A pair of villains that are almost always found working together, either as part of a larger team or as a duo with some expendable lackeys in tow to act as a distraction and carry loot.
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Redd Hott
Megan Doyle's origin, personality and motivations have fluctuated a lot over the decades (see the end of this post) but her power set has been pretty consistent. She's got excellent reaction speed and hand-eye coordination, can hold her own in any kind of fight, and can generate flames at will for both offense and defense. Her fine control over her flames is good and she can even propel herself through the air, flying with great agility but rather modest speed. Unlike some fire users she can't smother flames, only produce and direct them in her immediate presence. She's learned to be careful about setting things on fire carelessly.
Description: Absurdly voluptuous young woman with red-orange hair and glowing eyes, costumed in a snug fire-engine red bodysuit with a short charcoal black half-cape. In a fight she's generally wreathed in an aura of flames, and she leaves a trail of fire in her wake when flying or sprinting. She has a marked New Orleans accent and enjoys embarrassing straight-laced heroes with flirtatious behavior before setting them on fire.
Gender: Female Age: Mid-Twenties? Height: 5'8" Eyes: Fiery Orange
Hair: Red-orange Skin: Deeply Tanned Build: Shapely
Approach: Skilled Archetype: Bruiser
Health: 35 + (5 x H)
Powers: Fire d10, Agility d8, Flight d6
Qualities: Acrobatics d10, Ranged Combat d10, Alertness d8, Close Combat d8, Hot-Tempered Villainess d8, Persuasion d8
Status: Green Zone Health - d6 / Yellow Zone Health - d8 / Red Zone Health - d10
Abilities:
Blazing Evasion (R) When Attacked, Defend yourself by rolling your single Acrobatics die, and deal that much damage to another target.
Scorcher (A) Attack one target using Fire. Use your Max die. Either Hinder the target using your Mid die, or Attack another nearby target using your Mid die.
Stoked Flames (A) Attack using Fire. While you are in the Green zone, use your Max die. In the Yellow zone, use your Max + Min dice. In the Red zone, use your Max + Min dice against one target and use your Mid die against another target.
Warming Up (A) Take any basic action using your Max die. Recover Health equal to your Mid die.
Upgrades & Masteries (optional):
Group Fighter (I) +20 Health. When you take an action that lets you make an Attack, also make an Attack using your Mid die.
Master of Total Chaos (I) Automatically succeed at an Overcome when you throw out all the rules during a situation that is spiraling out of control.
Tactics
Redd is an aggressive fighter with a (literally) hot temper, and usually concentrates on pouring on the damage, hammering targets until they drop before shifting to the next. She'll usually open with Scorcher until she reaches her Yellow zone Health, then switch to Stoked Flames to maximize her damage. Blazing Evasion helps keep her in the fight longer and adds in more damage, although it does delay her status die climbing. Warming Up gives her a bit of healing in a pinch, as well as making her a versatile combatant who can use her Max die for anything. It mostly gets used for Overcomes or Defend actions (often for Fever Dream) but she might use it to Hinder just before her partner in crime uses Boiling Over for a big harm and heal combo. Redd is best at range, but none too shabby in a face-to-face brawl either.
Her upgrade makes her better at threatening multiple foes at once, and her mastery reflects her unpredictable nature the same way Warming Up does.
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Fever Dream
Desiree Jones' origin, personality, and motivations have been as variable as her partner's over the years (again, see the last part of this post) but her powers have always involved making people feel disoriented and weak as though they were suffering a high fever. The effect is entirely mental so physical resistance to disease is no defense, and even most AIs and supernatural creatures are susceptible to her "fevered" penalties. Victims often suffer delusions as well as alternating chills and fevers. With some effort she can also fine tune her mental powers to apply specific compulsions or force people seem phantom images, or to not see things she wishes to conceal. Her default power use is always a sickening psychic malaise, though.
She's also been consistently portrayed as knowing her way around the "spooky" side of the supers community. While none of her powers are actually magical she knows enough to identify, analyze, and respond appropriately to supernatural threats when she encounters them.
Description: Ridiculously curvaceous young woman with a definite Goth look, dressed in a tight-fighting black bodysuit accented with deep purple frills and ribbons. She often accessorizes with silver jewelry with arcane sigils and symbology. Has a sultry voice with a gentle New Orleans accent, and is almost hypnotically attractive when she wants to be - which is usually the case unless actively avoiding attention, in which case she somehow seems to fade into the background.
Gender: Female Age: Mid-Twenties? Height: 5'6" Eyes: Smoky Gray
Hair: Raven Black Skin: Pale Caucasian Build: Shapely
Approach: Skilled Archetype: Inhibitor
Health: 25 + (5 x H)
Powers: Suggestion d10, Intuition d8, Illusions d6
Qualities: Persuasion d10, Insight d10, Acrobatics d8, Creativity d8, Magical Lore d8, Scheming Villainess d8
Status: (# of heroes with penalties) 0 - d6 / 1-2 - d8 / 3+ - d10
Abilities:
Boiling Over (A) Each hero loses Health equal to the total penalties on them. Recover the same amount of Health. Remove those penalties.
Dizzying Heat (R) When Attacked by someone with a penalty you created, Defend yourself by rolling your single status die. The Attacker also suffers that much damage.
Fevered Thoughts (A) Hinder multiple targets using Persuasion. Use your Max die. If you roll doubles, also Attack each target using your Mid die.
Fire In the Blood (A) Hinder using Insight. Use your Max + Min dice. That penalty is persistent and exclusive.
Upgrades & Masteries (optional):
Calming Aura (I) +10 Health. The heroes act as being in the Green zone for status die, ability access, and all abilities. Heroes may remove this ability with three Overcome successes. If a hero takes a minor twist while attempting these Overcomes, you may use a reaction to Hinder them by rolling your single Suggestion die.
Master Behind the Curtain (I) As long as you are not directly involved in the fray and are using your influence indirectly, automatically succeed at an Overcome to manipulate a situation.
Tactics
Fever Dream's abilities revolve around inflicting psychic hinderances that manifest as a psychosomatic fever accompanied by hallucinations - a consuming mental flame as a counterpart to Redd Hott's purely physical ones. She prefers to spread lasting penalties with Fire In the Blood, but if pressed Fevered Thoughts gets more sweeping and immediate results. Dizzying Heat protects her against her victims while damaging them in the process. Once she has a good number of penalties in play she'll siphon them off with Boiling Over, dealing damage while healing herself in the process.
Her upgrade spreads a nasty aura of malaise that can seriously handicap heroes, and her mastery lets her use her potent mental powers and subtle social skills to get what she wants without open conflict.
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Infatuated Dupes d6 minions
Description: A miscellany of petty criminals, often garbed in themed outfits (Redd Hott favors a construction worker motif, while Fever Dream is fond of tuxedos, but it could be pretty much anything). All are moderately attractive in a generic sort of way but none too smart. They tend to be lightly armed with easily-concealable weapons, although some costumes may offer more obvious theme-appropriate weapons, eg lumberjacks with axes or baseball players with bats.
Got Your Back, Babe!: When taking a Defend action targeting a villain, add +2 to the result.
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You could just leave it at that, but these two were inspired by a rare desire to dip into the same kind of metatextual "these characters have a publication history" motif the Sentinel Comics setting uses. As such they can offer an opportunity to look at the changing ways female characters (particularly villains) have been portrayed over the decades. If you want to go that route, here's some suggestions for different eras of their fictional careers:
Golden Age - When Redd Hott and Fever Dream first appeared they had a definite "gangster moll" feel, although they quickly transitioned to obviously being the ones in charge with their mobster "boyfriends" cast as suckers they had wrapped around their fingers. Their motivations were entirely monetary, and the closest they came to characterization was some mean-spirited flirtation with opposing superheroes. Their powers were explicitly the result of experimenting with a mad science drug of some kind, with more than a hint that it was something meant to replace opium on the market. Despite their stories being fairly shallow, they were popular with both readers and artists alike (the vast majority of whom were male), quite probably because they were drawn about as sexy as you could get away with in the era.
In 1954 they got a brief mention in Seduction of the Innocent for glorifying crime, implied drug use, and what he insisted was lesbian coding. Then again, Wertham also insisted that Colonel Courage (one of their regular heroic foes in the 40s and 50s) was involved in "unnatural relations" with his sidekick Champion the Super Dog.
Silver Age - When superhero comics came back into vogue the duo's origins were scrubbed clean of any drug references, with their powers now granted by a super-science "chemical" tested on them by an unscrupulous researcher pretending to be a reputable doctor. Their organized crime motif was also pared back and they became much more generic super-crooks, sometimes teaming up with other villains for extra muscle. The stories were a bit less primitive but often very strange, with a lot of weird science showing up. While they got more defined in terms of personalities, it was mostly misogynistic stereotyping. Fever Dream was often shown as bitterly jealous of the looks and fame of female heroes, and Redd Hott started aggressively flirting with male heroes, especially the more "pure" ones. Their costumes actually got a little more tame, covering more skin and not getting as strategically ripped as they had in earlier stories.
Bronze Age - This era saw the two finally getting some more serious stories, as well as more origin retcons. The "superdrug" element of the Golden Age returned, but now they'd been forced to try the stuff by their mobster boyfriends, driving them to get revenge and go on a rampage to destroy the gang's drug labs and distribution network. They started showing some serious misandry coupled with a violent streak toward male criminals and heroes alike. There were also some seriously awkward stories trying to portray them (and several other female villains) as being "loose cannon" supporters of the Women's Liberation Movement. Their costumes got a little more risque again as the grip of the Comics Code Authority weakened.
Iron Age - The Nineties saw a series of "extreme" character re-imaginings, and Redd Hott and Fever Dream were pretty hard hit. They'd always been drawn as voluptuous but this decade saw them become much more objectified and their costumes were more revealing than ever. Their stories were almost universally shallow and writers couldn't seem to figure out what to do with them. Several ignored previous canon and had them acting as drug dealers and one arc had them stalking a superhero with an eye toward wrecking his marriage by pretending they were his lovers. There was a "big reveal" that the drug they'd gotten their powers from was an alien mind-control compound and they wound up working alongside a invasion force with other supers on both sides of the law.
Early 2000s - The worst excesses of the previous era were quietly forgotten and never spoken of again, and the two shifted back to traditional money-hungry villains. More sophisticated plots saw them doing more behind the scenes manipulations and fewer heists, using blackmail and fraud to extract money from shady businessmen, hypocritical religious figures and corrupt politicians. They never quite got to the point of being anti-hero types fighting the powers that be, but did help several female heroes bring down the targets they'd been victimizing - after they'd bled them dry, of course. Their misandry remained a key personality feature, partly explained by delving deeper into the Bronze Age version of their origin and making their "boyfriends" even more overtly abusive monsters. Their costumes and character designs were toned down to a more realistic look, with the Iron Age pure fan service look vanishing into history.
Recent Years - While not appearing as often as they had previously, the two did get a long story arc that lampshaded the fact that they'd been around for over seventy years and still looked like twenty-somethings. Their chronology was played with a bit, some fun was poked at the more bizarre Silver and Bronze Age stories, and the drug that empowered them was retconned into being something that also prevented their aging. It was also revealed to be highly addictive and going without the stuff for an extended period would result in their deaths. Most of the loot they'd stolen over the years had gone to paying to have a steady supply of the stuff synthesized.
This culminated in them being tied in to a broader storyline involving them helping various heroes fight against an organization selling a similar "empowerment" drug. Some critics complained that this was all just a pity play to make them more sympathetic characters, but others loved it, especially for the tongue-in-cheek references to older stories. Most people agreed that it was the strongest writing the two had ever had, even if that wasn't the highest bar to get over.
While none of that's very relevant to a roleplaying game, it might be interesting to use in a time travel story where the players wind up running into the two in multiple eras as they hop farther and farther back in history. A GM could have fun portraying the fluctuating behavior and motivation of these two, and the players can worry about breaking spacetime if they mess around with past versions of villains they know in the future. Or maybe the heroes' actions in the past are why these two have such a beef with them in 202X?
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