Another thing the dark side of the Nineties produced a lot of were copycat characters. Some were more transparent than others, and there’s always a fine line between homage and ripoff, but I think I’ve managed to parody the worst of the trope with this hulking fellow - without quite copying an actual published example, of which there have been several over the years:
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Just pure coincidence I’m sure that Ang-Gorr shares part of a name with Ang Lee, who directed the 2003 film featuring a character that is legally distinct and certainly not the reason behind a copyright infringement suit.
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I’m embarrassed to say it really is nothing but fortunate happenstance. I’d managed to almost completely forget that film even existed, and sure didn’t remember its director after more than twenty years.
Nineties Week continues with a nod to one of the most notorious storylines of the decade. I’ve also managed to work in a bonus trope with yet another forcibly misspelled character name in the interest of being kewl and edgy. We didn’t actually use this guy for a properly sprawling saga (it was a parody one-shot, not a multi-year campaign) but he still got up to some shenanigans that would have had Biomancer calling his lawyer about copyright infringement if he existed in the same universe.
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Today’s Nineties tropes aren’t entirely associated with lousy books, so it’s a bit of a cheat - but to make up for it you get both a superhero, a full villain writeup, and a lieutenant, all connected to one another. They aren’t even an utterly terrible concept, so for them to be a proper Bad Nineties Comic there must have been something wrong beyond the writing or art. I prefer to imagine the book was simply terminally late, never managing to make deadline and gradually becoming more and more erratic until the despairing publisher finally stopped pretending the creators could get it together and officially gave the title a merciful end. There were certainly more than a few of that sort of heartbreaker back in the day.
Cookie for you if you guess the twist before reading the blog post. 
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As Bad Nineties Week continues it’s time for a nod to fan service. Every era has its own brand of eye candy and that’s probably never going to change, but the Nineties produced some particularly off-putting attempts at portraying the human figure. Sure, it wasn’t all drawn by people who flunked anatomy and figure-drawing, but when the artists of the decade got it wrong they got it really, really wrong.
Also taking the opportunity to riff on several art tropes that mysteriously seem to affect primarily female characters, from absurdly fragile costumes to “artistic” rips and injuries to the anime-inspired naked transformation sequences. And all on one character who’s also a Mary Sue! What fun, I can’t wait to play her.
Although that Red combo she’s running will make me feel bad. Just silly.
And Bad Nineties Comics Week comes to a close with one last post offering some suggestions for tweaking pre-existing characters to mesh with the environment that started all this. Most of it is largely thematic, although there are some options to swap in some homebrew abilities for ones you’ve already got.
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Another supervillain who didn’t quite make it into Bad Nineties Week despite his “Extreme!!!” name. Got bumped at the last minute by Ang-Gorr - I may work a rivalry into a storyline at some point as a nod to that.
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Reformed villain superhero writeup today, mostly intended for use as an NPC, either in their heroic
or old villain lieutenant form. There’s a full hero writeup but I’m not convinced playing them would be much fun beyond maybe a session or two where the story is taking place at sea where they, well, suck less. A powerhouse this guy is not.
Can I just add that the Big Two are supranym hogs? Both of them have Cormorants, neither of whom have anything whatsoever to do with fishing birds. Marvel’s is some kind of cosmic entity’s OP servant who casually beat up the Fantastic Four, and DC’s was a nonpowered assassin who showed up in a couple of issues and promptly died. He wasn’t even working for the Penguin, which would at least have had some kind of vague connection - both seabirds, after all.
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Sticking with the seagoing posts from yesterday, a big new environment/keystone challenge combo post reflecting a maritime disaster in the making.
Written to be as versatile and reusable as possible without needing much tweaking. Should be able to handle a super-pirate assault on a cruise ship as easily as some mad scientist sabotaging a science vessel to make off with an experimental gadget in the confusion to a kaiju trying to eat an aircraft carrier and more.
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Very cool, and well-combined! I only have one question - you chose to have the villains be able to increase the challenge boxes, instead of the more usual advancing the scene tracker when something is falling apart. Was there a particular reason for the choice? Just game balance?
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Partly variety, but also a desire not to make things too hard on the heroes.
Advancing the tracker effectively makes all challenges harder to complete at once (since the heroes have all just effectively lost an action) while just adding a box to a single challenge will only offset a single hero Overcome. You could theoretically have the core challenge, a fire, and even multiple smoke challenges running at once, and the smoke and fire are inflicting global penalties till they’re solved (or time out for smoke, but that just starts a fire or makes it worse if it’s already ablaze), which could already be a lot of pressure on them.
Of course, if they’re breezing through the scene anyway you could do the usual trick of advancing the tracker instead, although that has more impact if there’s smoke and/or fire going as well so the tracker might need some time to do its thing. Like usual, what environment twists you bring into play a big difficult dial to turn.
My reasoning might be wrong, though. Only ran this once in a recent one-shot and it worked okay, although the players didn’t feel too stressed. They won on the last round of Yellow when the last villain did the math and realized if he didn’t Overcome to escape instead of turning the sinking ship challenge back on he was going to get captured, and he didn’t want the ship sunk that badly.
I guess I could have been a little meaner about twists. The players were generating a bunch for using Red abilities early and I was mostly going with their suggestions for those instead of haggling. They were still being pretty nasty to themselves anyway. One guy managed to lose his d12 Telekinesis to a major twist while also dropping his d12 Science to a d6 with repeated minor twists while using Red Overcomes in Yellow. His die pools were looking awfully sad by round six but he’d gotten five of the six successes they wound up needing on the key challenge.
On an unrelated note, I did some busy work on the blog so the unwieldy supervillain sub-index now has four alphabetical sub-sub-indices with about a quarter of baddies in each. Easier to scroll through now, albeit not quite as convenient to just browse names. Too boring to link to, you can find them through the main index linked at the bottom of each post.
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Prepping for some horror-themed October gaming my circle has planned with a new supernatural entity, a vengeful spirit hunting for her killers to drag to Hell with her.
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Since I’m playing as well as running a Halloween game, I needed a suitable hero PC. This gent’s a supernatural noir detective who leans hard into thematic SFX. Transmutation is an easy way to make your own dead leaves, creepy fog and even iconic paraphernalia like skulls and bones and jack-o-lanterns.
Like most Divided heroes his action economy is kind of dreadful and he’s probably too defensive a build, but I know there’s a spooky heavy hitter coming to the team so maybe we’ll balance each other out some.
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Ah yes, the old [Champaign City] listing in backgrounds and skill listings. My SCRPG game is set in Champaign City as a reference to it. A fictional historical governor made a champaign promise to build a new costal trade hub city. Probably northern California, possibly southern Washington (sorry Oregon) since the state and county name does not really matter in 80% of supers’ games.
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I got curious, and checked for the best spot for a city like that. With a bunch of infill, could do it in the yellow area of Southern Washington, with some grading of the hills, could do it in the red area of Northern Oregon. Portland Metro shown at same scale in the corner, for reference. Ignore the black dot, I forgot to turn off my location when I took the screen shot.
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I am writing these posts for general utility, so that will show up now and then. AFAIK the guy running it for us will probably be using Schenectady NY (his home, and a city all but one person at the table has lived in at one point or another). The real version of the city is decidedly lacking in both superheroic and supernatural activity, sadly.
Funny, I was having a back-and-forth on the subject of partially real vs. wholly fictional settings for supers campaigns over on the Hero Games forums just yesterday. I don’t think there’s One True Answer to that, but as I said on the blog years ago there are some advantages to mining real-world urban history for story ideas and to make the city feel more real. Even an invented city can benefit from pieces of real history being transplanted into them.
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I’ll be needing two new PCs for our planned October games. Doctor October has been done and posted for a while, and now after much waffling I’ve got my second hero for what’s being pitched as a more gonzo Golden Age style story. Hopefully I’ll fit in okay with this concept. Practicing my Italian accent now.
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always love it when immortals remembering to keep up with modern technology-
“of course, I know how to use a smart phone I was over 200 when Alexander Grahm Bell was born”
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With Technology d6 he isn’t exactly a super-hacker, but being a very elaborate piece of magical clockwork has encouraged paying some attention to changing times. Helps that he can pretty much casually rewire electronics without needing tools - Metal d10 is pretty potent. I was tempted to get Principle of Clockwork on him but it seemed a little too narrow after ~four centuries of doing his own repairs.
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Looked at my blog stats today after an anomalous spike in views and I have to assume the sudden uptick in readers from Italy is tied to the vagaries of search engines and using the word “corragioso” in the most recent post’s title. Hope I’m not disappointing too many people when the rest of the blog turns out to be English and rather lacking in supers with any connections to Italy itself.
But hey, the whole “Lion of St, Mark/Lion of Venice” design really is one of my favorite mythological critters, and Corragioso is a good name for one of them. I can actually imagine how it would move of the ground, which is more than I can say for griffins or hippogriffs with their weird eagle feet.
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