentai and the protagonists of Bubblegum Crisis.

Anime-inspired artwork aside, I have to say I didn’t find this module terribly impressive and almost nothing contained within fired my imagination as to use in further adventures. The character profiles are very bare, with most of the villains having backgrounds as deep as “she stole a suit of winged armor” or “he’s a remorseless killer,” with mention of which planets they’re from and which articles of the Galactic Code they’ve violated. Which is really just a cutesy way of telling you which crimes they’re wanted for by referring you to the relevant passages in the V&V rulebook.

The Sentai was especially disappointing because they don’t even get real names, which makes gaming out the suggested night on the town after the fight problematic. I assume the villains are using theirs, because monikers like Cor, Procyus, Aidri and Rux don’t really strike fear into the hearts of men, much less do a lot to make them stand out. And isn’t standing out a big part of what makes somebody a supervillain?

The details on the Galactic Police were a nice try at coming up with something to survive this adventure in a V&V campaign, but police IN SPACE aren’t really that special when visitors from (and visits to) other planets aren’t that uncommon in superhero universes. Besides, if I’m meant to take the Galactic Police seriously, I simply must ask: is Koniji’s uniform regulation?

Since she's written as being all mission-focused and stuff, I assume yes.

If nothing else, consider this: the final battle takes place on the slopes of Mount Fuji. Wow, that’s just…wow.

Like FGU’s other new releases, The Centerville Incident’s only $4 for the download. The whole thing’s so bare-bones, though, that I didn’t feel like I got much for it.

Villains and Vigilantes - In Broad Daylight

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

With the revival of Villains & Vigilantes, the game’s original creators have started to get back in on the action themselves. Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, who claim to have dreamed up the game as a means to settle which comic book characters could beat other comic book characters, also did some work for V&V’s early modules. With the V&V archives at Fantasy Games Unlimited being opened up again after all these years, Jack and Jeff are together again coming up with new stuff like an updated rule book and this, a new adventure that’s compatible with V&V, or the Living Legends game Jeff came up with after striking out on his own.

I was a little leery coming into this one, since the only module Dee and Herman worked on together was Crisis At Crusader Citadel, which gave us V&V’s iconic characters but also pioneered the “introductory encounter, fight with villains, track villains to lair for final battle” formula that defined a lot of V&V’s premade adventures. But hey, that was about thirty years ago, right?

Indeed it has been. Things start with the heroes being contacted by a modeling agency. It’s not what you’re thinking, though. One of their girls disappeared at the climax of a bungee jump off the Chrysler Building and they’re looking for experts in the unusual to investigate the matter. Gotta say, that’s a new way to get PC’s involved on me.

After that, the emphasis is on investigation of the disappearance and related unusual phenomena. It’s a well-constructed mystery, really, but has to be run with a group that’s good at keeping track of details. I usually haven’t had the privilege of gaming in groups like that. But come on, being a superhero isn’t about dealing out super-powered punches to the face all the time, and it’s good to see Jeff and Jack acting on that.

It does require super-battles every once in a while to keep things energetic, though, and In Broad Daylight doesn’t lag there. In fact between the villains, monsters, discovering the fate of the model, an unusual bank robbery and a secondary objective to save the life of a young metahuman, this a pretty busy module. There’s just enough going on for it to be fun and make the mystery that much more satisfying without being crowded, though. Although once again, it requires a certain kind of player to work right.

Ah, the villains. Overall, they’re a pretty solid team, but if I were ever to run this adventure you can bet I’d think of a better name than “Refuseniks” before I did. Even if it is rather appropriate with them having their secret base underneath a giant garbage heap. The concepts behind some of the…*sigh* Refuseniks are interesting, for all that. While a villain whose power is making killer toys is nothing new, the killer mermaid was a welcome surprise, as was the villain who’s basically an anthropomorphic disease.

Packed in with the module is a set of six pre-generated heroes, the Indestructibles, who as the authors are happy to point out appeared on early editions of the V&V rulebook.

They’re mainly intended as a ready-made group of PC’s, and they work fine for that. Tactically they represent a solid combination of powers, but perhaps more importantly, an interesting combination of personalities and backgrounds that could get good role players going off one another. The leader’s the son of another famous hero, for one thing, and another’s a Valkyrie on a search for a magic ring. Also, I liked that it mentioned the professional skills they have, which does something to answer a question about NPC heroes I felt V&V had been failing to answer for a long time: what do these guys do when they’re not saving the world? To my relief, books like this and Vigilantes International are bothering to think a little about that now.

But for all the cool possibilities they represent, I lost a lot of respect for the Gunsmith character because his backstory involves the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard in anything superhero-related: his father was shot in the groin and the bullet passed into a woman behind him, resulting in conception. I wasn't really that surprised to download the new rulebook, and see that in the example of play he got the crap kicked out of him (by, admittedly, a very formidable villain).

For that matter, the disparities in experience levels might cause some balking when the guy playing Blastar wonders why his buddy playing Armorman Jr. starts the game five levels higher than him.

The inclusion of the team heightens the feeling that parts of this adventure are screaming out to be expanded on in later material. For one thing, the Indestructibles are the heroes of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Did Shatterman and Condor from the comics apply to them before the Crusaders? When the players are summoned to New York to investigate the disappearance, the issue’s bound to come up of where all the local heroes are during this. The module even names the city’s main team (the Progeny) and explains why they’re not around (they’re in the middle of an annual “time out” where they focus on charity and solo work), pretty heavily implying harder details exist for these guys in the authors’ minds. Heck, if the players don’t manage to recover the means to save the metahuman child, the hero Axiom--who even showed up in insert art in the new rulebook--will fly to the other side of the planet and bring back a spare just in time. Could a universe book be in the offing?

They just know we're begging to hear more about this guy.

A lot of hard work obviously went into this adventure, and it’s plain how much Jeff and Jack have evolved since the 80’s (although I’ll admit there’s a part of me that misses the civilian names based on the hero names from their early stuff). If you know some players who wouldn’t mind more mystery than mayhem, this one comes highly recommend.

Villains and Vigilantes - Enemies At Large!

While I thought Into the Sub-Realm had the potential to be an extremely difficult adventure, one thing in its favor was having some pretty cool villains. So, a villains book from the same guys had a lot of potential.

After kicking things off with some mock taunts at Ken Cliffe over his own villain sourcebook, Super-Crooks and Criminals, including that their monstrously strong brute could beat his monstrously strong brute (you wrote down a higher number for a statistic. Congratulations), we get the standard 30 new characters. Understand that as I say that, there’s rarely such thing as a “standard” V&V character. Unlike say Champions or Mutants and Masterminds this game never dealt in character archetypes, which usually lead to truly creative characters more often than the ones you saw in sourcebooks for those other superhero RPGs.

I’ll just come right out and say the most creative character this time around was easily Sien-Sun, or “Slim” thanks to the downside of his powers. He’s a one-armed martial artist who tries to avoid relying on his powers, but he often finds himself having to use his power to shoot energy balls that consume his body mass to use, resulting in him getting a little skinnier with each use. You’d think he’d be training his hand-to-hand accuracy or something instead of his accuracy with his energy balls if that’s the case.

Beyond him, this book also contains something I thought V&V had been sorely lacking for a long time: comedic villains (maybe sometime I’ll put up the characters I invented myself to fill that gap). There’s only the two, Billy the Kidder, who has the power to make you laugh and the more interesting The Trick (who has minor magic that’s annoying rather than destructive, the power to make things go wrong, and a pet blob), but they finally fill a void within the game’s premade material. I was a little confused by a third villain they work with sometimes who seems intended to be a kind of “lethal joke” villain. Confused because there’s really nothing humorous about the character, powers or personality-wise. Other than the fact that he’s a foot-tall toy robot THAT CAN KILL YOU I guess.

The other characters in Enemies At Large range from the interesting (like Mr. Midas, Ranger 423rd , the villains named after rivers in the underworld, and the bug-themed villain team), to the mediocre (maybe Gargan could beat Terra-Rizer, but his powers are a lot more pedestrian), to the just plain boring (like Rhonda, who isn’t even named Rhonda). And there’s just something cheesy about two roster books in a row that have matador-themed characters. Even if the one in this book has a much more interesting background and set of powers.

The art by Patrick Zircher is good, managing to make most of the characters distinct and memorable. Some of it’s retooled, though, and the art for Mr. Midas, Old Yeller and Twister at least will look familiar to anyone who’s thumbed through a copy of Classic Organizations for the Champions game.

This is overall a nice selection of villains to add to a V&V campaign, though, more than worth $4 for the download. The selection is good more often than it isn’t, and it really did feel like the authors were going that extra mile. For instance, a page is given over to the villains Mr. Midas usually hires as muscle, ones that aren’t part of the other 30, instead of just saying which of the main selection he hires most often. So it’s more like a book of 39 villains. Likewise there's the Cluster, the aformentioned team of insect-based villains, whose regular membership is provided in the book but is also a temporary home of sorts for various other similar villains. So if you want an excuse to reuse a villain like Cicada from FORCE, there you go.

Extras-wise, Enemies At Large comes off worse than Vigilantes International, what with the only bonus material being characters the authors had played in their own V&V campaigns once upon a time. With their secret origins left out, that is. If the characters’ ages are representative of when the authors played them, that’s probably for the best. They do have some interesting and unusual powers, and a creative GM could get some use out of them. They just don’t feel like much of a neat add-on to a roster book, where you just bought a bunch of NPCs anyway.

And where exactly can I read The Menagerie, anyway?

Villains and Vigilantes - Vigilantes International

In my Danger in the Depths review, I mentioned that one of my favorite contributors to the Villains and Vigilantes game was Ken Cliffe. My favorite thing was the way he wrote each of his books as part of a cohesive universe. The connections between books might be little things, but they were there if you could spot them. Here, I respect him for penning something the game didn’t have before, which is a compendium of other good guys for your players to meet.

Villains & Vigilantes had sourcebooks that were collections of NPCs before (the earliest one was Stefan Jones’s Opponents Unlimited). However as their names implied (Most Wanted, Super-Crooks and Criminals, and the aforementioned Opponents Unlimited), they were collections of bad guys. In running most kinds of RPGs where the players are larger-than-life heroes, I’ve usually found it helped to immerse them in the game’s world by showing them there were others like them. It was nice to finally see a book like this where I could just pick out a likely character to inject into a particular setting when I wanted to have an NPC superhero show up, instead of having to make up one (let alone an entire team) from scratch. I love V&V, but making working characters can be time-consuming.

As usual, those little links to other works are there. We get to see the Red Raven mentioned briefly in Danger in the Depths, and one of the solos is the sister of murderzombie Samhain from Most Wanted 1, for example.

It goes without saying that the characters included run the gamut of creativity. One hero’s sealed inside a magic ring owned by a bunch of adolescent detectives who summon him for help when they get in over their heads, which is great. The not-really team made up of users of ancient objects of power was also an interesting idea, as was the reformed hood who gets his powers by being possessed by a ghost that he sometimes argues with. Then there’s the hero who’s dedicated to protecting…Antarctica. And is completely against using force to do so. Plus, it was excessive to have three characters who used “mask” in their names: the Mask of Midnight, the Masked Matador, and Masquerade.

Overall though, this is a useful book. Some of the characters come a little close to being cheap stereotypes, the Soviet Russian team especially (I get the feeling this was another book that’d been sitting around waiting to see publication since the 80’s), but nothing approaching European Enemies levels of lameness. Plus, the simple fact that it provided an assortment of premade NPC heroes and might lead to more books like this was a nice change of pace.

As for the extras, those were pretty good too. One of them was an archvillain called Anarch, and to say he’s a force to be reckoned with is an understatement. That he’s just an intermediary for someone even worse presents interesting possibilities for epic adventures involving Anarch. I also liked some of the new powers listed in this book, especially the luck-related and self-cloning ones.

The mini-adventure packed in wasn’t too bad, with some villains I’d find it fun to use in adventures of my own. However like most short adventures, it’s too, well, short to have really anything memorable about it beyond its villains.

Villains and Vigilantes - Danger in the Depths

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

Perhaps because there was never much effort to connect its various sourcebooks into a cohesive universe, one thing that can be said about Villains & Vigilantes is the sheer amount of variety. There’ve been modules where the players fight ninjas, battle aboard a space station and the island stronghold of a mad scientist, journey to a medieval fantasy world and to the farthest reaches of outer space, even to the depths of Hell. There’s even one where the heroes are asked to battle evildoers at a comic convention. Yet for all that, I always felt the system was missing an adventure about a visit to Atlantis. Or at least a reasonable facsimile. Evidently it’s another one of those things they’d actually thought of a while ago, but didn’t get to publish until just recently.

One thing I liked about this adventure right out of the gate is it doesn’t start with the players hearing about some emergency or weird occurrence and checking things out. It starts with them already locked in battle with an evildoer. While the GM is of course free, even encouraged, to use a villain of their own design, a couple are provided as a courtesy.

Speaking personally, one of my favorite writers for V&V has always been the guy who wrote this, Ken Cliffe. One of the things I liked about him was how he actually did build something of a singular universe via little connections he would make between the different books he wrote. For instance, one of his books was a compilation of villains called Super-Crooks and Criminals, and one of them was a swashbuckler type called the Highwayman. He often worked with another villain called Apollo, who didn’t appear anywhere in that book. However, should you read the module Organized Crimes, you’ll find a villain named Apollo with a similar swashbuckler style. I bring this up because one of the villains provided for the attack is Elisa Fathom, or the daughter of Nathan Fathom, the villain Bluegill who appeared in Super-Crooks and Criminals.

That’s a lot of attention to lavish on something ultimately so small, I know, but it made me feel like Cliffe was invested in the material he created. Not just writing an adventure for a superhero game because he had a couple cool ideas for villains.

The purpose of that fight is to have the players handily at the shore when a blue-skinned guy comes up begging for help, right before a group of heavily-armed, nasty blue-skinned guys show up and try to kidnap him. When the heroes undoubtedly refuse to let this happen, they find out they’re harboring the fugitive ruler of an undersea city. And then things get interesting.

I mean that. If V&V had one glaring weakness in its premade adventures, it’s that a lot of them tended to be simply:

Part 1: Battle with villains/investigate strange goings-on.
Part 2: Now aware that villains are up to no good, track them to their lair for a final battle.

Instead, the villains are the ones who go on the attack. It culminates in the players having to protect the city from a full-scale invasion, which was a break from the norm for this system to be sure.

After that, it’s time for the players to go on the attack and help the deposed regent regain his throne. And that’s when the adventure gets a lot more free-form, with suggestions on what to do during the trip to the city and how to incite rebellion once they’re there.

While I said I felt the game’s library of peripherals felt kind of empty without an undersea adventure, that’s not to say I think Danger In The Depths really shines. At least, not as much in the second half as the first. The first half places the heroes in a situation not often seen in premade adventures, which is to say as defenders rather than attackers.

The city is run like a pretty typical and bland tyrannical society. They even have gladiatorial battles for the amusement of the upper crust. Don’t evil people enjoy anything besides watching guys kill each other? Also, the trip to the city itself, in a submarine with occasional dangers from marine life and other underwater hazards, seems like something that would easily become tedious without a very good GM. For all that, however, the module provides a pretty comprehensive understanding of how to game out characters being underwater. It's also a product where you'd actually expect to find that information. "Pre-Emptive Strike" doesn't exactly scream "buy this for the system's aquatic rules." And I sure didn't see where the cover advertized it.

This, on the other hand...

I did like that the module came packed with an NPC aquatic hero, sort of like Commander Astro from Battle Above The Earth. The one Cliffe dreamed up for this adventure, however, is not only a lot more creative but as a result is much better geared toward appearing in adventures outside Danger In The Depths.

All in all a pretty good adventure, but Terror By Night has nothing to worry about.

Villains and Vigilantes - Terror by Night

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

Unlike Into the Sub-Realm, which was a standard if perhaps overly difficult superhero adventure, Terror by Night doesn’t have the fate of the world, the city or even large amounts of money at stake. There are no brightly-garbed thugs with inhuman powers just waiting for superheroes to show up so they can start flinging sarcastic quips around. What it does have is a circus. And a vampire.

Edward Cullen wasn’t the first vamp to be shaken out of the tedium of ages by love for a mortal woman. Victor von Heinrich has had his passions stirred by a beautiful NPC in your campaign city, but being a practical lord of the night he wants to study other features of the modern world that popped up while he was sleeping for centuries. Like superheroes. So disguised as an eccentric millionaire he buys a circus and brings it to town, planning to earn the beauty’s love and in the process test the mettle of today's champions.

Terror by Night's an excellent break for groups tired of saving the world all the time. If your players fall back on their instincts and march into the circus spoiling for a fight when they start to suspect something’s up, Victor won’t reveal his vampiric powers and attack. He’ll call up the best lawyers money can buy and slap your players with as much litigation as he can manage. They may never even realize they’re up against an honest-to-goodness vampire, or that the woman doesn’t need saving. At least not from Victor.

Which isn’t to say there’s no action at all in this adventure. After sizing up the PCs through several non-combative encounters meant to make them suspicious, Victor will try to lure them into his funhouse where he’ll reveal the animatronic monsters have some surprises that are a threat even to superheroes. They’re pretty tough, too, but not ridiculous tough like some of the villains in Into the Sub-Realm. The GM’s even encouraged to make this fun rather than frustrating. Like sending someone well-suited to fighting in water against the Creature from the Black Lagoon, for example.

The module even has a dash of humor: one encounter is on the shoot of a remake of Plan 9 From Outer Space, perennial favorite for Worst Movie Ever Made. Involving whatever big-name actors the GM feels like including, yet.

If the module has a downside, it’s that the final act splits the players into ones and twos, which can be boring to the players not involved in the scene currently being played out. With the right pacing and some evocative narration (which the GM will have to come up with himself), however, even the observers can probably get into the creepy goings-on. As it is, it's an appropriate enough climax, but has to be handled carefully.

Besides having a villain who’s not really evil and more interested in toying with superheroes than getting them out of the way of his grand scheme, Terror by Night has something else V&V adventures almost never did: sequel hooks. To say Victor von Heinrich is a rarity among superhero RPG villains is an understatement, and the encouragement to get more use out of him was more than welcome.

Villains and Vigilantes - Into the Sub-Realm

First published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1979, Villains & Vigilantes was one of the earliest of superhero role-playing games. It utilized a strange character creation system where values like strength and intelligence were determined by the game master judging how strong or smart the person playing the character was. On top of that, to determine their character’s powers the player chose one of a list of charts (such as general Powers, Psionic/Magic, Devices, Skills, etc.) and rolled dice to see what their power was. Many players ignored this method.

In spite of its sometimes bizarre system, V&V enjoyed a fair amount of popularity during the 80’s. It even spawned a comic book limited series by the same company that initially published the comic based on that other superhero RPG. Which will probably be showing up on Spectrum of Madness itself one of these days.

Around the end of the decade V&V and the other games published by Fantasy Games Unlimited seemed to go into hibernation. For years and years you could buy their older products off their website, but no new products were forthcoming. Until a few months ago, that is, when the company finally released some brand new material for V&V, and finally dragged some others out of mothballs (judging by the artwork and the introduction that talks about the never-released Most Wanted #2 just getting finished, this one was sitting around waiting to be published since 1986).

However before we move on, I’ll be giving away details about the adventure in the course of giving my thoughts about it. So if you think you might be a player in this adventure somewhere down the road rather than running it, do your GM a favor and stop reading now.

First off, I was surprised by how there was nothing from the author to the GM about ideal levels for player-characters. That doesn’t mean as much in V&V as it does in other games, where the characters become slightly better fighters by gaining levels but their powers and stats won’t change much. On the other hand, if their levels are high the players have used them for a while and know their strengths and weaknesses well.

If the PC's were rolled up the random way, that’s something that might make all the difference here, as Into the Sub-Realm has some pretty nasty villains and deadly traps. Unless your players rolled extremely well and are really used to their characters, it’s not hard to see them losing against some of the adventure’s villains (who weren’t generated randomly), or at the very least having fights that drag on long because of the downright excessive defenses some of them have.

Especially later on in the adventure, when the heroes have actually entered the Sub-Realm and the laws of nature actively work against them (but not the villains, of course). One of the enemies the heroes have to face before their final confrontation with the mastermind strikes me as frankly insane in terms of powers, especially when you consider the drawbacks affecting the players that he doesn’t have to worry about at all. Like no jumping or flying, no using wind or earth-related powers, no throwing things, movement rates being reduced to a quarter of their usual, having to make endurance saves because the air’s so thin, etc.

One part in particular deserves special mention, although players are only likely to see if it they do very well in the opening encounters or the GM thinks it would be fun to run and does it anyway. This part involves the adventure’s prime evildoer, tiring of the players’ interference in her plans, sending a giant rock monster to attack Japan. Why Japan instead of the city they live in, I couldn’t tell you, besides the fact that it’s a giant monster and giant monsters always have to destroy Japan before moving on to the rest of the world.

This monster has a whole new power made up just to represent how it can smash a player character with one hit. Invulnerability and a lot of Hit Points don’t count for anything. If a player character fails their endurance and agility saves, that’s it, they’re dead. Even if you're a "brick." Admittedly, things are offset some in this encounter by the players being assisted by a fairly tough local hero whose powers exploit the monster’s weakness. Speaking of, your players may be grateful for his help, but frankly I’m struck numb by the laziness of creating a Japanese water-controller named Tsunami.

Plus, while the villains are kind of cool in spite of what a pain some of them can be, the adventure is pretty much just fight fight fight fight fight. Certainly anyone playing a superhero RPG expects a fair amount of combat, but my favorite adventures for this system are ones that put a little more emphasis on investigation and other facets, like For the Greater Good and Terror by Night. After that my preferences run to adventures with an interesting hook, like The Pentacle Plot and Battle Above the Earth (which come to think of it also involved some investigation). Running around in caves fighting monsters all the time feels more like the province of a dull Dungeons & Dragons session. And I have nothing against D&D. The game, I mean.

The adventure introduces some interesting game mechanics, and some characters with cool power sets. Still, if you want to run a superhero adventure with a bunch of tunnel-dwelling villains, I’d recommend Invaders From Below from Champions.