Flashbang, D-List Teleporter Villain

This villain started as an experiment to see what the "worst" possible combination of approach and archetype would look like.  His base health is as low as it's possible to get, but he's surprisingly sort of hard to take down quickly thanks to his abilities, particularly with his upgrade.  Not quite a joke, but definitely not a high-powered villain no matter what he thinks of himself.

Flashbang

Thomas Thompson gained his powers after being struck by a lightning bolt while stocking outdoor shelves at a big box garden center, most likely due to some fluke reaction with the lawn care chemicals caught in the strike with him.  Realizing that he was now a superhuman being, he immediately quit his job and set out to take everything he always wanted out of life.  That mostly means money and lots of it, either stolen directly or by taking pay for acting as a mercenary supervillain.

He remains confident that his awesome powers make him nearly unbeatable despite considerable evidence to the contrary.  The only reason he isn't rotting in jail after multiple defeats is that his powers make him very good at escaping confinement.  Some quirk makes him unusually resistant to most power-dampening methods regardless of whether they employ a technological, psionic, or magical approach.  It rarely takes him more than a few days to recover from a defeat sufficiently to make his departure from even the most secure super-prison.

Flashbang might show up alone or with a few low-quality minions and a suitable environment as a foe for a hero or two, or he might have villainous allies who are letting him tag along.  He's exactly the kind of chump that Red Hott and Fever Dream might recruit as an expendable dupe, for ex.  

Description: Young man wearing a hooded black full-body suit covered in an elaborate mesh of copper wire and electronic modules, none of which actually do anything to boost or focus his powers but do add a good thirty pounds to his weight and make swimming inadvisable.  Only his pale, long-nosed face is exposed, which also shows off his unfortunate attempt at growing a mustache.  His speech is bombastic and he tends to shout a lot owing to partial hearing loss.  When he uses his powers he "leaks" crawling arcs of electricity and his teleports are accompanied by a bright strobing light and loud BOOM, making him very bad at stealth.  Even his Remote Viewing is accompanied by a distinct smell of ozone wherever he's scrying.     

Gender: Male           Age: Mid-Twenties             Height: 5'7"                 Eyes: Electric Blue 

Hair: Jet Black                             Skin: Pallid                    Build: Wiry

Approach:  Underpowered                                Archetype:  Fragile

Health:  5 + (5 x H)

Powers: Teleportation d8, Agility d6, Electricity d6, Remote Viewing d6                                      

Qualities: Ranged Combat d10, Criminal Underworld Info d8, Full Of Himself d8, Close Combat d6

Status: Green Zone Health - d10 / Yellow Zone Health - d8 / Red Zone Health - d6

Abilities:

Flashbang Attack (A) Attack multiple targets using Ranged Combat.  Defend against all Attacks against you with your Min die until the start of your next turn.

Instinctive Teleport (I) Whenever your personal zone changes you may immediately move elsewhere in the scene.

Lightning Strike (A) Attack using using Electricity.  If you roll doubles, add that value to your Attack.  If you roll triples, add all three dice to your Attack.

Unbeatable! (I) Whenever you would be reduced to zero or fewer Health, prevent that damage and reduce all of your power dice by one size.  If this would reduce any die below d4 you are knocked out.

Vanish (R) When Attacked, Defend yourself by rolling your single status die.  If the damage is reduced to zero, you may move anywhere else in the scene.

Upgrades & Masteries (optional):

Power Boost (I) +20 Health.  Increase all Power dice sizes by one (max d12).  

Master Mercenary (I) If you have a contract for a specific task, automatically succeed at an Overcome when your payment is at stake.

Tactics

Flashbang is entirely convinced that he's a fearsome and powerful supervillain and has few qualms about tackling entire groups of heroes, which usually works out poorly for him.  His go-to offensive move is to make a Flashbang Attack on every enemy in the scene, blinking around in a storm of noise, light, and electrical discharges.  When Attacked he'll use Vanish and attempt to teleport to a safer location, while Instinctive Teleport lets him do the same when he takes serious damage (which is virtually any damage, given his pathetic Health).  He can shrug off the first hit that would knock him out with Unbeatable!  After that he'll often strike back with Lightning Strike in hopes of rolling hot and getting a big hit.  The smaller his dice get the more likely rolling doubles or triples gets, and he'll try to build die pools with similar sizes to maximize the effect.

His upgrade significantly improves his health and lets him shrug off two knockout blows instead of one, as well as making him hit a little harder.  His mastery makes him much better at accomplishing a job he's been paid for, something he frequently struggles with otherwise.

Flashbang's teleportation power is fairly short-ranged (120 feet is about his limit) but remarkably quick, letting him make multiple jumps per second without great effort.  Each jump is accompanied by a loud BOOM, flashes of light, and significant electrical discharge, which is the foundation for most of his abilities.  He can also generate electricity without 'porting, manipulate existing currents and generally mess with unshielded electronics, but he's not very good at it and can easily suffer painful feedback and overloads.

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Urban History And Your Roleplaying Campaign

A lot of supers campaigns are set in urban environments at least loosely based on our real world, and one oft-overlooked way to make your setting come alive is to do a bit of research in your campaign city's actual history.  This is especially true if your game is set in a time period other than the modern day, or if you run a story arc involving time travel or alternate timelines.  Any city will be a very different place depending on whether it's the Golden, Silver, Bronze or Iron Age, and none of them look identical to the 2020s.

As an example of what I'm talking about, my current campaign is largely set in Albany, New York, which is more or less the nearest "big" city for most of my players.  Albany is the capitol of New York state (a fact that eludes many people due to the overwhelming prominence of New York City) and is quite small, with a population barely above 100,000 people, and forms a third of the "Tri-City" area - the other two cities being Schenectady and Troy with a number of smaller polities surrounding and separating them.  

A grand metropolitan area it ain't, but its status as state capitol means it has a disproportionate number of government offices and businesses serving them.  The city's population swells by a significant amount (I've seen claims it doubles) during the daytime when the state workers are in town, shrinking again when they aren't.  That quirk alone can easily effect games.  A super-fight taking place at night will endanger far fewer people than during the day, the morning and afternoon rush hours see much heavier traffic (although still nothing to compare to a really big city like NYC or LA), and any state holiday makes the whole city feel kind of empty.  There's also loads of sensitive records for criminals to steal or destroy and politicians to kidnap.

But that's the modern day, and this is about history.  All cities change over time, both in terms of demographics and physical structure.  There are obvious things (eg NYC doesn't have the Twin Towers past 9/11/2001) and less obvious ones (those same towers weren't finished until 1973, and construction started five years before that) and nothing is really permanent in a living city.  Almost every city in the US experienced tremendous demographic changes following WW2, generally growing in population through migration and births, and with different ethnic groups shifting between neighborhoods, mostly due to economic changes and (often) discriminatory government policies.   All of these elements can be mined for story ideas, or just to add some verisimilitude to your game. 

Going back to my example, Albany's most prominent (some would say only, with good justification) landmark is the Empire State Plaza.  The plaza is a sprawling showpiece of white marble with artificial ponds, abstract sculptures and the bizarrely shaped theatre known as the Egg.  The place is capped by the blocky state museum (also in white marble) and the much older state capitol building, a badly decaying architectural confection dating back to the 1880s.  All of these are literally towered over by a quintet of intimidatingly huge state office buildings that look like something you'd expect out of Nazi or Soviet state-aggrandizing construction styles.  There's also an enormous underground complex beneath the Plaza, occupying more volume than the Empire State Building and including a convention center, a food court, parking garages, and all manner of storage.  

The whole place looks absurdly out of place compared to the rest of the city, where few building outside of the small downtown area exceed four stories in height and the ones that do are tower housing blocks.  It's a remarkable display of how much power governor Rockefeller, mayor Corning and their political machine held back then, and is very much a memorial to their vanity and corruption.

The Plaza was built by seizing and destroying an entire low-income residential neighborhood in 1965, summarily evicting the residents who scattered to other neighborhoods or left the city entirely.  Construction was ongoing until 1978, causing over a decade of traffic snarls, noise pollution and general unpleasantness.  Games set prior to the Plaza would find it replaced with a residential district much like the rest of the city, with a population featuring a slightly higher percentage of African-American and Italian-American residents than most neighborhoods.  Approaching the mid-Sixties there would have been some protests against the upcoming demolition and an increasing number of empty houses and closed small businesses.  

There are obviously a lot of things you do with the Plaza and its history in a supers game.  It makes a good stage for a brawl between supers and an obvious target for villains.  Supers active in the Sixties might oppose it being built at all, or at least try to make forced displacement easier on the citizenry.  The city will never lack for a construction zone to fight in between 1965 and 1973, and who knows who or what may be buried in the foundations of the place?

And that's just one feature from one city.  Odds are that whatever urban area you're using for a game has something equally interesting hiding in its past.  If you're using a wholly fictional city (as the SCRPG's default setting does) you can still benefit from real-world history by flat out stealing some elements from actual cities and transplanting them to Rook City or Gotham or wherever.  You can also take cues from real history to flesh out a purely fictional city's past - there are some constants like the demographic shifts of the Baby Boom era that would apply almost anywhere, and the history of the last century in the US has seen a steady increase in the relative importance and population of urban versus rural areas.

Hopefully this encourages some folks to do a little historical research to mine ideas for their own games.  If you find anything particularly interesting I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Marshal Starblaze, Interplanetary Peacekeeper

This character was inspired by some online discussion about the (hypothetical) lack of healing in the game.  While it's certainly hard to stay completely ahead of the amount of damage a team of heroes will take in a fight, this guy can pile a remarkable amount of healing on both himself and one other hero at a time from Yellow status onward.  Max die Recovery on an ally and Mid die self-healing thanks to inverting self-damage is pretty great, and comes with a Min die attack as well - and that's before any bonuses.  There's even more inversion self-healing down in the Red, two strong defensive reactions to choose from to reduce the amount of healing needed by allies, and a really strong Red Overcome ability to solve other problems when things get desperate.  You might be able to eke out more raw healing with one of the "Min die Recovery for everyone in Y/R status" abilities in a large group with some bonuses, but focusing a Max heal on the most injured hero is frequently going to be better and you get a larger self heal as well.

He's also weirdly offensive for a "healer" with strong self-damaging Green abilities that become self-heals in Yellow.  Biggest drawback is that all his offense is Radiant, which can be a problem against some foes.  If he wants to inflict other types of damage he's stuck with basic Attacks, or coming up with some inventive Overcome to use the environment or other scene elements to inflict harm.  Also not very versatile if you need to Boost someone else and his Hinder game is non-existent beyond basics.  Pretty decent at Overcomes even before Red (Mastery is a broad Principle, and he's conceptually a space hero so Space should come up pretty often), and amazing when he does get there - or takes a twist to use the ability early.

Name: Marshal Starblaze

Origin: Thomas Dixon was working for Doctors Without Borders in Cambodia when he was abducted by alien slavers.  Unshaken, he proceeded to organize a resistance on board the slave ship, not only  among his fellow Terrans but among many of the other nonhuman species as well.  By the time the ship left the Sol system there was an active sabotage scheme in place, and escape plans were being made.  The alien overseers caught on at the last moment, and while they foiled the attempt to take over the ship's engineering section they lost control of communications long enough for a distress signal to be broadcast.  The ringleaders including Dixon were sentenced to be executed by spacing as punishment, but just as he was thrown into the void the Marshals of the Galactic Patrol arrived in response to the SOS, seizing the ship, freeing the slaves, and taking the slavers off to pay for their crimes.

While most of the former slaves were returned to their homeworlds, Thomas and several of the other xenos who'd led the revolt were offered a chance to join the Patrol itself and become local Marshals for their home systems of space.  Dixon took the opportunity without a second thought and has gone on to help protect the Earth and its neighboring worlds as Marshal Starblaze, Galactic Patrolman. 

Description: Fit-looking man in his early thirties dressed in a tight silver-white full-body suit that shade to deep blue on the hands, feet, and around the neck.  A seven-pointed golden star is affixed over his heart, and a golden aura surrounds him when his powers are active. 

Gender: Male             Age: Early Thirties          Height: 5'11"         Eyes: Black, Filled With Stars

Hair: Black Buzzcut                Skin: Sable Brown                Build: Lean

Background: Medical               Power Source: Relic           Archetype: Elemental Manipulator

Personality: Stalwart                  Health (G/Y/R):  30/22/11

Powers: Radiant d10, Awareness d8, Flight d8, Intuition d6

Qualities: Acrobatics d10, Alertness d10, Conviction d10, Stellar Marshal d8, Medicine d8, Technology d6

Status: Always d8

Abilities:

Green

Concentrated Starbolt (A) Attack using Radiant.  Use your Max die.  Take damage equal to your Min die.

Dual Starbolts (A) Attack up to two targets using Radiant.  Take damage equal to your Mid die.

Principle of Space (A) Overcome while in space or under conditions similar to space.  Use your Max die.  You and your allies each gain a Hero Point.  Minor twist: Who can hear you scream?  Major twist: What caused you to drift off into the unknown?  RP: You can survive in the vacuum of space without additional equipment.

Principle of Mastery (A) Overcome in a situation that uses your powers in a new way.  Use your Max die.  You and your allies gain each gain a Hero Point.  Minor twist: How did your powers fail you in the moment?  Major twist: What side effects are you suffering from your powers?  RP: You understand the metaphysics of your powers.

Recite the Oath (A) Boost yourself using Awareness.  This bonus is persistent and exclusive.

Yellow

Starlight Blaze (A) Attack using Radiant.  Use your Min die.  Take damage equal to your Mid die, and one nearby ally Recovers using your Max die.

Projected Shield (R) When another hero in the Yellow or Red zone would take damage, you may Defend them by rolling your single Awareness die.

Stellar Attunement (A) If you would take damage from Radiant, reduce the damage to zero and Recover that amount of health instead.

Red

Deflection (R) When an Attack would deal damage to a nearby hero in the Red zone, you may take d6 irreducible damage to redirect that Attack to a target of your choice other than the source of that Attack.

Masterful Solution (A) Overcome using Alertness.  Use your Max + Min dice.  Hinder all nearby opponents using your Mid die.

Prismatic Flare (A) Use Radiant to Attack up to three targets, one of which must be you.  Assign your Max, Mid, and Min dice as you choose among those targets.

Out

Lingering Light (A) Defend an ally by rolling your single Radiant die.

Tactics

Marshal Starblaze almost always opens a scene with Recite the Oath to establish a lasting bonus for himself, and may even repeat it while the scene is still in Green.  After that he relies on Dual Starbolts against weaker targets or Concentrated Starbolt against strong foes.  

Once in the Yellow zone he gains Projected Shield to Defend allies from harm and Stellar Attunement turns all Radiant damage inflicted on him (including his own) into healing.  Starlight Blaze is his go-to ability when damage output is less important than healing, and he'll allocate bonuses to it to maximize its effectiveness.  It's really quite an amazing ability, with the highest single target healing of any Yellow power and no downside at all thanks to him inverting his own self-damaging effects into healing.  

His Red zone abilities include a strong but painful defensive reaction in Deflection, which can redirect an Attack away from vulnerable heroes (including himself) at the cost of some irreducible self-damage.  Prismatic Flare is extremely versatile and combines strong damage output with even more self-healing, and can easily let him climb back into the Yellow zone if desired.  Finally, Masterful Solution is a potent Overcome option that also impairs enemies, giving him a good way to deal with challenges his Principles can't be applied to.

Outside of combat, he's an agile flyer with good speed and lifting power.  His Awareness power revolves around the ability sense both life and anti-life energies, which he's learned to augment with his medical training and general Alertness.  His Intuition stems from the subtle guidance of his Marshal's Star, while his Technology reflects the tinkering skills he learned in his time with Doctors Without Borders.  Stellar Marshal training includes self-defense skills, briefings on star systems and dimensional anomalies within his patrol zone, and how to deal with both innocent civilians and vicious criminals, whether human or alien.

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