Comes with a selection of hench-vehicles as well, because someone has to drag all the scrap back to the factory. Undecided on whether they all target foreign cars first, or if all the metric parts are such a nuisance they go after US competitor brands as first priority. Probably depends on how the AI is glitching at any given time.
Think “less grandiose Omnitron with serious OCD and a car fetish” and you’ve got it.
Also some of his gang, who may or may not be aware that they’re working for a gorilla. They’re pretty low-quality but he sure can bring a lot of them to a job.
Nifty. That’s a pretty meta gimmick that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Now they just need a nemesis (or ally?) modelled after a very modern major-general. : )
I might have been browsing the Guise Book again. My stuff gets about 40% sillier whenever I do that.
Also can’t help but notice that lately I seem to going through the apocryphal list of things that improve sales when they’re on the cover - a gorilla, something purple - think I just need a motorcycle (the Fnord Model M doesn’t quite qualify), a dinosaur, and IIRC a robot to complete my Sales Boost Bingo card.
Finally broken the writer’s block and health woes (gad, I hate sciatica) that have been limiting my blogging, so here’s a couple of lunkheads from space that were bothering my players in a couple of “filler issues” last month. Think Kirby’s New Gods if they were petty, vainglorious thugs and you’ve pretty much got the idea.
Brutallo & Brutalla - Twin cosmo-gods from beyond the stars, powerful but childish space thugs
Curious choice to give them both Above Mortal Concerns and Immortal Nature. They’re fairly similar in theme, but aren’t entirely redundant, I suppose, and they do combine to make the Brutal Twins extraordinarily durable.
Yep, that was the idea. I used each of them solo most of the time, with the scenes filled out with difficult high-priority timed challenges, environmental effects, and a smattering of lieutenants and minions to reflect the fools they’d bullied into working with them. That meant they were prone to be focused on, so they needed to be able to take a pounding and stay in the fight longer than anticipated. Their Ancient/Loner A/A combination left them a bit limited on the one thing I would have liked most - Boost abilities to burn penalties off them - but I skewed the environment twists toward that, keeping their inherent last-gasp ability functional more often than they might have managed normally.
The usual pattern I saw with the abilities was for the Above Mortal Concerns to reactively keep them from hitting zero if they had a penalty, and otherwise minimizing penalties so e-twists or follower Boosts could clear them more easily. If they were penalty clean, Immortal Nature would reset them to d12 Health ad infinitum, and they could still react to another another finisher Attack to reduce the damage to one, letting them get to a higher total Health after using Triumphant Rage for a solid Recovery. Not an impenetrable trick, but it frequently kept them fighting an extra round or two and my players had to think more about timing their Hinders right than usual. The team has a lot of mutual Boosting tricks that they’re very good at using to produce one really big hit every round, but Hinders are a much more limited resource before Red for them. A different team might find these two much easier to deal with, of course.
Their last appearance (to date - they’ll be back eventually, the players seemed to enjoy a good tough punch-up with some opportunities for heroic Overcomes as a distraction) used both of them, with the twins verbally sniping at each other for not beating the heroes on their own before this. By then the heroes were on their A Game when it came to coordinating damage and Hinders, and they wound up with a battered Brutallo into dissolving into starstuff while Brutalla escaped into a cosmic portal vowing to get even in the future. Grudges are good.
Another villain today, another option to explain where dunderhead villains and criminals get their supertech from and why some much supercrime involves stealing new inventions.
Savant - Ingenious if not terribly creative engineer with a bug about the supernatural
This gent also marks a milestone in my ridiculous “do one of every Approach/Archetype pairing” project, as he’s the 200th unique pairing on my blog. Just 52 more to go…sigh.
Nice anti-mad scientist. I like the “I’m sticking to normal science” mentality. It’s definitely a unique perspective for an inventor in a supers setting.
Also, cool idea including challenges in the write-up; that’s new. Although . . . the Grav Cage seems pretty fringe super-science to me. I mean, isn’t gravity usually one of the big things that real science can’t really do anything about?
52, you say? (Sorry, I just can’t hear that number without thinking of that.)
Conceptually he can copy and improve on even fringe science stuff, he just isn’t any good at coming up with ideas and theories on his own. A technological plagiarist, as it were. Big d12 Technology, no actual Science, strong on practical engineering and weak on theory. Flat-out magic leaves him stumped though, and he’s no good at biotech stuff. The synthetic lycanthropy the War-Wolves run on really makes his head hurt.
Last I checked there were still some theories that allowed for possible gravity manipulation, but it involved conditions that don’t exist without a singularity nearby so not exactly practical for testing.
It makes playing cards awkward, agreed. Stupid DC events…
Let’s get that down to 50 remaining so we can stop thinking about the number 52 and dwell on Hawaiian cop shows instead. A duo of ruthless vigilante “heroes” with a paranoid streak, ready to make things awkward for your (hopefully) more principled PCs:
A new villain with a silly gimmick, perhaps most suitable for Golden Age games - but a lot of fairly oddball characters are still going strong in 2023, so who knows?
Rad. I like the in-universe lampshading that his “scientific” powers make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Also, I like the gyro double-reference. : )
Although I note that you chose to omit Versatile Strike, the Fragile ability that does different actions based on the villain’s zone. It seems an obvious choice for a foe with such a theme, but I assume you had a good mechanical reason to omit it, even if it’s simply personal taste.
Honestly, I mostly didn’t want to type out the godawful wall of text that ability involves. Such a pain. I know I used it somewhere that I could copy-paste from but didn’t have the ambition to find it. As you may have noticed, I tend to rewrite abilities for brevity and clarity when there’s a way to do so, but that one defeats me.
Also I wanted the inherent movement ability to go with the Approach’s Attack & Recover trick (hoping to trigger free moves going both up and down) and the Attack and lasting self-Defend Fragile ability was too helpful for mister low-Health to pass on. His other tricks both self-Boost efficiently, which is meant to build up bonuses to sink into the Attack abilities’ riders, either to Defend or Recover.
I should probably also have mentioned that he was popular with artists and colorists because he was stupidly easy to draw. Doc essentially stands in a single fairly static pose whenever he’s spinning (and he’s always spinning), kind of up on his toes a bit and with his arms in tight most of the time. Draw that once then you can paste it in anywhere at varying angles, sketch in a bunch of whirly speedlines (and regular ones if he’s moving rather than spinning in place), and then add as many gyrolight rays as desired and you’re done. The colorist gets to just splash a monochrome aura and some rays over him and they’re done - sometimes they don’t even pick his face out in flesh tones. Pretty common for them to get the specific GYR color wrong in some panels and wind up with fans complaining on the letters pages too.
“Dear Mister Editor, Doctor Whirligig is drawn in yellow colors on page six, panels four, five, and six. He’d clearly just recharged his gyrolight rays by absorbing Mister Dynamic’s electron flow in panel two and should have been green at that point. Please correct this in future printings.”
