Ack, yes! I always forget that that multi-die system isn’t a flat probability curve. You’re rolling 2d10, not 1d20.
I wanna say I remember C&A saying somewhere that the idea is that the results that are more probable are the ones that are more common in superhero fiction.
It’s not even that in most cases. 2d10 only applies to the Background and Personality steps, and even there its not a a normal roll, it’s pick one result or the other or both added together. Power Source and Archetype are whatever 2-3 dice you got from the previous step, which produces all sorts of wonky odds for any given result. Obviously tends to skew toward lower results and any kind of number in the teens becomes highly improbable as the numbers get higher. There’s canon characters that cannot be rolled randomly at all - Bunker, for ex. No way to roll 20 off of Power Suit’s lousy d10, d6, d6 carry-over, after all.
Power Suit deserves a whole post of its own, now that I think about it. Might be my candidate for screwiest Power Source in the game despite there being a lot of published characters who arguably use one.
Yeah, I know. I was going for pithy brevity rather than complete accuracy on that one—and also I was sort of referring to Friv’s random villain creation table, which does use 2d10.
Yeah, IIRC it’s the only Power Source that mandates taking a specific Power.
Not only that, it then goes on to force you to use Power Suit in a specific ability (Onboard Upgrade, a peculiar P+E self-booster) if you take that ability at all - which means you can’t use it in Explosive Attack (which is probably where you want your biggest die) if you take both. And if you don’t take both so you can use Power Suit for Explosive Attack, you’re stuck taking Energy Converter, a unique reaction ability that loosely emulates a villain trick where you Boost using incoming damage of a given E/E type - and which isn’t keyed to any of your powers or qualities, so your die sizes are moot.
Couple that with Green abilities that are a) a nerfed version of Armored’s damage reduction and b) an innate that lets you shed penalties when your health zone changes (encouraging healing yo-yo tricks that don’t combo with anything else here) and you have a truly strange power source - and one that doesn’t emulate most published “suit” heroes IMO. Maybe it’s okay for Bunker and Benchmark, but I’ve seen a lot of players get it as an option and turn it down fast once they looked at what it really does.
I definitely remember that being said, and I definitely think that it is not quite true, because while the first ten are definitely more ‘common’ origins than the back half, the system as devised has the two most common superhero backgrounds as being in the military and being in the performing arts, and the most common power source being integrated tech upgrades.
Any of the 1-10 results have equal odds of coming up on single d10s, so it’s just the 2d10 additive result affecting the odds there. 9-10 is in the fat part of the curve (only 11 being higher, and not by enough to offset the influence of those single d10s) but is it enough of a skew to really be noticeable? We mostly gave up on randomizing pretty early in my parts so I never really noticed.
Okay, power sources aren’t on 2d10, they’re on whatever mix of 2-3 dice your background handed you. You’re looking at pools ranging from 8,8,6 or 12,8 to 10,10,6, with 10,8,6 or 10,8,8 being the most common by simple count but (probably) not by the odds of each given background being a valid option to choose. For ex, Tragic and Created both have 10,10,6 to carry into power source, but being able to pick an 8 for Tragic is way, way more likely than getting that 20 for Created, so their impact on the odds of 10,10,6 in the next step is very different.
Did you really crunch the numbers on all the possibilities (adjusted for the frequency of those backgrounds coming up) and wind up with 10 as the most frequent possible choice? If you did, I’m impressed by the amount of work involved, but that is a much harder number to come up with than the “straight 2d10, pick one or two” involved with backgrounds and personalities. I can eyeball the latter and immediately see 10 is going to be the most common result by a small margin, but I couldn’t even guess at what power source and archetype are going to wind up with beyond the obvious “high numbers are increasingly rare” conclusion.
Well, that’s what I get for posting from vacation - correctly challenged.
First: Backgrounds. These ones are easy. Your chances of getting anything from 1 to 10 is (18+#)%, and your chance of getting anything from 11 to 20 is (11-#)%. The shift from one choice to the next one is pretty small, but the overall shift from Upper Class to Military is about half again.
11 to 20 is where it really shows, of course. You’ve got an 11% chance of having access to Retired, a background that is extremely rare in comics. That’s about three times your chances of an Interstellar background (and boy are there are a lot of alien heroes) and five times the chance of being a legacy hero (very common in Marvel and DC, very rare in Sentinels.) And if you’re a Performer, that’s three times as common as being a Criminal or Medical.
For Power Source and Archetype: no, I don’t have the exact math, and I have in fact mucked it up. Someone did d10, d8, d6 on the other forum, and some quick notes show that the results are actually more intuitive than you would think, and match the pattern for 2d10: a rapid growth up to the maximum result on your lowest die, then a series of small cliffs until you hit the maximum result on your highest die, then a massive drop-off. The shift was about one percent per point on d10, d8, d6 up to 8, then dropping quickly, but I’m not calculating precision there.
With 11 out of 20 Backgrounds giving d6 as their low die, that makes ‘6’ the most common entry overall, with 5, 7, and 8 the runners-up. So the most common superhero origin is being empowered by Nature, with Mystical, Relic, and Power Suit as the next most common.
Only two Backgrounds can have Higher Power or Multiverse (Tragic and Created) and they’ve got about a 2% chance of the former and a 1% chance of the latter.
Unfortunately I don’t remember where I heard that (I am fairly sure Dave Chalker was involved though), but I think the gating was supposed to work in a way that some types just don’t (realistically) happen when you roll. Meaning, you only get there if you really wanted to, but not by accident.
This makes sense if you consider that generally, all the explanations in SCRPG are directed at novice audiences, where randomly whipping up a Hero from blank is the least-overwhelming method to get to My First Hero. And in that context, it also makes sense to frame this way as the default.
For more experienced players though, what they call the constructed method is the way that allows for the full range.
Personally I imagine most players would take that as soon as they know the ropes enough to care - except maybe for the creative challenge.
That’s certainly been my experience. Even new players who used random generation usually ask if they can go back and re-build their PC with method 2 (or rarely, make specific tweaks with method 3) after a few sessions.
I’m compulsive enough to have tracked what combinations of choices I’ve made with method 2 over the years and at this point most new heroes are attempts at using the less-popular options. It’s also a decent way to get a feel for which character creation elements seem to be over- or under-powered, or at least more or less difficult to build mechanically effective synergies with.
Schism
Real Name: Snapdragon Jack, First Appearance: Twilight Carnival (Vol. 3) #4, March 2022
Approach: Adaptive, Archetype: Squad
Upgrade: Inspiring, Mastery: Total Chaos
Status Dice: Based on number of allied villains and lieutenants. 4+: d6. 2-3: d8. 0-1: d10. Health: 25+5H [Upgraded 45+5H]
Qualities: Insight d10, Ranged Combat d8, Magical Lore d8, Fae Tempter d8
Powers: Telekinesis d10, Suggestion d8, Awareness d8, Vitality d6
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
***Note: '*Inspiring’ is a modified form of Group Fighter, which allows a villain to Boost instead of Attacking.
2022 saw the plans that Venture had put into place in the previous year come into effect, initially with good effect. The first comic to be adjusted under the new directive was Veilwalkers. While it had launched strong, the writer’s bout with Covid in 2020 had caused a four-month delay that the comic never fully recovered from. Rather than trash an intriguing premise, the editorial board decided to use it as a test bed for their new approach, and Veilwalkers ended with Issue #30 in December 2021. It was replaced by a planned twenty-five issue run of a new Twilight Carnival, which would blend the most popular aspects of the previous title with fan-favourites who had been given less time in the spotlight since the launch of the Diamond Age.
In the new Twilight Carnival, Veilwalker returned to Lostwood with Eli and Harbinger; Adamant chose to go off on his own to learn more about himself in the aftermath of the previous series’ end. In Lostwood, the three mages were joined by Moon Rider and Winter Wolf to found a new Twilight Carnival, dealing with magical forces that had awakened in the aftermath of the ley lines difficulties of the previous comic. Twilight Carnival was designed to serve as both a sequel and a standalone title, and its primary foes were a town deliberately designed to be a dark mirror to Lostwood’s record of integration and diversity: Leafblight, and its twisted leader Schism.
Schism had been born Dragonsnap Jack, a minor fae with a gift for manipulating others that far exceeded his actual powers. Having visited Lostwood, Jack fell in love – not with the community or its spirit, but with the drama that was always boiling just under the surface. Soon enough, though, he found that the drama wasn’t nearly dramatic enough. He wanted more. He wanted a powerkeg constantly on the verge of explosion, whose residents were at each others’ throats. But when he tried, he was quickly found out, and Winter Wolf roughly expelled him from the town and forbade him to return.
Schism wasn’t put off. He found a ragged collection of humans and monsters that had been deemed too cruel or violent for Lostwood, and then he began recruiting from others on the fringes of society. Anyone with darkness in their hearts and passion in their souls was a good fit for Schism, and soon he had built his own secret town, one that could tear Lostwood down. His city operated like a cult, its residents worshipping his name and swearing that they would destroy everything that Lostwood had built. They launched schemes and plans and sometimes just straightforward attacks, manipulating each other and feuding to gain Schism’s favour and sit at his right hand, and he reveled in it. The attention, the suffering, the pain inflicted in his name, everything that his pawns did was worth the fun.
The most important fact, the one that almost none of his followers recognized, was that Schism didn’t want Lostwood to fall. Its dedication, community spirit, and power served as the perfect wall for his minions to crush themselves against, keeping Leafblight in a constant state of turmoil with an external enemy that Schism knew they had no hope of defeating. The overarching story of Twilight Carnival was about how to stop Schism from causing more harm, while he gleefully told his foes that by gathering all of the world’s worst monsters in one place he was actually doing them a favour. After all… now they knew where the next problem was going to come from, didn’t they?
Behind the Scenes
This guy is such an asshole.
Imagine him just lounging on a chaise, someone feeding him grapes as he idly issues orders. Just running a finger under the chin of some poor dupe. Guy is the worst. He’s going to stick around forever. I don’t actually remember when I decided that I wanted a supervillain whose primarily goal in life was to get his own people killed fighting the heroes, but as soon as I did I knew I couldn’t live without him.
I did try to build a HeroForge model of him lounging, but right now the only chair options are really simple, and you can’t control legs, so it didn’t look good.
I’ve done a lot of minor homebrew here. I’m using my revised lieutenant-based Squad to let Schism have a few more people at his disposal, and I’ve modified Group Fighter to provide Boosts instead of Attacks to amp up the problems. Finally, Sow Chaos is a new Adaptive power that I think fits, and is fun to play with. There are two results here: first, Schism is Boosting a lot, so his allies are going to have some devastating rolls. At the same time, the temptations in Sow Chaos plus the redirects in Don’t Touch The Face make him a bit of a threat to his allies too, and when they go down a lot of his tricks go down with them. Isolated, he’s an easy fight.
Narratively, I have to agree. He’s also got a villain ability combo I’m leery of from past experience - see below.
I’ve run into significant balance issues with that one as written in the past, since a multi-target Attack (like Sow Chaos) can let you milk it for a ton of strong bonuses in a single turn. Admittedly, once you’ve damaged every target the ability becomes dead weight - but that hardly matters if you’re sitting on H big fat bonuses at the start of your second turn, and can potentially milk more if need be by damaging allies (which I assume is where the “temptations in Sow Chaos” come in). The problem (rather obviously) is if you have a multi-target Attack to hit every hero (and potentially expendable ally) at once for a huge bonus surge, you’ll still have that same Attack to use all those bonuses on your next turn, hitting every hero for a pile of damage and leading to a way-too-easy TPKO.
In my games I switched the original ability to “Once per turn, on your turn…” to limit that combination, but that’s just me. This guy has no single-target Attack abilities to use so he’d have to restrain himself to get the most out of the free bonus abilities, and it looks like he’s intended to gorge himself early instead and use the massed bonuses over time, which won’t work with my fix.
An alternative (to prevent the “bomb-gorge-bomb-with-bonuses” trick) would be to make all the bonuses from Friend and Foe exclusive (but not persistent). That would still let him gorge as much as he likes, but caps his ability to spend that stack of bonuses to one/roll.
The designers have a tendency to underuse exclusive anyway, almost always pairing it with persistent when there’s clearly design space to do otherwise. Persistent without exclusive would be a Problem. Exclusive without persistent, not so much. It’s a tool I’d like to see more of in a hypothetical revised/new edition.
I really like the idea of making the bonuses exclusive but not persistent; I think you’re right that it prevents Schism from dumping all the bonuses into a single bomb, while still encouraging him to beat up a bunch of allies at once. I’m going to make that adjustment.
Keep in mind I haven’t tested that one, but I cant see a real flaw in it beyond possibly conflicting with regular P+E mods. If I ever get to running again I’ll probably try it myself - I was never super happy with the “once per turn…” fix, which felt inelegant.
Keeping the hombrew edits going down to the wire: I’ve added another shift to Friend and Foe to encourage Schism to hit his allies by making the boost he gets only a Min die when he hits enemies. That’s mainly to prevent the tactical desire to hit five enemies and then spend five turns with big juicy bonuses, only hitting your allies at the end of a scene. This way, Schism is really encouraged to include one ally in each area attack so that he has a nice bonus for the next round.
That should definitely push toward the tactics you want. Bombing all of his allies at once is probably asking for a mutiny anyway. Doing one at a time makes the “oops, sorry” excuse a bit more plausible. 
Probably won’t do Sow Chaos all that often anyway. He’s got two other action abilities to exploit, and after he hits all the heroes at least once Friend or Foe stops working on them. Take a while to use all those small exclusive bonuses anyway, although his reaction ought to let you throw one into it each time in the hopes of “trading up” to a bigger (or at least non-exclusive) bonus with it.
Also, I now have an itch to do a pork-themed villain who has Sow Chaos as well, only it’s “sow” as in mama pigs, not as in spreading seeds. Or an embroidery villain with Sew Chaos. Or a very casual villain with So, Chaos?
This sort of wordplay is where stupid villain ideas come from.
True that. Just the other day, for instance, I thought up the idea of Mod-Man, a villain who both dresses in the mod fashion style of the 1960s and who hands out lots of bonuses and penalties. Likely inspired in part by the Mod Gorilla Boss.
like my anthropomorphic rabbit soldier Gun Bunny some of my abilities are-
In My Cross Hares
Order: Buck up!
Hare Trigger
Order: Hop to it!
Pellet Gun
Still Going
Watership take down
Genetic - Marksman should not be too hard to figure out what is what (last two are red)
Don’t forget classic Teen Titans foe the Mad Mod - I think I liked his Vertigo incarnation best.
Singularity (Diamond Age)
Real Name: Roxy Jotu-Hall, First Appearance: Venture into the Unknown (Vol. 2) #36, June 2022
Approach: Leech, Archetype: Calamity
Upgrade: Power Upgrade, Mastery: Unfathomable
Status Dice: Scene Tracker green: d6. Scene Tracker yellow: d8. Scene Tracker red: d10. Health: 35+5H [Upgraded 55+5H]
Qualities: Otherworldly Lore d8, Persuasion d8, Conviction d8, Thief of Realities d8
Powers: Cosmic d10, Awareness d8, Size-Changing d6
Abilities:
Common Scene Elements:
Over the course of Venture into the Unknown, Venturer learned more about his mysterious foe. They were an enemy that had the ability to draw individuals out of failing pocket universes, imbuing them with enough dimensional energy to stay alive for as long as they served their new leader. It also became clear that the universes that Venturer was saving were intended as some kind of fuel, their collapse powering the enemy further. But it wasn’t until Venture into the Unknown #35 that everything came together, when Venturer’s random hops through pocket dimensions following his mysterious antagonist finally brought him to a surprising place – one of the outskirt layers of the Jotari Alliance, Kalameth. Kalameth was under siege from dimensional enemies, and several other heroes had been drawn in to help. When Venturer arrived in person, he was able to use his power-copying abilities to track down the enemy and lead the other heroes to it, finally unveiling the true threat to so many worlds: Singularity.
After her many defeats on Earth, Roxy Hall had fled into the depths of dimensional space. There, fading and on the verge of dissolution, she was found by a small fleet of Jotari exiles; aristocrats who still refused the democratic dictates of the Jotari Alliance. Taking on her name as their new house, the rebels became the house of Jotu-Hall, determined to empower Singularity and wipe every dimension clean of lesser beings, leaving only powered beings (mainly powered Jotari and humans) in existence.
Roxy had learned in her travels that the other grand dimensional powers each had their own way of devouring realities, and had recognized that she needed a similar method if she was to avoid destruction. By breaking down the underpinnings of a reality and obliterating the narratives and logic that allowed a universe to exist, she was able to absorb its dimensional focus and add it to herself. The pocket universes the Sovereign had created ran on a particularly disparate force, making them easy prey, and giving her access to a wide range of servants drawn from alternate versions of the heroes and villains of Earth, who she called her Agents of Revelation. While Venturer had badly slowed her plans, he had not been completely successful, and she was ready to attack a meatier target. Kalameth, as the first Jotari layer to rise up against the Authority, was the one her servants desired for her to destroy, and Singularity was feeling quite positive towards them for their loyalty in saving her.
A union of heroes of Earth and Jotarus were able to force Singularity back, but everyone was now aware that there was a new threat to existence, the first Dread Power to form in over two thousand years. A new team of heroes was assembled to patrol against Singularity and the House of Jotu-Hall, made up of heroes of Earth and Jotarus. They included Captain Bolt, Jackie Frost, Venturer, and two Jotari heroes that had been introduced in a limited series earlier in the year, supported by Protean at her lab on Earth. They would fight supervillains across the dimensions as the new Vanguards, replacing Venture into the Unknown.
As for Singularity, she was far from destroyed. Like other Dread Powers, she could not enter a universe until the dimensional underpinnings holding it stable were damaged, but her own dimensional realm was a patchwork of her favourite pieces and peoples of realms she had destroyed, and it gave her access to armies and agents that she could deploy at will. After her defeat at Kalameth she decided to play it safe, making small plays with minimal risk of damage if she failed. The Vanguards would fall, in time. She only had to wait.
Behind the Scenes
I knew I wanted the 2021 and 2022 Diamond Age villains to have more callbacks to older comics; the initial launch of the new age is done, and it’s time to reassure older readers that the new line still values them. I also knew that I wanted Venturer’s ultimate foe to be a Dread Power of some sort. Initially, I thought of finally writing up Balor, who still doesn’t have a character sheet, but given Venturer’s connection to Protean, calling back her greatest foe and merging her with Jotari stuff felt a bit stronger.
Singularity is really nasty if you let her spin up, so you’d better boot her back to her universe before that can happen! Leech and Calamity combine into a character that really gets progressively more dangerous as the scene moves on, but who is pretty manageable early on. She doesn’t have significant Health (outside of ultimate form, of course) and her early defenses aren’t too bad. But as the tracker moves on and she starts rolling better and better, plus exploding larger and larger areas, she can be a really potent threat.
Definitely going to want to stick to the strongest attacks possible to prevent the rider on her reaction from triggering. Either that or use reaction-proof abilities, or even just Hinder her before another hero Attacks so a full block is less likely to happen. Even with just a d8 free Boost and Hinder plus damage negation is savage efficiency.
The wording on that seems a little fuzzy. The intent is like this, right?
Attack one target with Cosmic, using your Max die; then, if the scene tracker is Yellow, Attack any targets close to that target using your Mid die. If the scene tracker is Red, instead Attack one target with your Max+Min dice, and every other target in the scene with your Mid die.
Delightfully chaotic, albeit really rough on her allies late in the scene.
If you wanted to really emphasize the amount of damage she’s doing on reality (and causality) you could play around with non-standard scene trackers or environmental twists that can move the scene tracker around erratically. A tracker that goes G-Y-R-Y-Y-G-Y-R or something even more peculiar would be be one possibility, or a Major twist that moves the tracker back one step for next round and then forward two in the following round. Things that make time feel like it’s stuttering or looping. Make sure the players know about the possibility if it’s a twist, and let them see the weird tracker so they can plan around it if going that route.
