FTL’s concept is very cool. Most stories don’t address the perspective disparity between speedsters and normal folks much, if at all.
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It does tend to get glossed over or played as a joke most of the time, yeah. Then again, there aren’t a lot of villain speedsters (the main ones I can recall are Professor Zoom and Savitar) and heroic ones usually have better support networks to keep them from feeling too isolated. Kingdom Come touched on it very briefly with the Flash being a continual blur of motion (a look I’ve stolen for FTL) singlehandedly keeping Central City crime-free, which really can’t be healthy - like Batman levels of unhealthy.
I can also remember a one shot story in an indie comic about 35 years back that dealt with a guy trying to volunteer to work on a JLA-style team and getting rejected. He wasn’t a speedster as such, instead his mind and senses worked at Flash-level speeds but his body and reflexes were stuck at human levels. The team pointed out that he’d be in constant danger and their own ranks had folks who could match his mental speed and react that fast, so he’d really just be a hindrance. He leaves feeling dejected and frustrated, gets caught up in a minor crime at random, and the story closes with him watching the bullet that’s going to kill him moving closer and closer and him not being able to do a thing about it. Very grim.
Anyway, todays villain is Caesar Meccanico, a lookalike of Julius Caesar who’s building himself a power base of brainwashed dupes under the guise of the New Rome Movement. He’s also secretly a modernized WW2 era android following the unknown agenda of whoever programmed him. He exists mostly because I wanted a WW2 legacy villain that wasn’t yet another German holdout, but “robot Caesar” is also a pretty Silver Age thing to do.
And Friday’s villain, the stolen Spearhead ACE suit with its mercenary pilot.
The not German golden age villain made me think of the 5th Collum villain group from City of Heroes. at first glance they are neo-Nazis and hold out
OG-Nazis. Except their Super Villain leaders include Requiem, and Maestro. They are Italian fascists who lifted a swastika flag because there are more people who liked Hitler than Mussolini.
Then they go co-opted by space aliens but that is a different story
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Interesting, was more of a Freedom Force player. Robot Caesar’s movement in my game is definitely a fascistic (and brainwash-y) cult of personality but he’s leaning into the “glory of Rome” thing for recruiting even harder than Mussolini did rather than deliberately trying to recruit neo-Nazis.
Anyway, today’s supervillain is Ascendant, a flying brick who might still be talked back out of supervillainy with some serious effort. I like her mechanics a lot because she asks a hard question to other bricks, since you just cannot beat her with purely physical damage. Trading punches not only doesn’t work, it actively makes things worse for the heroes. That said, she’s got a bit of a glass jaw to element/energy and psychic effects, so not unbeatable.
Now we just need a villain from Imperial Japan to round out the Axis Powers.
Also, I like how he has an ability that adds minions to the scene, but it represents him just calling in some reinforcements rather than somehow creating the minions, which I feel like most minion-making abilities do.
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Well, he doesn’t really have any powers that would let him summon or create minions from thin air, and his brainwashing isn’t fast enough to make instant converts - but it would be pretty rare to find him in a situation where he really doesn’t have any followers nearby, and if the heroes caught him out like that he’d probably just try to surrender (if they haven’t twigged to his true nature) or flee. Think of his minions as being a high-ranking politician’s coterie of aids and security detail combined with some added sycophants on top. Not going to catch the POTUS without a bunch of them ready to help even if they’re temporarily out of sight.
I’m uncomfortable doing Japanese WW2 villains for a variety of reasons, although in a supers world there certainly should have been quite a few of them and the worst of the bunch would have rivalled any Nazi cape for sheer evil and inhumanity. Not a lot of examples of them in published comics postwar, and the few ones during (and even before) it are grotesque racial stereotypes that lean heavily into Yellow Peril tropes and worse. Neither German nor the rarer Italian baddies (powered or not) tended to get drawn with quite such a dehumanized style, although they sure used it to portray the folk they hated. Bringing up WW2 Japanese portrayals in Western media makes us (or at least our ancestors) look as racist as any Nazi party member, but pretending that didn’t happen is erasing history. Touchy subject. Maybe I’ll tackle it at some point, but it’ll require some careful thought that obviously-absurd characters like the Colossal Z-Man and a robot copy of Julius Caesar didn’t.
Anyway, on a less controversial note (unless you’re photosynthetic, I guess) today’s villain is the Green Queen, a floral tyrant from another dimension bent on cleansing the world of creatures of flesh - and none to keen on their technology and civilization either, so don’t think you’re safe just because you’re an android or something. She’s one of my rare Domain archetype villains, and as usual comes with a custom environment and some minions specific to it.
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I feel that it’s certainly possible to make an inoffensive WWII Japanese villain, but I agree that it’s a matter best handled delicately.
Unrelatedly, what’s the Green Queen’s stance on lifeforms that are neither plant nor animal (nor technological)? Magmarians, for instance.
Also, I like the idea of a rivalry between her and Infernovox, as they’re sort of opposing primordial forces.
And lastly, I really like what you did with the Desperate Survivor minions, specifically the bit where the Heroes can Overcome to turn them into allies.
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Hmmm. The Green Queen is very much a “surface world” problem and doesn’t really understand what’s down below where her deepest tap roots run, so once you hit bedrock it’s not her concern. Can’t photosynthesize underground real well, after all. If she ran into magmarians (or anything like them) on the surface she’d probably see them as minions of Infernovox and either try to flood/smother them if she thought she could manage it, or flee back to her home dimension in terror if there were a lot of them. She pretty much feels the same way about volcanoes, natural or otherwise.
Her personal blind spot also means she’d also be caught be surprise by the various Underland civilizations in my game, although she’d treat any appearance of their forces on the surface as just more flesh-life to dispose of. Fighting back against them at home would be hard - she could probably send roots down and force growth along caves and caverns, but with no natural light her “troops” would be slowly starving. Most likely she’d just grab the planet’s surface down to the topsoil level, siphon the seas wholesale (saltwater plants obey her whims too, and there are oceans of both fresh and salt water on her home plane) and drag it all back into the Green Dimension, leaving the Earth a drifting rockball with a lot less atmosphere and empty sea beds. The Underlanders might survive, and maybe some refugees from the surface. There’s a dark alt timeline for the heroes to prevent.
Pretty happy with them myself. Rather obviously, you could reskin and use them for all sorts of mind-control victims, or even zombies if you’ve got a fast-acting cure you could inject with an Overcome.
Anyway, today’s supervillain is a less imposing (but certainly not humble) baddy by the improbable name of Orb-Master, a mutant with a big mouth and showy telekinetic powers. He exists mostly as a temptation to a couple of my players who can’t stop making jokes about villains’ names. If they annoy him enough (I expect a lot of ball jokes, frankly) he may become a recurring nemesis who keeps changing his supranym in an attempt to get some respect.
And Tuesday see the unwelcome arrival of Glutton to this feast of villains. Literally power-hungry, this guy is a wild card or “wandering monster” who might show up to interfere in almost any super-fight, attacking both sides indiscriminately.
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Ascendant is also the title of another (not very good) RPG that released recently, and has probably been used for characters in published comics somewhere by now. Gave up trying to come up with wholly original character names quite a while ago. It’s just futile, especially for a fan project.
Today’s baddie has likely also had his supranym used before, but this iteration of him dates back to my first Villains & Vigilantes campaign in the early 80s. He adapted nicely to the SCRPG, and I imagine after 40+ years in prison he might have served his term for trying to carve his own face on Mount Rushmore, which is where my players beat him up originally. Maybe he’s been released in hopes he can help deal with climate change, but that’s not likely to work out well.
Cataclysmo, An Unnatural Disaster
Thursday’s “hero” was the treacherous scene-stealing corporate shill Hothead
Friday saw the malicious imp Gadfly, who started out as an NPC in the old Changeling RPG and is now doing his thing in the SCRPG.
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I quite like Hothead, as he’s sort of like an evil Benchmark. His status as a third party in fights between the Heroes and some Villains is also rather intriguing.
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The “bad hero with corporate backing” idea isn’t exactly new (there’s plenty of them in the past of DC and Marvel, and it’s at the root of the entire storyline of the Boys) but the degree of rottenness is a dial you can twist around a lot. In Hothead’s case, as written he’s well over into outright villain. A GM could turn that down a little (or a lot) and make him redeemable (like, say, Roxxon’s Sunturion). It’s debatable how much the companies behind him really understand how bad he is at heart, and that’s another dial you could adjust. Maybe they’re even worse than he is and expect him to burn out from their dangerous power-boosting experiments before he becomes a PR disaster, or maybe they’re wholly innocent and are being manipulated by his Presence the same way the public is. Most likely it’s somewhere between the two extremes.
Anyway, today brings us to Bodycount and Manpower, a pair of villains with a similar self-duplication schtick going on. They act as a good demonstration of how different Approach and Archetype combos can make a huge difference in effective threat level, something that’s particularly noticeable with minion-creator types.
And Sunday adds the Gheel Enslaver and its horde of robot minions, come to Earth in search of “merchandise” for resale in the galactic black markets.
Might be interesting to compare and contrast the three villains’ effectiveness and play style, since they all revolve around adding minions to the scene. Not all baddies are created equal by a long shot, even when they use a similar schtick.
Monday’s new villain is the Renaissance Man, a villainous polymath with the ability to turn his mental creations directly into reality. So pretty much evil Leonardo da Vinci as a Lantern Corps member.
Tuesday adds a villain “odd couple” (does anyone even remember that show any more, much less the film?) in the form of Tortoise and the Hare, a power armored scientific genius with a wide array of defenses and a magical rabbit cursed with a human body.
Wednesday brings us to Fireteam Firestorm, a four-man villain team of ex-mercenaries. Well, really they’re still mercs, just radioactive ones that can fly and shoot atomic energy bolts now. They’re another experiment with “off kilter” archetypes, since they’re a team composed entirely of Loners. Mechanically, it makes them fairly weak at first but they stronger as members drop, which poses a small puzzle for heroes fighting them. Do you focus fire and KO them one at a time, meaning the others are hitting back harder, or do you try to spread your damage around and leave them relatively weak until your’re ready to finish them all off at once?
Thursday sees two different versions of Crossbolt, a weapon specialist with gimmick ammunition inspired by Green Arrow and Hawkeye. Another mechanics experiment, using the Adaptive approach to let him toggle between different energy/element damage types during a fight, or even amp up his Swinging - because what gimmick archer type doesn’t have a grappling hook arrow? 
Finishing off the week with Negator, a ruthless vigilante cape-hunter bent on making reckless supers pay for their behavior whether they claim to be heroes or villains.
Dreadmorphs, shapeshifting Things from another world, in minion, lieutenant, and full villain form.
The Court of Entropy, a demon king and his inner circle of advisors.
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This week’s had some nifty villains. I particularly like Bodycount & Manpower, the Renaissance Man, and the Court of Entropy.
Thanks. Had a lot of fun roleplaying the uneven power dynamic between Bodycount & Manpower the one time I used them in a story, and the flood of minion duplicates actually put some pressure even on my group, who are really getting pretty practiced at crowd control these days.
The flood of villains this month is pretty much over, I’ve hit my 31 for the January challenge and just have a few more spares left in the buffer. Also need to recount, I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten past the halfway mark to the insane “do one of every Approach/Archetype combo” goal I set myself. Doubt I’ll actually finish all (does math) 252 possibilities, but I’ve certainly made a dent in it.
Here’s another three for the tally though - the Hooligans Three, a trio of very young up-and-coming villains with a diverse power set.
And one last entry for now, Professor Pusher, a “drug messaging” PSA villain with a long and awkward metafictional publishing history. He’s very much an homage to Steve Perrin’s Superworld and an expy of the titular villain from that game’s Bad Medicine For Doctor Drugs adventure.
PSA and “educational” baddies have shown up in real comics in quite a few forms over the years, and every faux publisher should have at least one in the roster of regrettable decisions they’ve made.
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Man, this forum’s slow lately. Everyone quit playing or something? Or playing too much to post, I guess. Let’s be optimistic and say that’s it.
Anyway, added An Aside On Using Dice To Track Mods In Play to my blog. Not really advocating for it, but putting it out there for anyone who wants to try it.
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Unfortunately, a LOT of folks use Discord for the kinds of conversations we used to have here. 
So those conversations vanish under piles of other conversations and folks like me who only check it occasionally just can’t keep up. 
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Pity. I intensely dislike Discord and don’t care to use it myself.
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Likewise, the BGG forum has essentially completely dried up, which is unfortunate, since I don’t want to try using Discord to keep track of development and playtesting info.
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Yeah, I’d noticed the dearth of online discussion of the game. There are occasional flickers of interest over on RPG dot net forums but aside from that Discord is about it - which leaves me out.
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As someone who’s best friends all live at least 300km away, I love Discord. But it’s great for small-ish (to maybe medium size) groups of people. Once you just get beyond that it’s just way too much. I understand why GTG uses it for playtesting, for instance, but in every “big” server in which I’m a member, I have literally every text channel permanently muted.
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