Superhero Team Concepts

In the middle of the night, I was thinking about superhero teams, and how to build them with archetypes that fit roles. I started to think about re-framing this; instead of thinking about 'roles' (mentalist, tank, damage dealer, speedster...), I would think about building a team from a storytelling perspective, in terms of origins. I realized that part of the reason the New Teen Titans work so well is because they from things from an origins perspective, and it provides so many more storytelling opportunities. I haven't thought about this too deeply yet, but here are some examples:

• Technology (Cyborg). Bring in stories about technology and the impact of new technologies. 
• Supernatural (Raven). Stories focused on magic, other realms of existence, and supernatural powers.
• Mythology (Donna Troy). Ancient gods and monsters.
• Cosmic (Starfire). Other planets and alien races.
• The Sea (Aqualad). Stories set in underwater environments.
• Villainous Past (Beast Boy... kind of). The former allies now enemies hold a grudge.
• Under the Shadow (Robin). You were a sidekick, and are trying to establish your own identity, but a lot of the villains that your mentor has still hold a grudge against you.  

Having such a wide range of origins gives the GM a variety of hooks that personalize adventures to the characters while giving a grand scope to the game. If all of the characters are teenagers who were transformed in the same lab, you immediately have fewer options for built-in ways to progress the story. Conversely, if each character has a unique origin and also has three pieces of 'unfinished business' in their origin, all the better. For example, my technology character could have a rival inventor whose tech ended up in my cybernetics, a bug in my software that could be exploited (and which I'm trying to have fixed), and a previous participant who 'failed' to adjust to the cybernetics, and who went mad. Instant adventure seeds that are personalized to the characters.

This comes up because I have really wanted to start a solo campaign, and while I feel like it should be focused on Doc, I'm just as intrigued by starting a "New Teen Titans" or "New X-Men" sort of game. I also kind of want to go a little more Doom Patrol with weirdness and a little less prototypical heroes like Doc or a Justice League. I could see New Stalwart Press witnessing the success of the X-Men and Teen Titans in the early 80s and deciding to start a comparable series... something to ponder. I also like the idea of the whole team being 'under the shadow', as this team would replace a team from the previous generation who had disappeared. Rooting the campaign in an unresolved mystery gives an instant hook ("Whatever happened to the Force of Five?") and matches the vibe of both New Teen Titans and New X-Men, since both replaced earlier teams with the same moniker.

Some Work of Noble Note May Yet Be Done

My oh MY but it's been a few months... I thought I'd give a personal update, and then hopefully get back into some gaming stuff sooner than later.

I last checked in some time around April... since then, we've learned that the chemotherapy treatments I was receiving (even after they adjusted to a more aggressive chemo treatment) seemed to be having little effect; the tumors on my spine, pelvis, and ribs have continued to grow, with new tumors appearing in the last few months. Treatments may have been slowing it down a little, but not much. My doctors at Roswell suggested I get a second opinion, and after Mary (who has been a super hero) called around, we ended up meeting with a specialist in Pittsburgh, who decided to move from chemo to a newer nuclear medicine called Lutothera. The problem was that it's a more expensive treatment, and our insurance company REALLY didn't want to pay for it. Fortunately, the doctors in Pittsburgh are tenacious, and at the end of June I got approval for the treatment. I received my first treatment on August 1, and tolerated it well enough. Initial scans showed that the nuclear medicine went right to the tumors, and seemed to be getting to work. The idea here is that the nuclear medicine should be able to destroy the tumors, so I am also on a regimen of meds that are supposed to re-grow the bone, because the tumors are going to leave weak points in my bones, leaving me susceptible to fractures. So, I am taking it relatively easy, walking at least 15 minutes a day, and feeling some genuine hope for the first time in months. There is a very real possibility that my prognosis has changed from months to years to live. We'll see. I will receive three more treatments of the Lutathera, once every 60 days. I should receive my final treatment on February 1st. and we'll do a scan shortly thereafter to see how effective this has been. I'm hoping for 'very'.

Unfortunately, at the same time Mary's mom had a recurrence of her own cancer, and it ended up taking her life at the end of June (on Grace's birthday, and the day before Mary's birthday...). So, while Mary has been battling to get me treatments, she has also had to bury her own mom. She's been through a LOT. 

Far less importantly, but not insignificantly, I've gone through the process of retiring due to illness, and have had to navigate that whole process about seven years earlier than I expected to... 24 years is a pretty good run, but I had wanted to get to thirty. I'm proud of my career and what I've accomplished, but it's also difficult to say goodbye to a huge part of my life when it hasn't been on my own terms. Our teacher's union hosted a wonderful retirment party for all of the retirees, but it felt like they spent a lot of the evening focused on me, which was a bit overwhelming. 

Yesterday, Mary sorted the last of the things that she had received from her mom, we finished re-organizing our closets, and I was notified that my retirement paperwork is completed, and 'the check is in the mail' for my retirement benefits. My principal and vice principal also stopped by and brought me a retirement gift that they had for me - it was genuinely nice to see them. It felt like the end of many things.

This morning, I woke up feeling like I'd turned a significant corner. As Mary and Grace begin the ritual of gearing up for the school year, I am sitting here sipping my coffee and thinking about the world to come. I contemplate the final verses of Tennyson's "Ulysses"...

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Falling Into Stalwart '85

When crafting the rules for Stalwart ’85, I somehow missed rules for falling damage (thanks to Rick H for bringing that to my attention). Hmf. Well, let’s correct that! 

A normal human has 8 hp. A fall of up to 10’ is minimal damage to most humans (you might twist an ankle, but you are likely to come away from a 10’ fall none the worse for wear). A fall of 20’ or 30’ is likely to result in a broken bone or two, and a quick Internet search reveals that a fall of 80’ or more is often deadly. 50’ can be life threatening. Okay, that helps set some context. At the other end of the spectrum, the Hulk can fall thousands of feet and suffer minimal damage; he’s soaking 10 points, and we’ll assume that making his Reflex check would net him zero overall damage, but maybe 10 points if he failed… so setting a ceiling of 20 points of damage is reasonable. 

If we say that you suffer 1 point for every 10’ fallen, with a maximum damage of 20 points (200’), and you’re allowed a Reflex check for half, that seems reasonable enough (a normal human is felled at 150’ or more even with a successful Reflex check – and probably dies). Supers are going to be felled but not die… because they’re supers. The Reflex check is DT 4, so a normal human suffers zero damage (.5 rounded down) on a successful Reflex check falling 10’, and only 1 point on a successful Reflex check falling 20’ or even 30’.

Building up that Rogues' Gallery

One of the strengths of the S85 world from a gaming perspective is that the villains outnumber the heroes, and the heroes aren't that strong or well organized. The 'problem' of stories set in Superman's Metropolis is that Superman is there - you don't really need anyone else when he's around. However, in Doc's Meridian, there are a handful of heroes, and they aren't very powerful. Doc himself is basically the Thing's power set with Reed Richards' intellect. He's powerful, yes, but not in the same league as Supes. That said, as I move forward, I do so wanting to add more villains to the game but not many heroes. One of the mistakes that I see supers games making is focusing on the heroes of the game world. In my experience, people want to play their own supers in the game world, and don't want to necessarily play the pre-generated superheroes. So, my focus should be on the villains. Players can focus on the heroes.

Parenthetically, this is one of the problems I’m running into with the Public Domain – the heroes outnumber the villains, and the villains are largely forgettable. I’m struggling to find really good villains to adapt to S85.

I spent a little time reviewing Doc’s rogues’ gallery, and it’s a really solid assortment of baddies. There weren’t a lot of gaps. I still have some iconic archetypes to fill in (there’s no ‘hunter’ villain yet, for instance; there’s no weather controller), but the biggest gap I noticed was in teams. I have a handful of both super and villain teams, but the comics are full of teams that are themed to work together, and S85 doesn’t have much of that. The good news is that the format of the Stalwart Phile is perfect for this exact need, so I’m going to devote a few Stalwart Philes to adding supervillain teams to the game. Here are a few examples of what I’m thinking:

• A Russian team that are ‘heroic’ but also 1980s Russians, so it’s complicated. This could be a team you hold your nose and work with, or that you do battle against. Or maybe both.
• An element-themed team.
• A chess-themed team.
• A snake-themed team that works for Vyperion.

Unlike most of the groups I’ve presented thus far, these are groups that always work together; they probably have matching costumes. They’ve got some team maneuvers that they’ve developed, and which can give them some other options in play. From a GM perspective, they are modular - you can design an adventure where the heroes go against a team of Russians, but you can easily sideline some of the members if needed to balance against your supers. 

Stalwart Phile #3 Now Posted

I've got the Stalwart Phile #3 now posted, and I am very pleased with this model for building the game going forward. Obviously, I based these on the old Marvel FASERIP Marvel Phile from Dragon Magazine, and it's a great format for me to work in. I can take a weekend and cobble one of these together, getting a substantive release out without feeling the burden of a 'complete' release. 

The companion adventures, of which I have done two (one is exclusive to KS backers) is working under similar conditions; these are long enough to represent an individual comic book issue, but short enough that I don't get bogged down in getting halfway through a draft and then giving up. I have a model in place that I can keep building on, and that was important to me to keep the game growing. If all I do is Stalwart Philes and short adventures, there's a solid foundation for the game to grow going forward.

Not Your Classic Time-Travel Adventure

I am looking at how Stalwart Phile #2/3 and Stalwart Adventures #2 can work together. I have the idea for a time-travel adventure that isn't a time-travel adventure at all. The idea is that there are two events that are linked by a few decades, and the adventure takes you through the linkage. Here's the idea of how these might fit together so far...

Act 1 - Decades ago, on one of their final missions, Freedom's Four defeat Doctor Voltus in his castle by trapping him in a closed cicruit system within his castle; they know it is a temporary fix.

Cut Scene 1 - In the present, the modern-day heroes (or Doc Stalwart if playing solo) meet with the retired older Liberty Lass and Bronze Beacon 2, who recount one of their final battles; we learn that Captain Reicher is up to something, and that something might be bringing back Doctor Voltus. Liberty Lass dons her gear for one last mission...

Act 2 - Travel to Doctor Voltus' old castle; a battle with Captain Reicher and minions. (Modern hero team with Liberty Lass).

Cut Scene 2 - Set up a device that can 'trap' Doctor Voltus; create mechanical keys in play that must trigger to permanently trap him so he can face trial for war crimes.

Act 3 - Final battle with Doctor Voltus with some triggered events built into the battle.

Cut Scene 3 - Funeral for Bronze Beacon 2? Something to finalize the events. Maybe have an event where the wrist bands he carried are donated to the museum his neice works for... set up the future Bronze Beacon? Historical comment about how this event was later ret-conned to include BB 3 even though that was never 

Hmm. I solved a lot of this as I was blogging. I know that I spoke about this at some point, but writing is really a thinking process as much as it can be a process of revelation; I talked to my students earlier this year about how I don't use writing to put down the things I already have in my head. Sometimes, I sit down with only the vaguest idea, but the PROCESS of writing it down and getting it out in front of my eyeballs allows me to see how the dots connect. That is exactly what happened here. What I ended up writing down is a lot more than was in my head, and much better organized, than when I started. Writing process for the win! 

Cataclysm Cover Final

Whew! I honestly have NO idea how Perez or Byrne was able to knock out covers with dozens of characters how they did. This was a really challenging piece for me, and I ended up having to make a few concessions with the layout I don't love, but squeezing all these characters in was harder than I expected it to be. Here it is... the cover for the Mighty Doc Stalwart Annual #2. The adventure is written, so I have to do final edits and should have that posted to KS backers later today... 

Cataclysm Cover

This morning I roughed in the cover layout for Doc Stalwart Annual #2: Cataclysm Across the Cosmos. I decided to go ahead and include all of the characters that KS backers had requested for their commissions - it is 19 characters in total, so I was able to fit them into my homage to Mike Zeck's cover to Secret Wars #1. If you're going to swipe a cover design, may as well go for one of the most iconic of all time. 

Stalwart Adventures #1

So... it's been an eventful few days. The bad news is that my white blood cell count crashed because of chemotherapy and I ended up in the hospital for a few days as they work to get me back up to speed. The good news is that I have my computer with me and a lot of time, so I have been able to get work done on Stalwart. I finished Stalwart Phile 2 this morning, and I finished Stalwart Adventures #1 this afternoon. They are posted on DriveThruRPG. They are both PWYW, so head over and grab them. 

Stalwart Phile #2

Stalwart Phile #2 is now available as a PWYW release on DrivethruRPG. If you are a KS backer or a member of the FB group, you already got a link to the pdf. This will pair nicely with issue 3, that will stat out the Great War-era group Freedom's Four, and which will build on the theme of fighting Nazis. Because, again, we punch Nazis in the face. Because maybe we need a reminder of that once in a while. 

Multiple Birds

Well I've had a productive morning! I finally got the inspiration for something that was going to go into the core rules, but I never solved it (and which was suggested by Tony L. originally - who also suggested the letters page)... I wanted to include a 'classic advertisement' somewhere in the book from the early 80s, but never really figured out how to make the page work. However, my Facebook feed in the last week or so has included a bunch of Hostess ads from the early 80s, and I realized that was the sweet spot, and the perfect ad to include. So, I went ahead and created that page... but, I also solved a few problems. I haven't actually drawn many pages of comics in a long time (I did a page for the Core Rules, but I drew that over a year ago now I think)... I didn't have a process in place to create a page. I didn't have any sort of routine. So, I went ahead and created a blank page in paint that was 2000 pixels wide and 3000 pixels tall. Working at 50% size, I did a rough layout/thumbnail. Then I moved to 100% and blocked in some 'pencils'. Then I put in the dialogue. Then working between 200% and 300%, I did the black and white for the whole page. Then I did colors for the whole page. 

And I am very happy with how it turned out. So, here it is... the black and white and color versions. And, I now have a process in place to create the pages for Cataclysm (or any other comic pages I do going forward). The proportions ended up being just right for the various tools I use in Paint. FYI, the whole process took a little over three hours.  

Thinking about tyranny...

I have no idea WHAT contemporary news could have me thinking about Nazis and fascist dictators... but I started to cobble together some villains for my intrepid Freedom's Four to face. I love how these are coming out. I have both original characters and some public domain characters, so I'm thinking that I'll basically have two Stalwart Philes dedicated to Nazis. I mean, it turns out that there are never enough Nazis to punch in the face. Here are two more. I particularly like how Iron Maiden turned out. For Captain Reicher, I just took the public domain Captain Nazi and re-skinned him. I was not comfortable drawing a swastica at all, and I figured that he's a member of the Great Reich, so he needed their symbol on his costume.

Errata for Stalwart '85

A hefty prizeless goes to Rick Hull for bringing these to my attention. Please feel free to send any typos/corrections my way. I don't plan to correct the books (since many of you have physical copies), but for the purpose of being as accurate as possible, here is the list of errata for Stalwart '85:

• Antigen: Evade should be 5 (Tag Evade +1)
• Clockwork Killer: HP should be 13 (12 +1 Tag)
• Emissary: HP should be 30 (Tag HP+2) 
• Lord Wrack: Focus should be 7 (Tag Focus +1)
• Messenger: SP should be 8 (Tag SP +2)
• Typical Javelin Agent: HP should be 12 (no HP tag)
• Javelin Knights: Mind D8 (4); Reflex D8 (4)
• Rochambeau: HP should be 20 (Tag HP +2)
• Blue Sun Boy: Force should be 8 (Power D16), Evade should be 5 (Reflex D10, no tag)
• Earthquake Kid: HP should be 17 (HP +1 Tag)
• Gamma Grrl: Evade should be 5 (no tag)
• Stalwart Sentinel: Focus should be 6; Force should be 7
• Typical T.E.N.D.R.I.L. Agent: Level should be 3, Endure should be 4
• Aria, Daughter of Ancients: Evade should be 4
• Zero, the Final Robot: HP should be 34 (HP +2 Tag)
• The Butterfly: Evade should be 6, not 5
• Captain Cross: Evade should be 4, not 3
• Dablo: Endure should be 5, not 4 
• Heracles: HP should be 40, not 36
• Mr. Lightning: Endure should be 10, not 6
• The Owl: Evade should be 7, not 6
• Plymo: Focus should be 3, not 4
• Sub Saunders: Endure should be 6, not 5
• The Sponge: Evade should be 3, not 6

Stalwart Phile #1

After a few rounds of edits, I think that this is actually correct! You can now get a copy of the Stalwart Phile #1.

I finally stopped trying to be clever and did what I wanted to do originally, which is follow the format for the Marvel Phile from Dragon Magazine back in the day - a short article with 3-6 character stat blocks, and no particular frills. I'm going to alternate between my characters/world in odd-numbered Stalwart Philes, and PD characters in the even-numbered Philes. I'll be posting these with a direct link to the pdf to the FB group and the Kickstarter, but I'll also put these up as a PWYW release on DriveThru in case you feel like tipping and to increase awareness of the game to the larger community.

Thanks!  

Into the Null Zone

Wow. I got something DONE - I put together a cover design for Doc #50, with the first foray into the fabulous Null Zone. I actually feel the cloud lifting a little today, and I haven't taken my two morning naps, so progress! Still not feeling math, but at least I was able to focus long enough to get this finished. Feels good.

And it gives me a chance to blog about an actual idea that has something to do with gaming... someone posted on FB somewhere about how Sandman could basically just kill anyone. He can send a little bit of sand into your heart or brain and cause a stroke and boom. In effect, many super-heroes could do this. If they really used their powers in a smart way, many supers could just cut off oxygen to their foes and end fights quickly... but they obviously don't.

And that got me thinking about why playing superhero RPGs is in many ways harder than other types of games - you have to willingly suspend your disbelief to have your character conform within certain standards, even when you have better options. As a fighter, your best option is going to be your long sword. If you had a fireball spell, you would use it. Every time. A supers game basically says, 'yeah, you have unlimited fireball spells, but wouldn't it be fun to conjure flame here and see what happens?' Everyone at the table has to be in agreement that this is the way the game is going to roll. You could use your force field to choke Simian Prime out in one round. But you don't because... you pull punches? You are dumb? 

Because it's a convention of the genre.

I have some built-in safeguards with Stalwart Points and ways you can use your powers in 'unusual' ways, but there's no rule saying that knocking out your foes with your force field isn't the 'usual' way you use that power, except that it's not a comic book way to do it.

Therein lies the rub for supers gaming. If you have one player at the table who's like, 'uh, logically, I just use my teleport to teleport the criminal directly to prison', then the game is already over. In effect, the players have to choose fun over winning. It's a mindset everyone has to agree to. Building a game that has traditional XP progression and advancement rewards players for winning. A supers game, to my mind, has to have rewards that have little to do with 'winning' the encounter, and more to do with 'enjoying' the encounter. Fun has to be the reward.

Fighting Through Chemo Fog...

I had a new chemo treatment with heavy-duty immunotherapy at the end of last week, and it has been a challenge to get my brain locked in ever since. I'm just kind of generally having a hard time focusing on anything, which is (all things considered) a minor annoyance. My pain is almost zero, and I spend my days napping and scrolling. My Facebook feed now overflows with LEGO updates, 70s and 80s comics, and a little bit of pro wrestling from the late 80s, so it keeps me occupied and I suppose on some level I'm filling the creative reservoir a little bit with raw material that I can draw from later on. 

I have tried on and off to work on both the adventures I'm writing (Cataclysm and Issue 58), but as soon as I get to math or specific details of plot, my eyes roll into the back of my head and my brain just won't cooperate. I have swelling in my hands and feet, so even building LEGOs right now is challenging because of uneven control of my fingers - just typing this feels weird because of the pins and needles feelings in my fingertips that's been here a few days. 

So, I doodle a bit and scroll. However, this morning I found an image I'd started during the KS campaign that I never finished (not sure why - but I obviously did now) of Satana, a PD character, and realized that she's the heavy hitter that Act 3 of Cataclysm is missing. She'll be appearing there, but I thought I'd at least share something that I am working on. I'm hopeful that since I'm almost a week out from my last chemo treatment, and have two weeks until my next one, at some point sooner than later this chemo fog will lift and I can get to some actual progress. 

However, in the interim it has been incredibly gratifying to watch you all start a community around Stalwart '85 on FB, and I'm very grateful to all of you who've contributed or shared your enthusiasm for the game. It has really and truly been a source of amazing positivity in the suckage of cancer.

Finally, thought I'd share that I have re-discovered the Decemberists, and I cannot believe how deep and rich their catalog is. It's like I find a new song and become completely obsessed over it. I have been listening to the Hazards of Love on non-stop rotation for a few days, but last night came upon the Infanta and just love it so much. I see that they are touring a little bit this summer, and I'd like to be strong enough to go and see them live. I don't go to many concerts (I have maybe gone to six in my lifetime), but the Decemberists would be front and center on my wish list. Being healthy enough in July to take a six-hour road trip to Canada to see them would be a huge win. 

Thinking PreGens

First off, thanks to you all (especiall Rick Hull) for getting a FB group up and running and for some great conversations so far. Here's the link if you want to jump in.

Now that I am thinking of including pre-generated characters for the introductory adventure, I was first tempted to go pretty generic and go with maybe four elemental heroes or something that would be 'archetypal' in some way. Then I thought I'd just re-print the Young Wardens from the core rules. Then I thought - nah, that's not the game I want. I started to look at my legacy characters, and realized that I have given Monument III, but have barely referenced who Monolith I or II were, and there was my opening. I could put together a team of 'midnight guardians' or somesuch. I then realized that I'd drawn Mr Justice, a PD hero, for someone last week on the Public Domain Heroes FB, and seeing that this guy is a ghost, he'd fit in perfect. I figure I have 2-3 more spaces - I already have Vesper as controlling darkness energy, but I could always add another character who can do that... in some ways, this group would have been a foreshadowing of the group that Doc ultimately ends up with in issues 251-260, which included Zirah and Monolith III. 

- Maybe the apprentice to Eldritch? A young sorcereress might be a good fit. Not sure how a new player would handle magic, since it requires a bit of understanding of how to use the rules and existing frameworks to do cool stuff. I think the more imaginative you are as a player, the more fun magic would be to play - and the less comfortable you are, the more un-fun this could be.

- Gila the Monster doesn't canonically appear for 20+ issues yet, but he would have been a good fit here. I could do an earlier version of Gila... but ah well. Or just a different big lizard dude. He's not that deep. Or go with a golem type here (altough Monument is already the muscle kind of).

- Renegade would not have been terrible, but he appears a hundred issues too late - In retrospect, I should have made him a character who appeared in the first fifty issues. He officially is where he officially is, and I have already committed that once something is published, it is 'canon' and I won't go back and change it. Canonically, Renegade appears for the first time in issue 143 (unless that's Renegade II... DON'T TEMPT ME FRODO). Although.. my use of the phrase 'took on the role of the Renegade' in his opening text leaves me the opening that this was an existing identity... that maybe his uncle had retired from. Oh man. I'm totally doing that. Renegade I is on the team. Sweeet. This is the Renegade of Meridian. I think my original Renegade when I was in middle school had the moon knight gimmick of getting twice as powerful at night - I might keep that, and have him have two stat blocks (daytime and night time) - with maybe an extra perk at the full moon.

- Someone has to have a head for a skull. That seems like a gimme. That or at least a headless horseman of some kind. Or maybe just a skull that floats around. Head and hand of Vecna. Kid Cranium. The Occipital Protuberance.

Odds and Ends

The introductory adventure using Malamus and adapting Mighty Doc Stalwart #58 is coming along quite nicely. Here's the central image that will be the cover for that issue and adventure. I hope to have it up and published by the weekend - it will be sent to all KS backers as a pdf, but will also be PWYW on DriveThruRPG. My only question is whether or not to include pregenerated characters. I have options: I could just reprint the Young Wardens (since this is kind of how I see a character group like that getting introduced anyway). I don't like the idea that there is an 'official' team that does these things - the 'official' story featured Doc. I could just publish Doc and a few possible allies? Add a few more public domain heroes? Leave the PCs out entirely and encourage the players to use their own characters? I mean, the core rules with all character generation rules are available for free, and I want to encourage people... it's the only thing I'm not sure how to solve yet. There are lots of PD characters that I haven't touched yet - I could create a different set of maybe 8 Public Domain heroes that are a separate thing, but which are a free resource anyone could then draw on when they need a character. I could make 'Public Domain character packs' of maybe 6-8 characters at a time and probably never run out of characters to do this for, but give a lot of support to the game and continue to expand from the characters that were part of the KS. I don't want to take from anything that was already a KS exclusive, so I'll be leaving those PD characters alone.

I also added two links to the comics database, but since that thing is already pretty big, it would be easy for you to miss them if you weren't looking. I've added them both as backup features in Mighty Doc Stalwart #200, seeing that issue in many ways as shared with Simian Prime. I added the Simian Manifesto and the text that would have accompanied a Project: Javelin mission into Simian City. 

Slugfest!

It dawned on me this morning that I have never actually drawn Doc vs. Simian Prime. I mean, I have lots of drawings of Doc, and a few of Simian Prime, but I've never drawn them actually... you know... fighting. So, I took up the challenge and decided to go for the most iconic sort of late 60s slugfest image I could manage. I'm quite pleased with how this has come along. It's going to be the cover to something at some point... here it is in both black and white and color. I even like the black and white version. It's very clean.

An Introductory Adventure

I spent a little more time with the grand comics database for Doc, adding some details from the core rules that had not been in my master document. I think it is all aligned now - as you can see, there are many blank spaces that need to be filled in, and a lot of placeholders where I know who or what may have first appeared, but I'm not exactly sure what the story was that they were involved in. That said, it's a pretty good skeleton of what the history of Doc's adventures have looked like, and it also leaves me with a lot of room to expand, deepen, and enrich the lore. If this was everything, I'd be okay. I think that there are still major storylines and characters who have yet to be introduced, and I'm excited to find those things hidden in my searches through the 'back issue bins' as I explore my imagination.

I also see several storylines that are going to adapt nicely into adventures. At present, I conceptualize adventures at around 8-10 pages - the cover of the comic, one or two samples of interior art (probably not full pages, but panels from throughout), a one-page overview of the storyline as it appeared (with historical context and all that good stuff), and an adventure broken into three acts with frame/cut scenes that help to shape the whole. While issue #1 would seem to be the most reasonable start, I'm actually leaning towards the first appearance of Malamus the Magma King in issue #58. This could break nicely into a first encounter in the northern streets of Meridian where Malamus' legions have risen from the earth to 'counter attack' the people who have been disturbing his caves. After a short battle, the Magmen would retreat, having made their point - continued hostility will bring even more damage. In a cut scene, we could learn that a company has been doing illegal sonic testing and drilling in the northern mountains, disturbing Malamus. In Act 2, the heroes could attempt to intercept a Project Javelin task force (maybe led by Prototype) that has been sent to destroy Malamus and crush his small empire. In Act 3, they go to his volcano and try to negotiate a peace agreement that will get Project Javelin to stand down and bring at least a temporary peace. 

This would set in motion a lot of different elements of the comic, and introduce an organization that does unethical stuff that could be an ongoing background threat. Doc himself could either be present for the mission, or the idea is that he is always on some other mission but acts as a resource for the heroes via telecom. He could phone in with suggestions or send some help, but he just happens to be on the moon, or fighting tsunamis in Japan, or helping rescue people from Mr. Everest, or whatever.

For longer storylines, I could adapt them as multiple parts, doing smaller campaign arcs (war of the demigods), or I could find linked issues across continuity and release them as a cohesive story (the various stories having to do with Doc's secret lab being taken over, crashed into the ocean, and ultimately used as an undersea base). Staying with the idea of adapting the existing comics history gives me a nice framework to stay within, and really defines what these adventures will look like.

A GL Swipe Because I Did

I've been actually chilling a bit on Facebook, just joining groups so that my feed is full of 80s comic goodness and supers RPG stuff. I can now just jump on and scroll through the most awesome stuff and spend time in the same world of Stalwart '85, which is groovy. I ended up joining a Green Lantern group just because of this image, and then I had to swipe it and create a variation for Bronze Beacon, because I just loved it so much. No idea who the artist is, but I love the style. Here's the original with my unapologitic adaptation.

Edit: I found the source - fan art. Wanted to give the dude the credit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DCcomics/comments/qq9osk/fan_art_just_finished_reading_new_frontier_and/

On Staying in My Sand Box

I keep instinctively looking at ways to 'expand' the game for Stalwart '85. I keep thinking of what I want to do 'next', or how to move the game/story/world 'forward' in some way. I keep wanting to make new 'main characters' to pick up pieces of the narrative and carry them in other directions. I originally planned last summer to hand over the reigns from Doc to Skye, and to start to tell her story instead.

But Doc always comes back into the picture. I started play testing the Cataclysm Across the Cosmos this week, and realized that it's not that story unless Doc is there. Doc is the center of gravity for the whole thing. 

In the last few days, I've been scrolling through some old scans online of Marvel 2-in-1, thinking it would be cool to have a character like the Thing who could go around and team up with other heroes to expand the world. Oh. I already have him. He's Doc. He's already doing that.

In fact, he's been doing it for 264 issues as of the time Stalwart '85 comes out. 

It always comes back to Doc. That's the future - it's the past. I was thinking about how to develop adventures for the game, and realized that I have a database going of great adventure ideas in seed form - I have re-organized this a bit and posted it so you can see the living database, but the answers are all right there. I should be publishing adventures for the game, but they can be rooted in adapting the existing 264 comics. The game is set in April of 1985. It's a fixed point in time. I can now spend my time going back and filling in as many gaps as possible. It's a bit of a strange creative enterprise for me - my job is to spend my time going through the 'back issue' bins, organizing things and adding to them. I don't have to generate 'new content' - I can just spend my time building up the catalog of what already exists as of April 1985. That should keep me busy enough. This is the entire sand box I have to play in. I can stay within these walls and never run out of things to work on - if you figure an average Doc story was 16 pages, and there are 264 of those, that's over 4,000 pages I haven't figured out yet. I think that's enough to work with. 

Plus, the whole idea of the game itself is that you're with me in April of good old '85. You bought the game, you own some comics, and you're itching to start your own game set in this world. You have no idea what storylines or continuity or strangeness is ahead, and you start building a game based on the comics you have. As you go, you hit conventions or comic shops or mail order and start to fill in your back issue collection. My job now is to help you do it.

Cataclysm Act 2

Letting my mind marinate on Crisis on Infinite Earths for a day gave me an idea for how to manage Act 2 of the Cataclysm Across the Cosmos. I had originally planned to 'write out' some of the heaviest hitters - once Stardust the Super Wizard gets involved, he's able to go toe-to-toe with Kid Eternity, so he kind of imbalances things. However, if I involve him indirectly, he could be an important player in the story, and end up having long-term consequences thereafter. This is one thing I'd like to incorporate - that the events of Cataclsym could potentially matter to your own game world (if you go that way).

Here's the elevator pitch for Act 2, assuming the elevator has like seven stops and the door keeps ignoring the 'door shut' button you keep smashing...

The actions of Kid Eternity on the ocean's surface (as he draws the sunken U-Boat to the surface where he can face his final fate), have disturbed the earth's core, and are destabilizing it. Doctor Haunt has called Stardust to compensate; Stardust is channeling cosmic energy, siphoning off the destabilized energy from the core that is shattering the world. Kid Eternity has summoned a bunch of villains and sent them to kill Stardust. So, the idea is that Stardust spends the whole Act drawing power from the core while a group of heroes tries to keep the swarming villains from killing him off.

- If he soaks D12+6 points per round, he's going to average 12 points per round; if he rolls average, he can soak 120 points in one minute - that's ten rounds. As long as he can keep siphoning energy, he should be okay. He has no access to his SP - he's using all of them to maintain this stunt.

- If Stardust soaks 100 points within 1 minute, he stabilizes the core and is able to go on to his next task, flying off to keep the moon from crashing to earth. He will spend the rest of the adventure using cosmic energy to push the moon around the earth. 

- Each time Stardust is felled, the core is replenished 2d10 points, and Stardust has to get back to soaking as soon as he's back up.

- Here's the kicker - if Stardust is actually defeated, then bad stuff happens. The 'big bad' is that Stardust himself is annihilated - his essence gets drawn into the core, and ultimately pulled into the next world that the heroes will inhabit. In effect, this puts the 'power cosmic' of the PD universe on the board for someone in the next world to capture, fight over, inherit, or reckon with. It becomes a big loose end for the GM to use in their adventures going forward. You could decide to have Stardust reborn a la Gandalf, or you could have another new character take on the identity. 

On another note, I'm starting to conceptualize Cataclysm as a hybrid comic book/adventure in a single package. I'm liking the idea of drawing the cut scenes and introductory passages, and then nesting the Acts between. Moving it from two things - part of a comic and a separate adventure - and into an interactive comic book seems a bit more on brand, and sets it apart a bit. The image above would not have been in the comic (since I was only going to draw part of Act 1), but if I end up drawing a page or two of each act as an introduction, it might feel more cohesive... I'll keep tinkering with it.  

Humble Beginnings

Recovering from chemotherapy is a lot of time just... kinda sitting. I had a radiation treatment last week that required me to minimize how much activity I was doing, and to avoid exercise... so. Yeah. A lot of sitting around. Energy has been relatively low, but the last few days I've started to bounce back, and I keep thinking of things to keep my occupied. I worked on the adventure for Cataclysm yesterday and did some reading this morning to try and get into the zone for that a little more, but I also started something else...

We'll see if this comes to fruition, but throughout high school, I had this massive poster of the Marvel Universe on my bedroom wall. I stared at that thing for hours and hours, considering all of the characters and imagining what it would be like to have a universe that big. Then, I flipped through my copy of S85 and realized - it's pretty good-sized. I mean, I have almost a hundred characters. I figured it would be really nice to have a huge poster that has all of my Doc characters in one place. It would take me a long time to finish, but it's something I can do during days and times where I just need to zone out and have something to doodle on. It would be a cool to have a big poster of 'my characters'. So... here's the anchor for the middle of the poster - Doc.
 

Spending Some Time in the Source Material

I spent some time going through my comic collection in the last month or two, sorting things and selling some older books on EBay. My collection includes Crisis on Infinite Earths #2-12; I am missing issue 1 for some reason (no idea if I ever owned it). This morning, I read through four or five issues and skimmed the rest and... wow. It's a lot. The pacing is really, really (really) fast, and worlds are just constantly getting wiped out. I get that it's the point, and I guess I'd have to put myself back in 1985 to appreciate the emotional weight of watching these worlds that you've read for decades get wiped out, but it's just a LOT. That, and a lot of it is redundant; I feel like it's the same emotional beats repeatedly, watching this hopeless battle play out. 

I'm saying I didn't love it. I was kinda hoping to be more impressed and inspired by it than I was. I understand that 2025 me is a bit more discriminating than 1985 me, but still. 40 years is a bit of time, and I obviously know a bit more about storytelling and pacing and those sorts of things than I did in middle school (you'd hope). All that said, it felt reading it more like an event than a story. It was trying to be a story, but it knew that it was an event. I recently sold the complete run of Secret Wars (same era) on EBay, and had paged through that as well before shipping it off - it wasn't quite this compressed. Secret Wars had a more manageable cast (of course), and a smaller scope, so it gets a pass for having to accomplish less with the same amount of room. It had more breathing space to tell a story.

I was expecting to get more I could beg/borrow/steal for Cataclysm Across the Cosmos, but it really didn't give me a lot. However, it did help me to decide that I'm going to go ahead and layer the Public Domain characters into my own world as well (and you can layer them into yours. Feel free). Ever since I moved backward from the 21st century to the 1980s as my default setting, I've known a few things are going to happen in Doc's future - one of these is that Echo City eventually becomes the main city of the game world. In previous iterations of the game, Meridian falls entirely during an alien invasion and becomes a toxic wasteland. I don't think I want to go there anymore, but I do like the idea that Echo City is directly impacted by the Cataclysm; the city is completely changed by the Cataclsym, its entire history and character changed. It's the more 'pulp' city anyway, and these characters largely have a pulp background, so just making it into a giant pulp action comics playground seems like a decent way to go. If Meridian is Metropolis (Doc's city, first and foremost), then Echo City becomes more like Marvel's NYC where everyone else just happens to be... and a place where I can maybe establish the next great team of heroes that includes a mix of my own original characters and PD characters as I've re-imagined them.

TL; DR

Let's be honest, I don't know if you really really want to read my six pages of playtest notes so far... but if you do, you do. I mean, it's a pretty comprehensive overview of building the Cataclysm Across the Cosmos so far. I'll summarize below:

I set up the first encounter, which ended up being 8 heroes against Gorgo. The heroes won after three rounds, but almost everyone suffered being felled once, and two characters were felled twice before they were able to drop Gorgo once. I was going to have the battle last for three drops of Gorgo, but I got to see what I wanted to from it, and was able to justify having Doc throw him out to sea story-wise, so it's all good. I had to ret-con the story as I went (no Doc at first, then added Doc), but it was no big deal.

I made a few adjustments on the fly, the biggest one being that a successful hit by a superhero against any foe deals at least 1 hit point. Gorgo's invulnerable of 10 against heroes averaging D12 damage meant that it was very unlikely he was going to suffer damage even if the hero rolled pretty well. Once I upgraded to 'all successful attacks deal at least 1 hp even if they don't', the fight sped up a little bit, and they were able to slowly wear Gorgo down. The complications I added at the beginning of the sequence also helped a bit to mix it up from a straight up fight to some strategy and something to do other than punch the villain. 

I went back and forth a bit on SP, but have realized that I have to limit SPs to the 'main character(s)' only or these battles are going to be quick. If all eight heroes had access to their SPs, they'd all be stunting immediately, doing all sorts of crazy stuff and ripping through Gorgo. Because only Gorgo and Doc had access to SP, it made the fight feel more comic-booky and less gamey, if that makes sense. I don't want it to feel like you're playing a tactical game; I want it to feel like you got dropped into the middle of a comic battle as they happen. In the big comic battles, a lot of characters get regulated to the background, doing their 'default' attack while a few others take center stage. The way I've set up SP here emulates that pretty well.

It was nice to crack out the dice and actually play Stalwart '85 again - it's been a few weeks since I actually played the game. I'm adding the Google Doc to the resources for Stalwart '85 in case people want to read through all this - I expect to continue it as I go.