5 thoughts on “First game with a new group tonight.”

  1. I always want to get the answers to two questions: why do you do this together, and why do you do this instead of letting professionals or adults do it? Both always have answers, but they’re important to get!

    I like underwater bases, mythical figures, and villains crafted to poke at a hero’s weaknesses.

    Also maybe check out maskbook.herokuapp.com – Home | Maskbook for ideas?

  3. From the limited number of games I’ve run, my favorite villain was ‘The Collector’, a time-traveler who has been driven somewhat mad by her repeated attempts to stave off some apocalyptic event in the future. She uses various robotic minions to find and take people from specific points in the timeline in a desperate effort to prevent the calamity in question.

    Depending on the needs of the story, she could have fought one, all, or none of the heroes before in her past, even when they’ve never seen her before.

  4. The usual default I see at gamedays and on podcasts is some variant of “The villains are raiding the bank/museum/high tech lab; stop them”. As I often run one shots with the same players, I try to mix it up a bit, either by going with different premises or adding complications to the basic premise:

    Complications:

    1) A villain tries to bribe, extort, or trick the players into the “evil deed”. (Make sure to plan for the players NOT going along)

    2) Players stop a thief from performing the deed, only to find out THEY have been blackmailed or tricked, and they need to join forces against the real villain.

    3) The players stop the thief, but they and/or the thief end up unleashing a worse threat.

    4) The players stop the theif, established heroes and/or the news gives high fives, but they discover the easily-stopped thief was a ruse or distraction, and they have to go after the SNEAKIER thief that got away.

    Other plots I have done as session ones or one-shots:

    1) The players are at a party or event when the villain strikes at the building or someone in it, and have to stop them and protect innocents (think Die Hard; I used Nano from the deck of villainy at a Christmas party where he took over the Christmas robots at his father’s company. Die Hard meets the Dr. Who Chirstmas special).

    2) The players are at some supers-related school, and someone targets the school to get at the super-kids there (kidnap for evil scientist villains, eliminate for Sentinel-clones). The PCs are the only ones with any actual combat chops.

    Villains – the Deck of Villainy is useful here (I like Nano for session ones), but some other villains I have spun up recently:-

    1) “Fulcrum” – is the new identity of the legacy villain “Taskmaster”, who is an angry misanthropic nerd kicked out of Rook and other places. He has a bulbous power suit that lets him take control of the powers of other supers. As Taskmaster, he was defeated by the silver age team The Paragons. After he was paroled, he rebuilt his tech and disguises himself as “Fulcrum” claiming he is, it fact, the source of all super powers. He has a new peice of tech, an invisible floating “pod” that he can put defeated supers in and use their powers directly. Thus he may be fighting with the power of multiple superheroes until the heroes figure out what’s up. (This was a villain in my ongoing campaign)

    2) “The Corvine” – a trio (more or less as needed) of mysterious sorcerous villains who have sorcery/reality bending powers, but whose direct attacks may be gravity, disorientation, or flocks of birds. When they retreat or travel, they explode into a flock of birds. They appear to wear long dark clothing like cloaks or raincoats, and have bird-like facial features. (This is a generic villain I brewed up quickly for a one-shot. When a player made their Doom a reality-altering villain that inserts itself into our world by taking animal form, I made the Corvine an expression of that.)

    EDIT: Formatting. Spelling. Grammer. The usual.

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