TEXT:   
  The Bad Guys 
   
  by James Thomson 
  Copyright 2004© James Thomson 
   
  Some artwork by Tony Perna, taken from Superhero Image Portfolios 1.3 and 1.5. copyright © Louis 
  Porter, Jr. Design www.lpjdesign.com/DevilsWorkshop/ImagePortfolio 
   
  Some artwork by Jason Watson, taken from Fantasy Image Portfolio 1.4 copyright © Louis Porter, 
  Jr. Design www.lpjdesign.com/DevilsWorkshop/ImagePortfolio 
   
  Some artwork copyright © 2003, V. Shane 
   
  Some artwork copyright © Christopher Shy taken from World of Ronin Arts: Character Portfolio 
  Three. Used with permission. Visit the artist’s website at www.studio.com and the publisher’s site at 
  www.roninarts.com. 
   
  Some artwork copyright © Samuel Araya taken from World of Ronin Arts: Character Portfolio 
  Four. Used with permission. Visit the artist’s website at www.paintagram.com or 
  http://samael.epilogue.net and the publisher’s site at www.roninarts.com. 
   
  Some artwork taken from Character Portraits: Fantasy Heroes ©2003 Mongoose Publishing. 
   
  Some artwork © 2004 Brian Eggleston 
   
  Special thanks to Paul and Johnny Davis, for all their invaluable assistance. 
   
  Requires the Mutants & Masterminds RPG by Green Ronin Publishing For Use. Villain Points 
  are Product Identity of Green Ronin Publishing and are used with permission.  Mutants & 
  Masterminds, M&M Superlink, the M&M Superlink logo, and Green Ronin are also 
  trademarks of Green Ronin Publishing and are also used with permission.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
   
  Table of Contents 
   
  Introduction-----------------------------------3 
  Using This Book--------------------------------3 
  The Campaign World------------------------3 
  New Feats and Powers-----------------------4 
  Chapter 1: Minor Threats----------5 
  Sicko the Clown------------------------------------5 
  Big John----------------------------------------------8 
  Doctor Shock---------------------------------------10 
  Mano del Muerte----------------------------------12 
  Chapter 2: Moderate Threats---14 
  Broken Arrow-------------------------------------14 
  U-Go-Grrrl-----------------------------------------17 
  The Unicorn----------------------------------------18 
  Vampire Girl---------------------------------------20 
  Wolf-Dog-------------------------------------------22 
  God--------------------------------------------------24 
  Helen Damnation---------------------------------27 
  Chapter 3: Major Threats------29 
  The Snow Queen----------------------------------32 
  Black Thunder------------------------------------32 
  The Death Angel----------------------------------36 
  Doctor Moloch, Phd------------------------------39 
  Azeraphel, the Screaming Angel--------------41 
  The Hammer of Doom---------------------------43 
  Captain Valiant-----------------------------------46 
  Chapter 4: Teams---------------------------49 
  The Nowhere Men---------------------------49 
  Woodchuck Man----------------------------------51 
  The Ratcatcher------------------------------------53 
  Grim Diddle----------------------------------------55 
  Vernichtung 5----------------------------------57 
  Der Totenkopf-------------------------------------60 
  The Moebius Man--------------------------------62 
  Blitzenhammer------------------------------------64 
  Zyclon B--------------------------------------------67 
  Der Shreik------------------------------------------69 
  Mother Moebius-----------------------------------70 
  The Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys----72 
  Johnny Black--------------------------------------75 
  Cimarron Starr-----------------------------------77 
  Grease Monkey-----------------------------------79 
  Doctor Destructor-------------------------------- 81 
  The Texas Twister--------------------------------82 
  Mr. Fist--------------------------------------------- 84 
  The Lone Star Lady------------------------------86 
  Jim Dandy------------------------------------------88 
  Boy Howdy---------------------------------------- 89 
  The Four Deuces------------------------------90 
  Double Deuce------------------------------------ 94 
  Ace of Wounds-----------------------------------97 
  Lady Deuce---------------------------------------100 
  Diamond Deuce----------------------------------103 
  The Steel Deuce----------------------------------105 
  Bones-----------------------------------------------108 
  Executive Solutions------------------------111 
  Executive Solution D----------------------------115 
  Executive Solution M---------------------------119 
  Executive Solution Z----------------------------121 
  Executive Solution X----------------------------123 
  Executive Solution R----------------------------125 
  Executive Solution Q---------------------------128 
  Executive Solution F----------------------------130 
  Executive Solution Y----------------------------132 
  Jim Flint, Agent 12------------------------------135 
  Zelma Zimmer-----------------------------------137 
  Mr Smith------------------------------------------138 
  Jim Flint’s Bodyguards------------------------139 
  Appendix A: Villains by PL-------------------------140 
  Index-------------------------------------------------141
  
    
   
  Introduction 
       A compendium of every sort of crime and 
  wickedness, this book contains more than fifty of the 
  most gloriously evil (or tragically misunderstood) 
  supervillains in history. From cackling arch-fiends to 
  sneering street thugs, if you want scum in capes—
  we’ve got ‘em!  This volume holds enough goons, 
  creeps, crooks, monsters, madmen and maniacs to 
  trouble your players for months on end. A veritable 
  smorgasbord of crime, where the sneeze-guards of evil 
  are always clean and the bacon bits of wickedness 
  never run out!  Includes more than one hundred 
  separate adventure seeds that will let you start using 
  these villains straight out of the box. Serving all your 
  needs for crime at pennies on the dollar, no batteries 
  are required (unless you’re reading this on a laptop), 
  and neither is any specific campaign world—these 
  super-scoundrels fit right in anywhere!  It’s time to 
  don the bicycle helmet of villainy and head-butt the 
  smirking face of justice! 
   
  Using This Book 
    The villains in this book are arranged by Power 
  Level, rather than in alphabetic order.  We start out 
  with the least powerful villains and build our way up 
  to the toughest ones. There’s an index in the back, in 
  case you need to look someone up alphabetically.   
       After the individual villains, we have five 
  supervillain teams for you, which are also organized in 
  order of the level of challenge they provide, from the 
  lowly Nowhere Men (intended for low-level teams 
  and groups that like investigating mysteries) up to the 
  nation-toppling, hero-crushing mercenary group called 
  “Executive Solutions.”  Each team comes with notes 
  on how to get the most effective use out of them, the 
  kinds of tactics they use in combat, and a brief sample 
  adventure or two.  
       A word on using heavy villains.  When it comes to 
  Power Levels, M&M is more like the D20 system than 
  it is like most of the point-based superhero games you 
  may be used to.  In a lot of superhero games, a group 
  of medium level PCs can take down a single high-
  level villain without all that much difficulty. In these 
  games, an NPC opponent usually needs to be between 
  twice and four times as powerful as the heroes in order 
  to really give them a run for their money.  M&M 
  doesn’t work that way.  Here the differences between 
  Power Levels really matter.  A PL 12 villain is 
  significantly stronger than a PL 10 hero, a PL 15 
  villain is a real challenge, and a PL 20 villain really is 
  a world-smashing menace.  Throw a team of PL 10 
  Player Characters up against the boys from Executive 
  Solutions en masse, and the opposition will decimate 
  them.   
       To avoid getting chased down and pummeled by 
  your frustrated players, try and be aware of how tough  
  the opposition is, and give the PCs tactical advantages 
  if you think they’ll need them. Your players are sure 
  to appreciate it.  There are few gaming experiences 
  more thrilling than spotting an enemy that you know 
  can beat the stuffing out of you, and then realizing that 
  this time you have the drop on them.  
       A word about lethality might also be in order here.  
  A few of these villains (the Ratcatcher, the Unicorn 
  and Sicko the Clown, for example) try scrupulously 
  not to kill people.  They won’t even use lethal force on 
  the heroes who are trying to beat them up.  A few (like 
  the poor insane Mano del Muerte) kill all the time—
  being homicidal is part of their character concept.  But 
  the remaining majority of character descriptions don’t 
  specify exactly how much lethal force the NPC should 
  use in combat. It talks a lot about whether or not a 
  given villain might take hostages, endanger innocents, 
  use torture and so forth, but tends not to say much 
  about whether they would kill an opponent in combat, 
  because that should be up to the GM.  And it should 
  depend on the kind of game they want to run.    
       If you are running a game that is relatively light in 
  tone, then even characters with bloody pasts like Lady 
  Deuce or the Hammer of Doom don’t have to try to 
  kill the Player Characters.  Being stone killers may be 
  part of their back-story, but it doesn’t mean they have 
  to kill somebody in this particular adventure. Lady 
  Deuce is capable of throwing a baby off the end of a 
  pier, but that doesn’t mean she has to spot a stroller 
  down by the docks in every scenario.  I want this 
  material to be as useful to you as possible, so I don’t 
  want to restrict some NPCs to “gritty” settings and 
  others to “four-color” campaigns. My own style is 
  probably more influenced by Warren Ellis, Frank 
  Miller and Grant Morrison than it is by Kurt Busiek or 
  Chris Claremont.  I’m more of a pretentious oaf who 
  thinks he’s Alan Moore than I am a pretentious oaf 
  who thinks he’s Jack Kirby.  But if you’re a four-color 
  fanatic then I want you to be able to use this material 
  too.  If you think the Four Deuces are cool but you’re 
  running a campaign modeled on the Powerpuff Girls, 
  then keep their bloodiest deeds offstage. 
   
  The Campaign 
  World 
   
       There isn’t one. I wrote these characters with the 
  intention of making them as easy as possible to drop 
  into whatever campaign you want. The only common 
  assumptions here are that superheroes exist and that 
  the campaign is set in the present day.  Even then, 
  most of the villains in this book can be adapted to 
  
    
  previous epochs with only a little work. I have 
  included no secret history of the world, no single 
  explanation of what superheroes are, when they 
  appeared, or where they come from. We won’t learn 
  who the gods are, what alien races rule our corner of 
  the cosmos or what Secret Masters (if any) have been 
  manipulating mankind’s history from the beginning. 
  Because the more I tell you about these things and the 
  more tightly I tie these characters into them, the more 
  it will distort the shape of your campaign, shifting its 
  focus away from your vision and toward my own. It’s 
  better just to give you stuff that I know you can use.  
       Because I chose this approach, you will see 
  relatively few world-conquering arch villains in this 
  book.  Make no mistake, there are plenty of powerful, 
  dangerous high-level antagonists toward the end—
  opponents who could give almost any superhero team 
  a run for its money.  But guys with names like “Doctor 
  Apocalypse” or “Baron Von Annihilation”, (who 
  always seem to be brooding in their powered armor 
  with wine glasses held thoughtfully aloft in one hand 
  and a Brahms concerto playing on the phonograph) 
  tend to seriously change the shape of the campaign, 
  shifting much of its focus toward the threat posed by 
  their own huge vainglorious plans. They also tend to 
  be tightly wired into the back-story, since you would 
  expect them to have a big effect on the course of your 
  world’s history (or at least the part that concerns 
  superheroes).  Make no mistake, I love that 
  archetype—I’ve seen all the same James Bond movies 
  you have and I loved them just as much.  But you 
  really only need one or two of them for a campaign 
  and you probably already have yours picked out.  I 
  thought it would be better to give you something more 
  useful. 
       There are a few places where for the sake of 
  atmosphere I have used the name of a secret British 
  military project that tried to build combat cyborgs 
  (Project Abbadon) or a US government contractor that 
  made some disastrous attempts to create super-soldiers 
  in the 1990s (the IF Foundation) but these names are 
  just placeholders.  Use them only if you don’t already 
  have a secret project that builds cyborgs and 
  supermen.   
       There are also a few spots where one character’s 
  back-story makes reference to another character, 
  particularly in the adventure seeds.  Here too it’s just 
  for flavor and to make the characters seem more 
  vividly alive.  Ignore these links or plug different 
  characters into them just as you like.  You are under 
  no obligation to incorporate all of these villains into 
  your campaign and I tried to set things up so that if 
  you’d like to just adopt a few, it wouldn’t disrupt 
  things.  So, if for example the text says that Double 
  Deuce has hired the Snow Queen as muscle on a job, 
  but you don’t like the Snow Queen, or some part of 
  her origin story conflicts with something in your 
  campaign world, just substitute another high-level 
  super-criminal with a reputation for professionalism.  
  It doesn’t even have to be someone with ice powers.  
       I’ll be producing another book of supervillains 
  really soon, so if you can find the time, let me know 
  how well this approach works for you and I’ll bear it 
  in mind while I’m putting “More Bad Guys” together. 
  Would you like characters who are even more separate 
  from one another?  Would you feel more comfortable 
  with a broader sense of background?  Don’t be shy--
  I’m here to serve your appetite for crime, whatever 
  unsavory form it might take. 
   
  New Feats and 
  Powers 
       We barely have any of these, either.  In fact we 
  only have one.  
       The lunatic celebrity supervillainess called U-Go-
  Grrl has a new feat called “Limited Immunity to 
  Prosecution” which gives her a +3 bonus on any rolls 
  made to evade getting arrested, arraigned, served with 
  a summons, convicted of a crime or in any other way 
  inconvenienced by the legal system. It also applies to 
  any rolls a lawyer or other legal representative might 
  make on her behalf.  This is a purely defensive feat—
  it doesn’t make it easier for her to sue people or have 
  them arrested, just to keep her from having to face the 
  legal consequences of her actions.   
       The reason I didn’t pack the book with new feats, 
  skills and powers is roughly the same as my rationale 
  for not building a campaign world.  I’m lazy as hell. 
  By which I mean to say (ahem!) that I want to make 
  the GM’s life easier.  
       I personally find it unpleasant when players come 
  up to me with new feats and powers that they’ve 
  picked up from some supplement I haven’t read 
  (always just before game time, when I can’t properly 
  study them) and I’d like to spare you the extra effort 
  and annoyance.  In addition, point-based superhero 
  games are notoriously prone to rules-creep and I want 
  to contribute as little as possible to the growing clutter.  
       It’s so important to U-Go-Grrrl’s character 
  conception to have this extra feat that I didn’t see a 
  way around including it.  Fortunately, it’s simple, it’s 
  low-powered and it’s OGL.  Go ahead and use it 
  however you like in your own work.  You paid for it. 
   
  
    
   
  Chapter 1: Minor Threats 
   
  
    
  Sicko the Clown 
  Real Name: Wendell "Butch" Blutarski 
  PL: 8 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 16 (+3) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 14 (+1) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +12  
  Defense: +23/+18  Speed: 35   
  Damage Save: +12 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +1   
  Skills: Craft (Weird Clown Gizmos) +5, Hide +5,  
  Intimidate +5, Performance +5 
  Feats: All-Out Attack, Dodge, Improved Trip, 
  Power Attack, Rapid Healing, Startle, Stunning 
  Attack, Surprise Attack, Takedown Attack, Toughness 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +8, Gadgets +8, 
  Running +1 (Cost 2pts) 
  Equipment: (Weapon, +8 Stunning Damage 
  Cost: 1pt), Dubious Clown Van (Vehicle; Size: Large; 
  Movement: 6; Hardness: 6; Armor Bonus: 3; Features: 
  Radio Reception), Revolting Pies (Energy Blast +8 
  Stunning Damage; Flaw: Device; Cost: 1pt), Stanky  
  Bombs, (Obscure +8; Flaw: Device; Cost: 1pt) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Loathsome drunken 
  degenerate.  
  Quirk: Crazed Clown Code (Can't knowingly do  
  anyone Lethal damage or allow an innocent to come to 
  harm) 
  Unlucky (Something horrible will happen to him at 
  least once per adventure). 
   
  “Hey kids, it’s yer old pal Sicko th’ 
  Clown!  With all kinds of kooky, zany, 
  nutty, messed-up, painful, ghastly, 
  horrid, wacky fun for all of you!  Ha ha 
  heh heh hee hee ho hoo hoo ha!”   
   
  A wretched, drunken, self-loathing, glue-sniffing 
  misfit clown.  He’s an alienated, unhappy deviate who 
  steals women’s underwear, wallowing in his 
  perversity with frantic glee. He commits weird, kinky 
  and outrageous crimes for the sheer twisted hell of it, 
  and to get attention.  He loves attention, especially the 
  negative kind.    
       Sicko adores being a villain, a weirdo pervert freak, 
  and plays it up at every opportunity.  Yet he’s much 
  too self-conscious and theatrical to ever let his act get 
  totally out of control.  He won’t hit superheroes with 
  lethal force, and if he beats one he will always come 
  up with an excuse to put them in some ridiculous, 
  humiliating but easily escaped death-trap rather than 
  execute them on the spot.  Even when drunk he would 
  never willingly let an innocent come to harm. He is 
  deeply ashamed of this fact and tries hard to conceal 
  it.   
       For while he’s great at playing the role of a sinister 
  perverted clown, under his makeup he’s kind of a 
  fraud.  He gets no kick from hurting people—he just 
  likes shocking them.  The thrill he gets from stealing 
  panties is chiefly that it’s filthy and wrong.  He gets 
  hardly any joy out of wearing them, unless of course 
  someone catches him in the act.  He’s not even a real 
  pedophile, despite sometimes making leering remarks 
  to that effect (Note to the GM:  try to keep this last 
  affectation low-key enough so that it won’t get too 
  disgusting for your players to handle. Sicko shouldn’t 
  hang around school playgrounds in a raincoat—that 
  would probably freak the PCs out too badly.  But if 
  he’s surrendering to a superhero he might say 
  something like “I can never say no to anyone in a Boy 
  Scout uniform!”)   
       If confronted with the fact that he isn’t nearly as 
  evil as he pretends to be, Sicko will rave and protest 
  and make outrageous claims about what a revolting 
  degenerate he is (“No!  No! I eat three kittens before 
  breakfast!  I invented th’ Teletubbies!  I had intimate 
  carnal relations with Walt Disney’s pickled brain!”).  
   
  Using Sicko the Clown in your 
  campaign: As an opponent he is flashy and 
  distracting, constantly hurling sick jokes and 
  exploding pies full of panty hose and bondage 
  magazines, pausing to scribble rude graffiti on a wall 
  or to sniff some glue.  But he’s a better tactician than 
  he pretends to be. He won’t interrupt a fight to do 
  something silly and vile unless he actually has a free 
  moment. Otherwise he would get caught too fast and 
  the show would end too soon.  He’s always got an 
  escape plan or two, even though he doesn’t much care 
  whether he wins or loses the fight.  He might take a 
  hostage, but if he does he’ll utter some ridiculous 
  threat like: “Stay back, or I’ll paint moustaches on the 
  pictures of all this guy’s kids!” or “Back off or I’ll tell 
  Mrs. Happy Homemaker here that Betty Crocker 
  doesn’t really exist!”   
       He may even attempt to take himself or his sock 
  puppet hostage, just for laughs (“Back off or th’ clown 
  gets it! No one will miss him, what’s one less crummy 
  clown in the world?”)   
       He’ll never take small children hostage under any 
  circumstances, as he feels that would be too scary for 
  them.    
       Unfortunately, Sicko’s drunkenness and drug abuse 
  make him dangerous to be around—not because he 
  might lash out and do something savage, but because 
  being wasted makes him sloppy and incompetent.  
  He’s almost sure to kill an innocent sooner or later 
  through some drunken mistake.  This will no doubt 
  drive him deeper into self-loathing wretchedness, and 
  make him even more prone to misbehave.  
   
  Adventures With Sicko the Clown:  
  1) Another Triumph for Moral Decency 
  Sicko the Clown attends a meeting of the Crusade for 
  Moral Decency—after all, who could be more in need 
  
    
  of moral decency than Sicko the Clown?  He will 
  sneak backstage and put rude slides in the speaker’s 
  carousel, rewire the PA system to make even ruder 
  sounds and then finally, as the meeting comes close to 
  dissolving in panicked chaos he’ll attack whoever is 
  speaking at the podium, pelting them with sticky pies 
  and foul insults until they run for cover.  He will then 
  hold the audience hostage while he delivers a crazy, 
  rambling, drunken lecture on the topic of family 
  values, mocking and mutilating everything they hold 
  dear, pausing only to show more grody and ridiculous 
  slides or to do more drugs.  Can no one stop this 
  crazed clown of crime?     
       Actually, the audience is going to do its best to try.  
  After only a little of Sicko’s raving they are mad 
  enough to rip him limb from limb, and by the time the 
  PCs arrive they may find that they have to save Sicko 
  from the Crusade for Moral Decency, rather than the 
  other way around.   
   
  2) Hey Kids, It’s th’ Sicko the Clown  Show! 
       Sicko the Clown gets his own Saturday morning 
  TV show, by breaking into the carrier wave with an 
  illegal transmitter from the back of his skanky clown 
  van.  He shows vile cartoons and revolting puppet 
  shows and mocks everything good and decent.   
       Just how obscene the leering clown gets on his 
  show is up to the GM.  If your PCs would be 
  uncomfortable with a lot of swearing, then avoid it.  
  Otherwise, feel free to make his show an utterly 
  outrageous torrent of filth.   
       It’s going to be tough to catch Sicko, since he stays 
  on the move while he’s broadcasting.  Unfortunately, 
  one of the stations he’s interfering with has an owner 
  with Mob connections, and he doesn’t exactly dig the 
  idea of some clown cutting in on his action.  The cops 
  are also prone to overreact, since a whole lot of them 
  are also parents and have caught their kids watching 
  the show on the sly.  Sicko may be in real danger 
  soon. To make matters worse, a supervillain from 
  Texas named Cimarron Starr is in town, and she 
  doesn’t like the way Sicko is interfering with her soap 
  operas.  His unpatriotic tone also offends her, as does 
  the way he mocks televangelists.  She is going to teach 
  this clown to show more respect for decent folks, and 
  has no objection to killing him in the process.  
       "Now sing along kids: 'Who's a twisted pervert and 
  who wears all your panties? S-I-C, K-Y-T, H-E-C-L-
  O...' Ah th' heck with it, I gotta huff some more glue..."  
   
  3) A Very Special Sicko the Clown Christmas 
       Sicko the Clown is beginning to feel the Christmas 
  spirit upon him.  He has taken to hanging out at Santa 
  Claus themed leather bars, with names like “The 
  North Pole” and “Kris Kringle’s Hidey Hole”—places 
  where big dudes dressed like Santa whip guys dressed 
  up as reindeer and bellow “now dash away, dash 
  away, dash away all!”  Joints where you can get a 
  tattoo of a burning tannenbaum on your face at the 
  bar, and the jukebox always seems to be playing “It’s 
  a Holly Jolly Christmas.”   
       But then one sodden Christmas Eve, a guy that 
  everyone calls “Jolly Old Saint Nick” gets busted by 
  the fuzz for selling crank and doing indecent things to 
  a clothing store mannequin, just as he was about to 
  deliver a whole load of toys to a program across town 
  that the Hell’s Angels run for the orphaned kids of 
  outlaw bikers.   
       Sicko is seized with a sudden surge of drunken X-
  mas spirit, and decides to save Christmas.  Alas, his 
  sleazy clown van doesn’t run at the moment and his 
  tires are all in hock.  But there’s a marvy-looking 
  sleigh hanging from the bar’s ceiling which might 
  actually be functional, and after Sicko delivers a 
  rousing drug-crazed rant about what a bastard Santa 
  Claus must be (“Poor kids izz often naughty, in 
  Santa’s book, but rich kids izz  always nice.  Izz juss 
  like my old clown Mama always used to say ‘Sicko’ 
  she’d say, ‘get me my @#$%&*! Marlboros ya little 
  creep!’, which always reminds me of th’ spirit a th’ 
  seezun…”) there are plenty of “reindeer” ready to pull 
  the sleigh across town.  
       He asks the red-nosed little alcoholic who dresses 
  up like Hitler: “Adolph, wit yer nose so bright, won’t 
  you guide my sleigh tonight?”  And off they go, with 
  Adolph the red-nosed Hitler in the lead!   
       Of course, Sicko is a wanted criminal, and any 
  superhero who sees him riding in a sleigh covered 
  with obscene X-mas related graffiti drawn by eight 
  half-naked weirdoes in leather harnesses with fake 
  antlers on their heads will surely assume that clown is 
  up to something dreadful.  I mean, wouldn’t you? His 
  motives are actually noble, for once, but his pathology 
  will never let him admit it to the PCs.   
       To complicate matters, a bigger, meaner 
  supervillain who Sicko has annoyed may show up and 
  try to spoil Christmas for everyone.  Said villain will 
  somehow know all about Sicko’s secret good 
  intentions and will mock him loudly for them.  This 
  should let the PCs know what’s really going on, and 
  not a moment too soon!  Is there still time to save 
  Christmas?  On Adolph, on Pukeface, on Pervert and 
  Witless!  On Vomit, on Rat-Fink! On Stanky and 
  Twisted! Hey wait a minute—it’s July!  What the 
  %$#@*!?? 
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Big John 
   
  Real Name: John Wayne Stimple 
  PL: 9 
  Str: 20 (+5) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 10 Wis: 8 (-1) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +16/+14 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +6 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +2   
  Skills: Intimidate +9, Spot +6, Taunt +5 
  Feats: Chokehold, Great Fortitude, Heroic Surge, 
  Improved Grapple, Iron Will 
  Powers: Growth +9 (Extras: Shockwave, 
  Thunderclap; Power Stunt: Lethal Damage; Flaw: 
  Permanent; Cost: 7pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Murderous Bigot (Big John 
  is incapable of working with members of other ethnic 
  backgrounds and will attack them in preference to all 
  other  targets, even if doing so puts him at a tactical 
  disadvantage) 
   
  “What do I want?  I want a white 
  America.  You give me that, right now, 
  and I’ll surrender.  What’s that?  You 
  say you can’t?  Well then I guess I’ve 
  just got to crush another hostage.  You 
  better watch carefully this time, or I’m 
  gonna make it hurt a lot worse…  Now 
  look at that--you see what you made me 
  do to that poor girl?  You’re responsible 
  for it, you know.  You did this to her.  
  Now let’s take it from the top.  Ask me 
  what I want again.”  
   
       A crazed white supremacist giant on a rampage, 
  leaving a trail of blood and destruction behind him.  
  Bumbling around without purpose or point, he hopes 
  to do as much damage as possible to the people he 
  hates before being gunned down by the cops or the 
  Army.  Above all, he wants to draw attention to 
  himself and to his cause.   
       He's a bully and a killer, aggressive and sadistic.  
  He loves to hit helpless people.  He loves to browbeat 
  and intimidate his victims before crushing them.  He 
  constantly wears a cruel, knowing smirk.  Big John 
  truly believes that the world is run by a secret cabal of 
  Jews and Freemasons, and he thinks you know it too.  
  He's willing to engage in long, scary conversations 
  with people about his ideas, toying with them, letting 
  them think he might not kill them if they can say the 
  right thing.   
       In combat, he’s a ruthless and surprisingly cunning 
  opponent.  He takes hostages as often as he can, and 
  tries to put himself in positions where shooting at him 
  will cause a lot of collateral damage.  He likes to use 
  school busses for cover, he likes to place himself in 
  front of oil storage tanks or strip malls crowded with 
  shoppers.  Kids aren’t safe from him, old people aren’t 
  safe from him, even his fellow white people aren’t 
  safe from him.  While he tries to focus his anger on 
  minorities, gay people and everyone else he hates, Big 
  John can always seem to find an excuse to kill just 
  about anybody.    
       As you might expect, he doesn't really fear death or 
  expect to live much longer--guys who go on cross-
  country killing sprees seldom live to a ripe old age 
  (particularly if they're thirty feet tall and can't hide 
  anywhere).  Yet he does fear both pain and 
  humiliation, and can be threatened with either.   
       John was always big.  He weighed 14 pounds at 
  birth, and was five feet tall by the time he was four 
  years old.  He towered over his teachers in school and 
  his mother at home, which made them afraid of him.  
  So they beat him and terrorized him as much as they 
  could.   
       By the time he was twelve John was seven feet tall 
  and a lot stronger than an ox.  His mother pulled him 
  out of school, banished him to the cellar and told him 
  to stay out of the sight of decent people.  Instead of 
  staying out of sight, he started hanging around by the 
  Mini Mart. He could easily pass for an adult, so 
  nobody questioned why he was there in the middle of 
  the day.  
       He found out about nazism from the public library 
  and TV, although his mom had already told him that 
  black people were evil.  Throughout his adolescence 
  he hung out with other kids who were into the same 
  stuff.  His incredible size, strength and cruelty made 
  him a natural leader.  The group of them set dogs on 
  fire and put the eyes out of squirrels and wished they 
  could get their hands on a black kid. They were known 
  troublemakers, despised by decent folks and 
  constantly hassled by the sheriff.   It always tickled 
  John to think that while every adult he had ever met 
  felt the same way he did about blacks and Jews, the 
  fact that he wore a swastika on his shirt made them 
  hate and fear him.   
       By the time he was fifteen, John was twelve feet 
  tall and could no longer pass for a normal human.  
  Most of his friends were in juvie by then anyway.  He 
  retreated to his Mom’s basement and spent a lot of 
  time watching TV and surfing the web.   
       When he was twenty, he began exchanging e-mail 
  with an online hate group called the Purifiers.  They 
  were a kind of suicide club, constantly egging one 
  another on to run amok in public, kill a bunch of 
  minorities and get gunned down by the cops.  John is 
  the third one to actually do it.   
       At the GM’s discretion, the other Purifiers may be 
  a shabby collection of lunatics and halfwits, or they 
  may actually be a group of paranoid white supremacist 
  
    
  superhumans, ready to tip over like a chain of 
  firecrackers and wreak havoc all across the country.  
  John killed his mother and collapsed their house 
  before he set out on his rampage, but his computer’s 
  hard drive is still salvageable, and who knows what 
  evidence it might contain?   
   
  Using Big John in your campaign: Big 
  John has no intention of being taken alive, and is 
  probably a one-shot villain, who appears, goes on a 
  rampage, and then dies.  However, if the PCs manage 
  to capture him, he can become a recurrent menace.  
  He’ll escape custody if he gets a chance and start his 
  bloody rampage all over again.  While he is vengeful 
  and vindictive, his resources aren’t really great enough 
  for him to effectively hunt most superheroes down 
  (anyway he’s much too busy trying to smash stuff and 
  go out in a blaze of glory) but if he encounters them 
  again he will be pleased and will single them out for 
  special punishment.   
   
  Adventures With Big John: 1) Zero Day 
       One Saturday morning a maniac named Wilbur 
  Munce runs amok and starts shooting people in the 
  parking lot of a synagogue.  He has a lot of hostages 
  and the cops are desperate enough to call the PCs in to 
  stop him.  Overcoming Munce is easy for a team of 
  superheroes, but when the cops look at his apartment 
  they find his connection to the Purifiers’ web site.  It is 
  painfully clear that this group of white supremacist 
  psychopaths has at least one actual parahuman in its 
  ranks, and that he is about to go on a rampage.  Can 
  our heroes stop Big John in time? And come to think 
  of it, why does he call himself “Big John”?   
       The PCs will arrive in John’s home town just 
  slightly too late—he has already caved in his house 
  and walked off into the night.  Now the PCs will have 
  to fight a running cross-country battle, tracking John 
  by the incidents he creates, to stop him before he does 
  something horrendous.  There is a small and 
  predominantly African-American grade school 
  directly in his path, about forty miles away.   
   
  2) Fast Train to Nowhere 
       This scenario assumes that Big John’s rampage 
  covers a much wider swath of territory.  Big John has 
  been smashing his way across the upper Midwest (or 
  some other part of the country, far distant from where 
  the PCs live) for about a month now.  He seems to be 
  able to suddenly vanish when superheroes get too 
  close.  A Player Character gets called out of town to 
  visit a frail and elderly relative (or better yet, the frail 
  and elderly relative of their love interest).  They have 
  stopped at a diner or a rest area near some train tracks, 
  and the Player Character finds themselves 
  momentarily alone, outside.  A freight train rumbles 
  past, and Big John bursts out of one of the cars, 
  landing on the far side of the tracks from the PC.  As 
  the train rumbles between them, the giant marauder 
  sees the PC, smiles sadistically and gestures to 
  indicate that they should keep silent. Perhaps he 
  makes a threatening gesture in the direction of the 
  diner, or the PC’s love interest.  Then John lumbers 
  off to cause havoc somewhere close by.  How does the 
  PC go after Big John without blowing their secret 
  identity?  What will they do about their obligations?  
  How can they get in touch with the rest of the team 
  and what cover story will they use?  Can the team 
  even get here in time to keep Big John from doing 
  something awful?  And will the huge thug really take 
  some kind of twisted revenge against the PC’s loved 
  ones? 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Doctor Shock 
  Real Name: To be determined (see 
  description) 
  PL: 9 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 6 (-2) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10  
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +10  
  Defense: +11/+9 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +5 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +4 Willpower Save: +3  
  Skills: Balance +8, Craft (Electronics) +8, Hide +9, 
  Jump +6, Move Silently +10, Open lock, +8, 
  Profession (to be determined) +5, Read Lips +8 
  Feats: All-Out Attack, Dodge, Improved Initiative, 
  Surprise Attack, Toughness 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +3 (Extras: 
  Willpower, Reflexes: Cost: 3pts) 
  Equipment: Armor +9 (Extra: Damage Field 
  [electric], Paralysis [No Range]; Cost: 2pts), 
  Darkvision (Flaw: Device; Cost: 1pt), Detect 
  Movement (Flaw: Device; Cost: 1pt), Immunity to 
  Suffocation (Flaw: Device; Cost: 1pt) 
  Weaknesses: Disabled: Deaf (-4 Penalty to 
  Initiative, Cannot make Listen skill checks) 
  Quirk: Depraved Complusive Deviate (can't stop 
  harassing his victims even if it's obviously going to get 
  him into trouble). 
   
  “All women crave the burning shock of 
  my tender electric caresses.  And soon 
  they’ll all know my touch.”  
   
       A creepy little peeping Tom who complusively 
  harasses women.  He likes electricity in deeply 
  unhealthy ways and has built himself a "shock-suit" to 
  help satisfy his peculiar appetites.  His Shock Suit is 
  designed to give out both massive jolts of electricity to 
  others and exciting jolts to himself.  He watches his 
  victims from a distance, then invades their homes 
  while they sleep, leaving threatening mash notes for 
  them.   
       He mostly bothers deaf girls and can't understand 
  why they reject him.  All deaf women must want him-
  -who else would have them?  They're freaks, 
  defectives, cruel accidents of nature, unlovable by 
  anyone.  Surely they crave him and his hot electric 
  love!   
       After spying on and harassing a victim for a while, 
  he'll sneak into her room while she sleeps and shock 
  her awake with his electric caresses.  Then he'll go 
  away, and come back to do it again the next night.  
  Someitmes it's hard for his victims to get anyone to 
  believe what is happening, which adds greatly to his 
  relish.  It also makes them more likely to turn to 
  unconventional sources for help (the Player 
  Characters, for example).   
       Doctor Shock has yet to kill or sexually assault 
  anyone (at least in the conventional sense) but who 
  knows what he might become capable of as he 
  explores his vice more deeply.  He prefers not to get 
  into direct confrontations with the authorities, but 
  unlike the usual stereotype of a peeping Tom he is no 
  coward and although he has never fought a superhero 
  hand to hand he would find the prospect thrilling.  If 
  the battle is going well, he may linger too long at the 
  scene, unable to control his glee.  He doesn't feel a lot 
  of moral compunctions and certainly wouldn't mind 
  taking a hostage if it either helps his chances of getting 
  away or makes the situation more exciting.   
       Doctor Shock never speaks, but does leave copies 
  of his "Electric Love Manifesto" lying around to 
  explain his motives.  He is of course deaf himself.   
   
  Using Doctor Shock in your 
  campaign: Dr. Shock probably won’t stand up to 
  an assault by a team of superheroes for long, so the 
  key to using him right is to keep him offstage for as 
  long as possible, letting the tension build and build as 
  the PCs match wits with him at a distance.  He’s really 
  meant for creepy, atmospheric mysteries rather than 
  for street brawls.  We’ve left his identity undetermined 
  so that you can make this part of the mystery—
  perhaps he turns out to be someone his victim (or the 
  Player Characters) already knows, or even someone 
  who is helping them with the investigation.   
       He could well be a one-shot villain who dies or 
  gets sent to prison forever after his rampage, but if he 
  ever gets out again he’s going to build himself another 
  shock suit and go right back to doing what he loves.  
  Or perhaps he’ll start stalking a PC’s loved ones. 
   
  Adventures With Doctor Shock: 1) The 
  Unfortunate Van Valkenburg Matter 
       Doctor Shock torments a young deaf woman 
  named Miranda Van Valkenburg until she commits 
  suicide. A friend of hers is the deaf cousin, sister, 
  girlfriend or other close female acquaintance of a 
  Player Character. She hadn’t seen Miranda in some 
  time, and regrets it bitterly.  While going through 
  some of Miranda’s things, she finds her diary.  There 
  are only a few entries from after Doctor Shock started 
  terrorizing her—she was too upset to write very much.  
  It seems clear from what little she did write that no 
  one believed her, everyone thought she was crazy or 
  desperate for attention, so she decided to kill herself.   
       In addition the diary, the PC’s friend finds a copy 
  of the Electric Love Manifesto.  She does not know 
  that Doctor Shock is watching her through the window 
  as she reads it, or that she is about to become his next 
  victim.    
        The Doctor starts harassing her slowly and 
  cruelly—letting her glimpse him outside her window, 
  leaving threatening notes.  She doesn’t know what to 
  do, no one will believe her, just like they didn’t 
  
    
  believe Miranda. She isn’t even sure that she believes 
  it herself.  Initially she won’t want to talk to the Player 
  Character about this, but if they press her she tells 
  them the whole story and shows them the evidence.  
  And just in the nick of time!  For Doctor Shock is 
  about to move things up to the next stage.   
   
  2) School of Shock 
       Dr. Shock terrorizes the women’s dormitory in a 
  large school for the deaf.  He is already on his third 
  victim by the time the Player Characters get called in.   
       The first victim transferred out of the school when 
  she found that no one would believe her stories about 
  an electric marauder who abused her in the dead of 
  night, in her room, with her roommate asleep on the 
  next bed.  When he started to harass a second victim 
  the school started treating it seriously, but before they 
  had a chance to involve the police the second girl feel 
  down the stairs (perhaps by accident, perhaps not) and 
  wound up in the hospital, unconscious.   He has now 
  transferred his affections to another student, although 
  by the time the Player Characters learn about these 
  events he hasn’t done more than leave her threatening 
  messages and a copy of his unsavory “Electric Love 
  Manifesto.”   
       It is possible that the Player Characters have been 
  brought in as consultants, to resolve this matter 
  discreetly, but it’s almost more interesting if one of 
  them has instead been drawn in through their secret 
  identity—perhaps as a staff member, counselor, 
  teacher or even a student at the school.   
       We have left Doctor Shock’s identity unspecified 
  because that can be one of the most intriguing parts of 
  the mystery.  He is deaf, and he is somehow able to 
  open any locked door in the building.  Is he the creepy 
  janitor? A male student?  A teacher?  The school 
  psychologist?  The headmaster?  Some weird guy who 
  lives across the street and has nothing to do with the 
  school? Do whatever would be most dramatic and 
  scary. 
   
   
   
  
    
  Mano del Muerte 
  Real Name: Ramon Ochoa 
  PL: 9 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 9 (-1) Wis: 6 (-2) Cha: 2 (–4) 
  Initiative: +3 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  (+9L Damage Field) Attack Bonus (Ranged): 
  +12  Defense: +23/+19 Speed: 35 
  Damage Save: +4/+6 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +3 Reflexes Save: +3 Willpower 
  Save: +-2   
  Skills: Hide +9, Listen +9, Move Silently +9 
  Feats: Darkvision, Dodge, Durability, Evasion 
  Powers: Super-Wisdom +9 (Flaw: only counts 
  toward resisting mental attacks; Cost: 1pt), Energy 
  Blast +9 (Extras: Damage Field, Subtle; Power Stunts: 
  Pentetrating Attack x4; Cost: 4pts),  Obscure +5 
  (Flaw: Partial; Cost 1pt), Protection +9 (Cost: 2pts), 
  Running +1 (Cost: 2pts) 
  Weaknesses: Disturbing (looks like a mutilated 
  ruin of a man, makes all Diplomacy and Bluff checks 
  at a -5) 
  Quirk: Paranoid schizophrenic (the Mano del Muerte 
  is dangerously out of touch with reality, which leads 
  him to make grave errors and do terrible things) 
   
  "America! Cruel goddess!  I raise 
  monuments of blood to slake your 
  appetites, though it wounds my mind and 
  damns my soul."   
   
       A crazy, murderous, rampaging lunatic with 
  superhuman powers.  He has somehow been cursed 
  with the ability to kill with a touch or a glance, 
  rupturing blood vessels, melting flesh, causing spasms  
  and convulsions.   
       We don't know much about how he gained his 
  powers or went mad.  He served in the US Army, in 
  hopes of distinguishing himself enough to gain 
  citizenship, and may have been considered for some 
  sort of superhuman combat unit.  Some of his records 
  are classified, but it at least seems clear that he was 
  discharged for psychological instability and that he 
  had some kind of trouble with his resident alien status 
  after that. Did he volunteer for some kind of 
  dangerous experimental treatment, in hopes of 
  becoming a citizen? Did it give him psychic powers?  
  Did it exacerbate his mental instability?  Did they 
  sense that he might be dangerous and try to have him 
  kicked out of the country?  We will probably never 
  know.  His own ideas on the topic are uselessly 
  deranged.  
       Completely insane, hopelessly delusional, he thinks 
  that people are asking him to sacrifice them to the God 
  of Blood, so that America can stay strong, immune to 
  foreign influences.  He will go to some random 
  location and ask the people he finds there if they want 
  to be sacrificed for the Blood God's greater glory, that 
  America might shine pure.  They always answer yes, 
  to his continual surprise (or at least that's what he 
  thinks they're saying) and although he hates to kill 
  people, what choice does he have?  Just think what 
  would happen if he didn't kill them!  America overrun 
  by foreigners, corrupted and made to serve as a 
  festering breeding pool for their foreign influences, 
  contaminating the rest of the world with their 
  foreingness!  Before he kills them, he asks the 
  sacrifices where he should go next and they always 
  give him another address (or at least he thinks they 
  do).  
       Mano del Muerte is sentimental about children and 
  cute things and cries a lot over his victims, both before 
  and after he kills them.  He would never, ever hurt a 
  child or an animal and could be dissuaded from taking 
  a sacrifice if he thought a child might see him do it. 
  He has five kids of his own, back home in Bolivia, and 
  he misses them terribly.  Sometimes he gets one of 
  them confused with some child here in the states and 
  will leave gifts for them outside their window, or 
  follow them down the street at night to make sure 
  they're safe.  Sometimes he misunderstands a 
  stranger's intentions toward "his" child and kills them.   
   
  Using Mano del Muerte in your 
  campaign: Adventures with the Mano del Muerte 
  should always take place at night and the atmosphere 
  should always be as creepy as possible.  While he does 
  have some unexpected tricks up his sleeve, he won’t 
  provide much challenge in a knock-down, drag-out 
  fight.  Therefore the PCs should only get solid chance 
  to come to grips with him right at the end of the 
  scenario.  Most of the adventure will usually involve 
  trying to figure out his motives and then intercepting 
  him wherever he is about to strike next, before any 
  more innocent people die.  
       He’s as pitiable as he is scary, but he’s also exactly 
  the kind of villain who tempts the PCs to use lethal 
  force.  If he survives his first encounter with the 
  Player Characters, they could dedicate themselves to 
  trying to cure his condition or they could just have him 
  locked away forever.  He’s not a competent escape 
  artist, but if you feel that the PCs would enjoy fighting 
  him again then he could get loose in some kind of 
  accident or mass prison break.  However you decide to 
  use him, he should not become the kind of villain who 
  shows up every week, since that would make him less 
  frightening. 
   
  Adventures With Mano del Muerte: 1) 
  Hand of Death, Clutch of Fear 
       The city is gripped with fear as the mad killer 
  called the Mano del Muerte stalks its streets by night.  
  No one has yet been able to catch the fiend in the act 
  of his grisly crimes and no one knows where he might 
  strike next.   
  
    
       The state and municipal authorities have formed a 
  joint task force to apprehend Mano del Muerte and 
  one member of the task force asks the Player 
  Characters to informally participate.  The contact 
  should ideally be someone the PCs think of as honest 
  but whom they don’t know very well on a personal 
  level.  Of course you should use your own best 
  judgment here.  If some other character would work 
  best for your PC group, use them instead.   
       It is unclear whether or not City Hall has tacitly 
  approved the PCs involvement.  The city authorities 
  seem unusually willing to cooperate with or at least 
  turn a blind eye to the PCs’ activities, but tat the same 
  time their contact really does seem to be making an 
  effort to keep at least some members of the task force 
  from knowing that the PCs are involved.   
       As the PCs read reports on Mano del Muerte’s 
  crimes and hear testimony from eyewitnesses, the 
  nature of his motivations slowly starts to emerge. It 
  becomes clear that he’s actually choosing addresses at 
  random, but because he thinks that each victim is 
  telling him where to go to find the next one, it might 
  be possible to figure out his next destination from 
  something a witness overhears him saying to a victim. 
  After they have explained this to their contact, they get 
  a lucky break. The very next time they are out on 
  patrol, tracking down another potential sighting, their 
  contact gets in touch.  A new eyewitness has just come 
  forward, and she heard Mano del Murte say something 
  that clearly indicates the major city landmark right 
  next to where he will take his next victim. Actually 
  it’s a little ambiguous (just enough to put a little doubt 
  into your players’ minds) but it certainly seems to 
  indicate where he’s going.   
       A squad of police officers moves in to confront the 
  killer, but the PCs are closer and they get there first. A 
  terrible downpour opens up over the city just as the 
  PCs arrive at the scene.  Somewhere out there in the 
  dark and rain lurks the Mano del Muerte, poised to 
  strike.   
   
   
  2) Carnival of Sorrows   
       Mano del Muerte stalks the city by night, spreading 
  carnage and woe. The Player Characters are hunting 
  him on their own, without any support from the 
  authorities.  By talking to witnesses and studying the 
  pattern of his crimes they are just starting to get a 
  sense of why he’s killing people and how to figure out 
  where he intends to strike next, when a stage incident 
  is brought to their attention.  A criminal named 
  Ignacio Ruiz is found murdered on his ex-wife’s 
  doorstep.  A policeman lies dead beside him.  Both 
  men were killed by the Mano del Muerte.  Ruiz’ ex-
  wife tearfully notes that her little boy, Hector, is 
  missing.   
       Ignacio was stalking his ex-wife and stepson and 
  he had sworn to do them both grievous harm  There 
  was already a restraining order out against him, but 
  she knew it wouldn’t do any good and fully excepted 
  that he would kill them sooner or later.  
       In fact Ingnacio Ruiz accosted his stepson on the 
  steps and while the two of them struggled, Mano del 
  Muerte happened by the scene.  He mistook little 
  Hector for one of his own sons, and swiftly moved to 
  protect him, killing Ruiz dead on the spot.  He slunk 
  back into the shadows to watch over “his” boy from a 
  distance, but some of the neighbors had heard the 
  altercation and called the police.  A squad car 
  happened to be right in the vicinity, and when the 
  police officer inside got out to talk to Hector, Mano 
  del Muerte misunderstood his intentions and killed 
  him too.   
       Hector wandered off in shock, but there are 
  witnesses who have seen him, and seen the weird and 
  horrible figure that follows him. Various people 
  attempt to talk to or help Hector, and Mano del Muerte 
  kills them.  And just as the PCs start to catch up, the 
  boy and his shadowy protector wander into a carnival. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Chapter 2: Moderate 
  Threats 
   
   
  Broken Arrow 
   
  Real Name: John Wolf 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 14 (+2) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +8 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +13  
  Defense: +20/+12 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2/+9 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +2 Reflexes Save: +10 Willpower 
  Save: +4   
  Skills: Acrobatics +6, Balance +6, Diplomacy +5, 
  Gather Information +5, Hide +5, Knowledge (Indian 
  Reservations) +5, Listen +9, Move Silently +10, 
  Search +5, Sense Motive +5, Spot +9, Survival +5 
  Feats: Attack Focus (Bow), Connected, Dodge, 
  Evasion, Expertise, Far Shot (Bow), Infamy, Instant 
  Stand, Lightning Reflexes, Point-Blank Shot, Precise 
  Shot, Tracking 
   
  Powers: Super-Dexterity +4 (Extra: Super-Senses; 
  Cost 4pts) 
  Equipment: Bow (+5 Lethal; Extra: Explosive 
  Effect [Exploding Arrow], Power Stunts: Obscure 
  [Smoke-Screen Arrow]; Cost: 2pts), Armor +4 (Cost: 
  1pt) 
  Weaknesses: Disabled: Missing one arm below 
  the elbow, can't use his prosthetic hand to do anything 
  but hold objects 
   
  “All any man can ask the world to give 
  him is justice--but most guys are too 
  smart to ask. So I guess you can see I 
  was never all that bright.”    
   
       A bitter, misunderstood Native American vigilante 
  from the Ogalala Sioux reservation.  He's generally 
  thought of as a crazy Indian separatist who uses terror 
  and violence to intimidate anyone who disagrees with 
  his lunatic ideology. The truth is far different.  Broken 
  Arrow fights corruption, organized crime and the 
  shadowy power of the mining interests on reservation 
  land (all of which are deeply intertwined).   
       His stepfather was a tribal policeman, who tried his 
  best to help people, but wasn’t able to accomplish very 
  much.  The grind of police work wore him down, 
  made him drink, made him beat his wife and kids.  He 
  was so busy trying to be a good man at work that he 
  became a monster at home.  To avoid his stepfather’s 
  erratic wrath, John took to spending as much of his 
  time as possible outdoors.  He hunted, fished, taught 
  himself to navigate by the stars and sometimes didn’t 
  come home for days.   
       His grandmother understood him, and he spent a lot 
  of time at her place, too.  Although she didn’t have 
  much education, she was an activist and an outspoken 
  woman, and she taught him a lot about his people’s 
  tragic history.   
       John left the reservation at age 18, and joined the 
  Army. They noticed his skills as a marksman pretty 
  quickly, and signed him up for sniper training.  Before 
  long he was reassigned to the Rangers, then to the 
  Delta Force, and then to a super-secret elite unit called 
  “Team Seven.”  An extremely competent sniper, and 
  an all around superb soldier, he was nearly the equal 
  of the team’s legendary squad leader Silvio Strozzi 
  (who later became the supervillain known as the Ace 
  of Wounds).   
  
    
       John lost his right arm below the elbow on a 
  mission during the first Gulf War, so he took his 
  pension and went home.  That missing arm has saved 
  his life many times since—everyone assumes that he 
  couldn’t possibly be Broken Arrow when he has no 
  right hand (in fact he just uses his prosthetic hand to 
  hold the bow, and aims with his left).  
       It was the first time he had been home in years, and 
  it was a troubled period on the reservation.  There was 
  unrest and repression.  A lot of people were fed up 
  with the tribal government and the amount of 
  influence the big mining companies had over it.  There 
  were underground groups who resisted the status quo 
  with bombs and there were vicious reprisals against 
  them.   
       John was a quiet, cautious guy by nature, but he 
  couldn’t stay clear of the struggle for long.  His 
  grandma was still alive and still an activist, his little 
  brother Fred was involved in the underground—if 
  nothing else, John he had to get involved to protect 
  them.   
       During this same period he got back together with 
  his old high-school girlfriend, a gorgeous young 
  woman named Eudora Leaps-Tall, who was trying her 
  best to get enough money together to go to Wyoming 
  State University and become a nurse.  She wasn’t 
  political, but after hanging out with John for a while 
  she began to take an interest herself.   They got 
  married almost on impulse.   
       Alas, these were bad days to start taking an interest 
  in politics.  People who spoke out against the mining 
  consortiums and the shady deals that certain parties on 
  the tribal council had cut with them had a way of 
  dying sudden violent deaths.  First Fred turned up 
  decapitated in a ditch, then Eudora vanished on her 
  way home from her night job (she was never found, 
  although John has his suspicions about where her body 
  may be buried) and then someone marched Grandma 
  out into the woods and shot her in the head.  John 
  couldn’t protect a single one of them, and he was 
  losing other friends, too.  
       It was around the time his Grandma died that he 
  went a little insane, took his bow, put on a mask and 
  started to fight back.  For the past ten years he’s 
  battled corruption and organized crime, first on the 
  Ogalala reservation and then as his reputation grew, 
  on other reservations across the West.   These days he 
  often feels it took him much too long to take up his 
  knife.    
       An unhappy man, he tells lots of bitter jokes and 
  drinks too much.  He has lost a great deal and seen 
  many terrible things, both on Team Seven and 
  afterwards.  When asked about the subject of revenge, 
  he always replies with some version of the following 
  rant: “Now here’s a funny thing about revenge.  
  There’s no such thing.  The scale never balances.  
  Why?  Because there’s no scale.  I take three guys, I 
  knock one eye out of each of ‘em, and what are you 
  gonna to do to me?  I only got two eyes, and anyway 
  losing both your eyes is more than twice as bad as 
  losing one of them.  If my life is worthless (which it is) 
  and I kill a guy whose life was valuable, how you 
  gonna make the scales balance? Forget it. There’s no 
  scale.  So don’t trick yourself about why we do what 
  we do.”   
       It is hard to say whether or not he would resort to 
  killing an enemy.  The matter hasn't yet come up, but 
  it's bound to eventually.  He most certainly would not 
  take hostages, but he might terrorize or threaten an 
  enemy to get information out of them, and in an 
  emergency might resort to actually torturing them 
  (although he would feel terrible about doing it).   
       He is a canny, cagey opponent who knows how to 
  use the ground to his advantage.  In combat with other 
  superbeings, he will always try to hit them from a 
  distance and to take them by surprise.  He wears a lot 
  of body armor but he knows that his defenses won’t 
  hold up against guys who can put holes in the sides of 
  tanks.  A straightforward sniper without a lot of 
  money to spend on an arsenal, he uses a minimal 
  range of special “trick” arrows and mostly just 
  concentrates on hitting the target really well.   
       Broken Arrow is a controversial figure even on the 
  reservation.  He does have connections with the most 
  extreme wing of the native separatist underground, but 
  he doesn’t believe in their credo. He regards 
  overthrowing the US government as an unrealistic 
  goal.  However, they hate the existing power structure 
  as much as he does, so they make good part-time 
  allies.  He’s out to make things better for the ordinary 
  reservation Indian, and the seperatists are useful tools 
  to help him achieve that goal.   
       While his grandmother taught him a few of the old 
  tribal religious rituals, he practices them more to 
  honor her memory than anything else.  Personally, he 
  believes in no gods at all—but he does believe in his 
  grandma.  English is his first language and he actually 
  can’t speak Sioux as well as he would like.  He really 
  doesn’t have a secret identity anymore, and spends 
  nearly all his time underground, in costume.  
  Sometimes he sleeps in his body armor.  It amuses 
  him in a twisted way that he is called a terrorist and a 
  supervillain, but it doesn't surprise him.    
   
  Using Broken Arrow in your 
  campaign: Instead of dragging the PCs out to the 
  wilderness, it’s almost better to have Broken Arrow 
  come menace them on their home ground.  See the 
  adventure seeds below for some examples of how to 
  do this.  He isn’t tough enough to take on a whole 
  gang of PL 10 heroes by himself, but then again he 
  usually isn’t the real villain of the scenario, either.  
  Typically he’ll appear, hunting some other villain or 
  criminal, the PCs will misinterpret his motives, attack 
  him, defeat him, and only then find out that they have 
  misunderstood things and that something bad is about 
  to happen if they don’t team up with Broken Arrow to 
  stop it. Of course this approach only works once with 
  any given PC group, so after their first encounter he 
  can become a helpful but seldom-seen ally, or a source 
  of adventure leads.   
       Broken Arrow operates in a completely different 
  part of the country from the Mafia supervillain known 
  
    
  as the Ace of Wounds, so the odds of them running 
  into each other is low.  If they did, they would both 
  immediately recognize each other from Team Seven.  
  It would no doubt occur to each of them the other one 
  knows their secret identity, but they’re both reasonable 
  men and they would probably be able to work 
  something out that doesn’t involve killing each other. 
   
  Adventures With Broken Arrow:  
   
  1) Tiny Lester’s Great Big Problem 
       A terrified biker named “Tiny” Lester Scruggs 
  comes to the Player Characters and tells them that he 
  knows Broken Arrow’s secret identity.  They’ve got to 
  hide him, to get him into federal witness protection or 
  something—the guy is crazy and he’s coming to kill 
  Tiny Lester.   
       All of this is a lie, except for the part about Broken 
  Arrow coming for him.  In fact Broken Arrow is after 
  Lester Scruggs because he supplied crank to a gang on 
  the Navajo reservation, shot people with casual 
  abandon whenever it suited him, and may have 
  sparked a major gang war between the Insane Young 
  Vipers and the Navajo chapter of the Crips.   
       Broken Arrow intends to turn him over to one of 
  the rival gang factions as a peace offering, in hopes of 
  ending the war.  But the Insane Young Vipers have 
  already sent a hit squad after Lester, which may arrive 
  at any moment.  The PCs may be surprised to see that 
  despite being reservation kids they dress in hip-hop 
  clothes and speak the same gangsta dialect as an inner 
  city gang, with a few Navajo words mixed in.   
       Meanwhile Lester has been trying to get some of 
  his outlaw biker friends to join the party, just to make 
  things really interesting.  
   
  2) A Standing Dog and a Lying Hound 
       A prominent Native American leader named Ron 
  Washi has come to town to drum up investors for a 
  new Indian casino.  He’s going to throw a big party at 
  a hotel and schmooze the business community for 
  some cash. However, the word is out that radical 
  Native American separatists may attempt to disrupt 
  the party, or even kill Ron Washi.  They say that 
  Broken Arrow himself may be coming.   
       And indeed Broken Arrow is on his way—but not 
  to kill Ron.  In fact a ruthless business rival named 
  Norville Standing Dog wants to build his own casino, 
  with the backing of organized crime, and Ron Washi’s 
  proposal is getting in the way.  Standing Dog has 
  arranged to have Mr. Washi killed at his party.   
       Ron is something of a crusader—he wants to build 
  a casino that will bring money to the reservation.  
  Norville Standing Dog wants a casino that will funnel 
  most of its revenue into the coffers of the mob.        
       Broken Arrow favors Mr. Washi’s proposal.  
  Furthermore, a public execution like this will make it 
  that much harder for indian casinos to find investors 
  who aren’t tied in to organized crime.  Even though he 
  regards Ron as a sellout and a greedy fat cat, Broken 
  Arrow is here to protect the man.   
       If the GM wants to complicate things, perhaps 
  Norville Standing Dog has hired a supervillain to carry 
  out the hit—someone too big for Broken Arrow to 
  handle by himself, like the Snow Queen or the 
  Diamond Deuce.  Either way, it’s going to be one hell 
  of a party! 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  U-Go-Grrrl 
  Real Name: Courtney Amber Lopez 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 19 (+4) Con: 12 (+1) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 9 (-1) Cha: 18 (+4) 
  Initiative: +14 Attack Bonus (Melee): +7 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +9  
  Defense: +30/+16 Speed: 80 (Super-Speed) 
  Damage Save: +1/+14 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +1 Reflexes Save: +14 Willpower 
  Save: +-1  
  Skills: Balance +10, Bluff +5, Diplomacy+5, 
  Intimidate +8, Taunt +10 
  Feats: Connected, Dodge, Fame, Evasion, Legal 
  Immunity (New Feat, grants a +3 to any rolls made to 
  escape legal prosecution), Minions (business managers 
  and enterouge, 15 PL 1 characters and 1 PL 2), Move-
  By Attack, Rapid Strike 
  Powers: Super-Speed +10 (Power Stunts: Wall 
  Run, Water Run; Cost: 6pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Develops obsessive, 
  irrational, self-destructive crushes and does all kinds 
  of stupid and dangerous things to get the attention of 
  her prospective paramour. 
   
  “Now there’s a rack of abs that even 
  makes my heart beat faster! Wooo-hooo!  
  Heyyougottagirlfriendmisterhuhuhu 
  huh?”  
   
       Perhaps the fastest woman alive, able to run at 
  twice the speed of sound.  She's a bit of a media 
  darling, mostly because of her loud, brassy personality 
  and her controversial behavior.   
       Until recently part of a large and celebrated 
  superhero group, U-Go-Grrrl caused so much havoc 
  on the team that they expelled her.  She's still a 
  celebrity despite her expulsion and makes a lot of 
  public appearances.  People love U-Go-Grrrl, or love 
  to hate her.   
       In person she is twitchy, manic and constantly 
  fidgets at superhuman speed.  She has no attention 
  span and gets bored in a flash.  When she gets bored, 
  she breaks things, and is forever trashing hotel rooms 
  and causing trouble in public. Violent, nuts, leering 
  and inappropriate, she flirts broadly, badly and often.  
  She also has a way of developing unhealthy obsessive 
  crushes on male player characters.  She's much too 
  crazy and socially maladroit to express her feelings in 
  any kind of reasonable way, and will try to get their 
  attention by playing dangerous high-speed pranks on 
  them.  The more the player ignores or rejects her, the 
  more she will escalate her tactics, getting wilder and 
  more outrageous.  This is going to get somebody 
  killed if it isn't stopped.   
       Unfortunately, stopping it is going to be tough.  
  Her powers make her hard to catch and her status as a 
  celebrity shields her to a large degree from arrest. 
  Some very powerful people have made a lot of money 
  from the public's interest in U-Go-Grrrl and they aren't 
  about to let her go to prison if they can help it.  She 
  also has a kind of limited immunity from prosecution, 
  a holdover from her days as a superhero. Whether this 
  would hold up in court now that she isn't fighting 
  crime or saving the world is debatable, but her lawyers 
  and business managers will try to use it anyway. 
   
  Using U-Go-Grrrl in your campaign:     
       U-Go-Grrrl can be played as a comic annoyance or 
  a serious, scary menace, depending on how the GM 
  wants to present her.  She should meet one of the male 
  PCs in some kind of public social setting, act 
  obnoxious (perhaps get abusive with a waiter or some 
  hapless service person) appall them and leave. Make 
  sure that she doesn’t actually do anything illegal, but 
  that she’s so awful that the PC would never even 
  consider getting involved with her.  
       Only later, perhaps between some other adventures, 
  will she start playing pranks on them and trying to get 
  their attention.  It all goes downhill from there. 
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  The Unicorn 
  Real Name: April Pfeffner 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 8 (-1) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 14 (+2) Int: 
  14 (+2) Wis: 8 (-1) Cha: 20 (+5) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +4 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +6/+9 (Mental 
  Attacks) Defense: +18/+17 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +8 Willpower Save: +6  
  Skills: Bluff +8, Diplomacy +11, Handle Animal 
  +10, Intimidate +12, Innuendo +10 
  Feats: Detect Negative Thoughts, Psychic 
  Awareness, See Invisibility, Startle, Trance, True 
  Seeing 
  Powers: Amazing Reflexes Save +7 (Extra: Also 
  Applies to Willpower Saves; Cost: 2pts), Obscure +10 
  (Flaw: Partial, Cost: 1pt), Telepathy +10 (Extras: 
  Illusions [Creatures Only], Mind Control, Cost 4pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Irrational fear and hatred of 
  "Bad Thoughts." Compulsively tries to stamp them out 
  with Mind Control, regardless of the consaquences to 
  herself or others. 
   
  “Please, you have to stop hating one 
  another before I do something awful!”  
   
  A tormented psychic who has great difficulty shutting  
  out the thoughts of others.  Negative thoughts cause 
  her terrible pain and unhappiness and this has made 
  her irrationally obsessed with stamping them out.  The 
  Unicorn wants everyone to be nice, to treat one 
  another decently, to be happy and above all to think no 
  bad thoughts.  She's a powerful enough telepath to 
  force them if they refuse.   Not blessed with any sense 
  of restraint or practicality, she causes havoc in public, 
  projecting images of butterflies, winged horses and 
  dolphins flying through space into the minds of 
  everyone around her, screaming that the new age of 
  joy and splendor is at hand.  She doesn't want to hurt 
  anybody, just to make them hold hands, sing songs 
  about love and rainbows and forsake the cruel world 
  that oppresses them.  If she wanted to do this in 
  private, or on a commune off somewhere in the 
  woods, it would be merely unwholesome, but the 
  Unicorn will do it on crowded city streets at rush hour, 
  tying up traffic and bringing out the SWAT teams.   
       She has a very vivid inner fantasy life and is a 
  spectacular telepathic combatant, projecting huge 
  halos, coronas and streams of butterflies everywhere 
  around her, making her voice seem to thunder from 
  the clouds. She will avoid causing anyone physical 
  pain, and will rely on the strength of her telepathy to 
  force them into submission. Her powers are strong 
  enough to affect lots of people at once and so battles 
  that involve the Unicorn usually have large numbers 
  of innocent bystanders clogging up the field and 
  getting in the way.   
       It may also give some heroes pause to beat the 
  living daylights out of a fragile, wide-eyed young 
  woman who genuinely doesn't want to hurt anyone.  
  Then again, if they don't drag her off to jail a police 
  tactical unit is likely to put a bullet in her poor addled 
  brain.   
       Her background is unremarkable.  Both her parents 
  are moderately successful real estate brokers.  They 
  are both charming and weak, easily influenced by 
  other people and painfully afraid of disapproval.  Her 
  father has an unconscious, low-level psychic ability to 
  make people buy houses, but it’s nothing on the same 
  scale as the Unicorn.  She grew up skinny and lonely, 
  an only child, and has been reading people’s thoughts 
  for as long as she can remember.  Always desperate to 
  please but achingly shy, she was an unpopular kid 
  until high school, when her fragile, waif-like beauty 
  became apparent. She could read minds better and 
  better as her brain matured, and she didn’t like what 
  she saw there. Nonetheless, it was a good way to help 
  get along.   
       Now she’s in her first year of college, and a bad 
  LSD experience has magnified her powers 
  enormously.  She can control minds as well as read 
  them, and she can’t shut out the torrent of negative 
  feelings that people radiate.  The world is in agony, 
  and it must stop hurting before it drives her insane.   
   
  Using The Unicorn in your campaign: 
  The PCs will first encounter the Unicorn shortly after 
  her psychic breakthrough. She is disoriented and 
  afraid, trying desperately to make the voices in her 
  head stop screaming and she has no idea how to do 
  this, apart from grabbing every mind within her reach 
  and forcing it to think nice thoughts. Depending on 
  how the encounter goes, she could be a one-shot tragic 
  villain who appears, wreaks havoc and dies before the 
  PCs can save her, or a recurring threat who comes 
  back a little different each time she faces our heroes.   
       If they can convince her to just leave and find 
  somewhere less populated to live, she will try to do it, 
  but after a few months in the wilderness she will find 
  to her horror that she can still faintly hear the cities 
  crying out to her in pain, and that their voices are 
  getting louder all the time.  She will return to heal 
  their pain the only way she knows how—by forcing 
  them.   
       If the PCs convince her to get therapy and take 
  some kind of medication that will suppress her 
  superhuman abilities, she will try to comply with the 
  program, but then find to her shock that she feels dead 
  inside without her powers.  To someone who has been 
  able to read thoughts and feelings all her life, this is 
  like being struck deaf or blind.  She will lapse into a 
  deep depression, stop taking her drugs and go publicly 
  berserk once again.   
       If she is confined to an institution, she gets abused 
  there and eventually escapes.  Now she’s angry and 
  will no longer trust the PCs or any other authority 
  
    
  figures.  They told her she would be safe and people 
  would take care of her in the hospital.  Instead they 
  hurt her!   
       Once the Unicorn has resurfaced a couple of times, 
  she develops a disorganized cult-like following who 
  will try to protect her and get in the PCs’ way.  
  Unscrupulous psychic villains (like the man who calls 
  himself “God”—see his description on page 24) may 
  find out about her and try to exploit her for their own 
  nefarious ends.  Perhaps the best solution to the 
  Unicorn’s problems is to find her a powerful psychic 
  teacher who can help her use and control her gifts, in 
  which case she may turn into a different kind of 
  character altogether—perhaps even a superheroine.  A 
  Buddhist monastery might also provide her with a safe 
  haven, particularly if it’s geographically isolated.  
  Getting them to accept a woman as a monk may prove 
  difficult, however (depending on the tradition they 
  follow) and it may even start to cause the kind of 
  psychic disruptions in their community that could 
  trigger another one of her mental collapses.   
   
  Adventures With The Unicorn:  
  Be Happy or Else 
       An utterly mysterious disaster has gripped the 
  downtown area.  Just as the evening rush hour began, 
  some kind of traffic disturbance appeared in front of a 
  major local landmark (use whatever landmarks would 
  be appropriate to your campaign city), traffic is now 
  gridlocked for miles in all directions, and yet no one 
  seems to know exactly what is causing it.  In fact 
  they’re not exactly sure where the source of the 
  problem is—it can be tough to tell with traffic patterns 
  and the landmark is really just where things are 
  clogged up worst.  The police who went to the scene 
  twenty minutes ago haven’t come back or checked in, 
  and the authorities are starting to get seriously 
  worried.   
       A traffic helicopter arrived about five minutes later 
  and then suddenly dropped out of contact.  They’re 
  still going through the tape of the broadcast when the 
  PCs are summoned to look into the matter.  If the 
  Player Characters stick around to see what the last part 
  of the tape shows, it doesn’t reveal much.  A lot of 
  cars aren’t moving, a lot of people have left their 
  vehicles and are standing on the street, it’s hard to be 
  sure, but most of them seem to be looking at 
  something off-camera.  Oddly, no one in the news 
  chopper is providing any kind of voice-over narration.  
  The only sound on the tape is the noise of the 
  helicopter’s whirling blades.   
       When the PCs arrive at the landmark, the Unicorn 
  is holding a giant crowd rapt as she begs them to stop 
  hating one another and to believe in the power of 
  rainbows and butterflies.  Huge illusory images seem 
  to blaze above her in the sky. Swarms of butterflies 
  and winged unicorns flying under rainbows and 
  dolphins swimming through the void of outer space 
  and even sillier things.  Some people are still yelling at 
  her to let them get home to their families and their 
  dinner, and she is trying her best to answer them.  She 
  looks frightened and overwhelmed.  Then she senses 
  the PCs’ presence and looks right at them.   
       How to deal with this situation?  The SWAT teams 
  are on their way and the national guard is next.  As the 
  PCs try to reason with the Unicorn, one of them gets a 
  text message (or some other such thing) from the 
  Mayor’s office.  It says “Keep her distracted while we 
  get the sharpshooters into position.” 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Vampire Girl 
  Real Name: Unknown (isn't sure herself) 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 12 (+1) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 18 (+4) 
  Initiative: +3 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +13/+10 Speed: 30/35 (Teleport)/45 (Float) 
  Damage Save: +5 Fortitude Save: +5 
  Reflexes Save: +3 Willpower Save: +0  
  Skills: Bluff +10, Hide +8, Knowledge (weird 
  things) +5, Move Silently +8 
  Feats: Darkvision, Durability, Immunity (Aging, 
  Disease, Poison, Suffocation) 
  Powers: Drain +10 (Flaw: Only Drains 
  Constitution; Cost 1pt), Incorporeal +9 (Extra: Float; 
  Flaw: Only Works at Night; Cost: 2pts), Regeneration 
  +8 (Flaw: Only Works at Night, Cost: 1pt), Telepathy 
  +10 (Extra: Mental Protection; Cost 3pts), Teleport +7 
  (Flaw: Only Works at Night; Cost: 1pt) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Compulsive Liar, must 
  make a Willpower Save vs. DC 20 to tell anyone the 
  truth about anything.   
  Quirk: Delusion (Thinks she is Susceptible to 
  sunlight) 
   
  “Life is a ghastly nightmare carnival of 
  shadows.  That’s what I like about it.”   
   
  She only appears at night, she can float in midair, 
  vanish into nothing and she drains the lifeforce of the  
  living.  Is she the thing the vampire legends speak of?  
  That is difficult to say.  In fact nobody knows who or 
  what she is at all, which suits her fine.   
       She loves to tell outrageous, contradictory stories 
  about herself.  She loves to suddenly appear, make 
  strange pronouncements and then vanish into the 
  shadows. One night she'll make up imaginary cabals 
  of vampire lords who rule the world in secret, the next 
  night she will claim that Judas Iscariot was a woman, 
  and was punished for loving Christ by wandering the 
  world as a vampire queen.  Perhaps the next night 
  she'll tell you that the Department of Defense used 
  psychedelic drugs to create a test group of psi-
  vampires in the fifties at Area 51.  None of her stories 
  are consistent, none of them are true (or are they?)   
       While she enjoys acting mysterious, ancient and 
  wise she is in fact silly, fun-loving and irresponsible, 
  without a care in the world or a plan beyond the 
  present moment.  Vampire Girl's motives are simple.  
  She likes to dance in clubs, lurk in darkness, get 
  attention and suck the life force out of good-looking 
  young men and women.  A constant and compulsive 
  liar, she feels no shame about it—or about anything 
  else for that matter. Mercy and honor are equally 
  foreign to her, but then again so are malice and 
  revenge.   
       She cares nothing for danger and is totally 
  indiscreet about feeding.  Only her penchant for 
  playing it mysterious has kept from making some kind 
  of grievous error and drawing the authorities down on 
  her.  She has yet to actually kill anyone by draining off 
  too much of their life force, but it's not because she's 
  being careful--she just feeds often enough that she 
  isn't all that hungry.  If she were in desperate need of 
  sustenance, who knows what she might do?   
   
  Using Vampire Girl in your 
  campaign: The GM can play Vampire Girl any of 
  a number of different ways.  She can be a source of 
  (unreliable) information about the occult underworld, 
  a shadowy foe for the players to pursue, or even a 
  potential love-interest.  She may work best if the 
  Player Characters are amused or enthralled by her at 
  first, and slowly come to realize how irresponsible and 
  dangerous she is as they see more of her.   
       Not particularly bloodthirsty, she has no taste for 
  physical combat and if the PCs attempt to hunt her 
  down she will try to avoid coming to grips with them, 
  using hit and run tactics to pick them off one at a time 
  as the opportunity presents itself.  She is no strategist, 
  however, and may very well attack a superior force or 
  try to hold her ground against impossible odds, just on 
  a whim.   
       Who and what she really is we leave up to GM, 
  although perhaps it is best if the PCs never learn the 
  answer at all.   
   
  Adventures With Vampire Girl:  
   
  1) Vampire Girl and the Case of the Discount 
  Waterbed 
  Rumors reach the PCs of a creature who calls herself 
  Vampire Girl.  She haunts some new underground 
  club, so hip the PCs didn’t even yet know it existed.  
  The place is too cool to have a name, and instead is 
  usually called “Discount Waterbed”—the sign in the 
  window across the street from its unmarked entrance. 
  Club kids from Discount Waterbed pretend not to be 
  impressed by her vampire shtick, but from the way 
  they talk about her anyone can tell that she haunts 
  their dreams.  And a lot of them are turning up with 
  bite marks. 
         PCs who choose to investigate will have two 
  problems.  First, how to infiltrate a place this 
  exclusive, without accidentally saying or wearing 
  something that gives them away (hint: the key is to 
  look cool, but at the same time not like you’re not 
  consciously creating some kind of a “look”).  Second, 
  how to tell which of the pale young goddesses 
  writhing away on the dance floor is Vampire Girl.      
       The PCs first trip to Discount Waterbed is 
  frustrating and reveals nothing (if they even get in).    
      The second time, they meet a mysterious young 
  woman dressed in a tight black leather dress with a 
  1920s bobbed haircut who acts really enigmatic when 
  
    
  asked about Vampire Girl.  She’s too cool to ever 
  actually dance, whoever she is.  The moment the PCs 
  try to press her on the subject of Vampire Girl, she 
  disappears, melting into the crowd.   
       If they try to find her they glimpse her just once, 
  near the back door.  The alley outside is deserted, 
  although they can hear the club’s dance beat throbbing 
  through the walls.  And all of a sudden they spot the 
  young woman with the 1920s hair, lying slumped in a 
  doorway, smiling blissfully.  Standing over her is 
  Vampire Girl.  Come to think of it, they’ve seen 
  Vampire Girl a bunch of times before—she was 
  dancing next to them for a good chunk of the night.  
  Or was she?   
       Vampire Girl seems amused, the girl with her sighs 
  happily and a very odd conversation begins.  She will 
  tell them that she knew they were coming, that the 
  forces that rule this city sent them, whether they know 
  it or not.  This is the night Count Zoltan rises from his 
  grave to taste the blood of the world and see if the 
  vintage has yet matured.  If the PCs want to stop him, 
  they must go to the city’s oldest graveyard and find 
  the mausoleum whose name has been eroded away.  
  They must go quickly, for the Nine Blood Lords are 
  already on their way to pay Count Zoltan their dark 
  homage.  
       No matter what the PCs say to Vampire Girl, she 
  replies with more of her strange monologue.  If 
  attacked, she vanishes into thin air.  She disappears at 
  the end of her speech in any case.   
       Wanda Nyzinski, her victim, doesn’t really know 
  much about Vampire Girl, who she only sees at the 
  club or out back in the alley.  There is no Count 
  Zoltan, there is no  mausoleum, there are no Blood 
  Lords ready to pay anyone attendance.   
       The PCs don’t see Vampire Girl at Discount 
  Waterbed again.  But one night while they’re on an 
  unrelated case (preferably while looking for the lair of 
  some other villain) she suddenly appears in an alley 
  behind them and tries to tell them that there are weak 
  places in the world where the Vulgroids push through, 
  sucking all the light down with them into the Seven 
  Shadow Dimensions.  That’s the only reason the real 
  world exists—they built it to provide them with 
  sustenance and entertainment.  The whole world is 
  only about five hundred years old.  And she should 
  know, for a thousand years ago she was a princess in 
  Samorkand, and was drawn into the seventh shadow-
  realm to be a handmaiden to its terrible Vulgroid 
  queen.  There is a big confluence of the forces tonight 
  at one weak point, and who knows what might happen 
  there.  They should go and see for themselves.   
       Then she tells them where, and it turns out to be the 
  exact location of the villain they are looking for.  The 
  rest of her story is complete and utter rubbish, and the 
  villain they are chasing knows nothing about shadow 
  dimensions or Vampire Girl.   
       The next time some major occult peril menaces the 
  city, Vampire Girl appears to the Player Characters on 
  a lonely church rooftop after midnight and tells them 
  exactly what is going on.  She uses the same loopy, 
  pretentious style as before, but this time she is telling 
  the absolute, honest truth.   
       Then, some weeks later, a club kid turns up in the 
  hospital, drained of life so badly that he’s near death.  
  Vampire Girl, if confronted, swears that it wasn’t her, 
  that some other peril walks the night, stealing all the 
  prettiest kids for itself and leaving her with the dregs 
  from the rave scene.  Is she telling the truth this time?  
  That we leave in the hands of the GM.   
   
  2) Vampire Girl and the Case of the Runaway 
  Robot 
       The PCs have either bored or annoyed Vampire 
  Girl, who decides to make their lives more interesting.  
  The next time they see her, she tells them that she’s 
  leaving—that this city isn’t safe for the dead any 
  more.  The shades desert their haunts, as something 
  darker moves in the darkness.  It’s coming closer, she 
  can feel it—it’s already at (she names the intersection 
  of two streets) and now it’s moving fast!  She 
  vanishes.   
       If the PCs go to the location she mentioned, they 
  will indeed find something there, but it’s not some 
  eldritch monstrosity that preys on the dead.  In fact it’s 
  a giant killer robot from Texas, who calls himself 
  “Doctor Destructor.”  See his individual description on 
  page 81.  
       He seems delighted to see the heroes and says that 
  “she” said they could tell him about his origins, that 
  they know who built him and what the dreams he’s 
  been having mean.  When they protest that this isn’t 
  true his mood darkens and he points out that “She said 
  you’d say that, if you were the False Dionyn.  Then I 
  suppose that we had better fight, if that is in fact the 
  only way to make a False Dionyn speak the truth.”     
       Doctor Destructor is an implacable combatant, and 
  will chase them all across town.  He’s convinced that 
  the physical form the PCs wear isn’t real, and that it 
  conceals the three-headed Dionyn Dogs from the 
  Other-Realm called the Hounding, who are 
  impervious to mere physical harm.  Or some such 
  gibberish.  He will be unfailingly polite while he 
  pounds the crap out of the PCs, but he doesn’t think 
  their injuries are real and can't be persuaded to stop 
  hitting them. “What is my real name?” he keeps 
  asking.  
       When the PCs next see Vampire Girl, they may 
  want to ask her why she did that to them.  For the very 
  first time she gives them a straight answer: “I wanted 
  to see what would happen.  I’m terrible that way.” 
       They will probably try to attack her, but just at that 
  moment, the troubled young supervillain called Wolf-
  Dog suddenly appears, and demands that they tell him 
  the way home.  She said they knew the way home, but 
  that they wouldn’t tell him out of meanness. Well he 
  will have an answer from them—show him the way 
  home!  Vampire Girl slips away, leaving them to deal 
  with this situation. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Wolf-Dog 
  Real Name: Lionel Fenric 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 8 (-1) 
  Initiative: +7 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +12 Defense: 
  +23/+19 Speed: 35 
  Damage Save: +13 Fortitude Save: +12 
  Reflexes Save: +5 Willpower Save: +0  
  Skills: Balance +9, Hide +9, Jump +5, Move 
  Silently +9, Survival +9 
  Feats: Dodge, Durability, Great Fortitude, Identity 
  Change, Improved Initiative, Lightning Reflexes, 
  Power Attack, Rapid Healing, Scent, Takedown 
  Attack, Tracking, Ultra-Hearing 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +3, Super-
  Strength +6 (Extras: Leaping, Super-Constitution, 
  Super-Senses; Cost: 7pts), Regeneration +9 (Cost: 
  2pts), Running +1 (Cost: 2pts) 
  Weaknesses: Disturbing (looks like a werewolf, 
  -5 penalty to all Bluff and Diplomacy checks) 
  Quirk: Foolishly loyal, even when it's severely 
  contrary to his advantage. 
  Vulnerable (to Dazzle attacks). 
   
  “Wolf-Dog he the dog-dog! He steams 
  you like iron!  He hang you like laundry!   
  He conquer the world and ask for more 
  jam!  ‘Cause dey call him Wolf-Dog!”  
   
       A crazy little werewolf with a bad haircut, Wolf-
  Dog is a bit of a redneck, a bit of a stoner and a bit of 
  a punk.  He’s from somewhere in far northern Quebec 
  or maybe Labrador (he says it's Quebec but his native 
  language is English, which makes that seem unlikely). 
  Wherever he’s from, it’s somewhere cold, distant and 
  isolated, where people still think his hairdo looks 
  tough instead of stupid.  
       Somehow he’s been stranded in Texas, a place he 
  doesn’t like or understand at all, and he’s desperate to 
  go home to his hairy werewolf family in the frozen 
  North. Alas, he’s too ignorant to find Texas or 
  Labrador on a map, and he doesn’t have the skills to 
  earn the money for a trip home, even if he knew where 
  home was.  
      To support himself and his quest he steals, and this 
  will soon get him into worse trouble. He loves beer 
  and pot and is constantly tempted to waste his money 
  on them instead of saving it up for a bus ticket, so he 
  has to go steal more.  He hasn’t killed anyone yet, but 
  he could at any time.  
       Wolf-Dog is wild and enthusiastic, outrageous and 
  manic. An incorrigible delinquent, he commits acts of 
  vandalism and property destruction for no reason, 
  sometimes in the middle of committing other crimes.  
  He loves fighting, and brags and howls and shows off 
  in combat.  His soliloquies often make no sense, but 
  they’re usually fun to listen to even though his 
  constant boasting and habit of referring to himself in 
  the third person (“dey call him Wolf-Dog!”) gets on 
  some people’s nerves.  Although he wants people to 
  think he’s hip, Wolf-Dog knows little about city life 
  and it shows.    
       He acts like a dog even when he’s in human form, 
  and has all kinds of odd/gross doglike mannerisms. 
  Like any dog he’s distractible and loves attention.  
  He’s quick to challenge a potential foe, but when he 
  loses he doesn’t hold a grudge.  If a superhero beats 
  him up but doesn’t injure him too badly, he’ll become 
  fawningly eager to impress them, like a wolf who has 
  been humbled by another member of the pack.  
       If however they use excessive force on him, break 
  his bones, put him in the hospital, or savagely 
  humiliate him with fear attacks or mind-control, he 
  may turn vicious and start killing people casually. If 
  this happens he won’t bother hunting the hero who 
  wounded him, but he will react with brutal lethality if 
  he happens to encounter that hero again.   
       How he came to find himself  in Texas remains a 
  mystery.  He isn’t very articulate, but if questioned 
  patiently he can explain that he was running in the 
  woods, that someone shot him with a tranquilizer dart, 
  that he woke up once on what he thinks was a plane 
  and again in the back of a truck.  He smashed his way 
  out of the truck and found himself stumbling down a 
  freeway in the middle of Houston.  
   
  Using Wolf-Dog in your campaign:  
      What kind of villain Wolf-Dog evolves into 
  depends largely on how the PCs treat him.  He could 
  stay a happy-go-lucky loudmouth or become a 
  homicidal menace.   
       It’s easy to recruit Wolf-Dog for a team.  Just beat 
  him in combat and give him some positive attention, 
  and he’ll react with slavish doglike loyalty (until he 
  sees you get beaten in a fight or he finds a way home). 
  He trusts easily and naively and if he is betrayed he 
  will react with bewilderment rather than rage—at least 
  the first time it happens.  
       The PCs don’t have to encounter Wolf-Dog in 
  Texas, his quest to go home could lead him in any 
  direction and he could get tangled up in just about 
  anything along the way.   
   
  Adventures With Wolf-Dog:  
   
  1) Wolf on th’ Lam 
        Wolf-Dog gets off a bus in the PC’s home town.  It 
  doesn’t take long for him to hear about the Player 
  Characters, and that they help people, for free.  He 
  finds them as fast as he can, and if they don’t attack 
  him on sight, he explains the nature of his problem—
  he wants to get home, but he doesn’t know quite 
  where it is.  Also, he doesn’t have enough money.  
  
    
       If the PCs take pity on him and try to help him out, 
  he will follow them around, singing their praises, full 
  of snuffling wolflike devotion.  He may try to provoke 
  a playful fight with one of the PCs, but that’s just so 
  that they can beat him and establish his place in their 
  pack.  He is loud, goofy and a little annoying, but he’ll 
  fight as hard as he can on their behalf.  Perhaps a little 
  too hard, in fact.  He’s eager to prove himself to his 
  new friends and is apt to hurl himself into the teeth of 
  danger at a moment’s notice.   
       If on the other hand the PCs drive Wolf-Dog away, 
  he’ll follow them at a distance and try to prove his 
  good intentions.  The next time they get in a fight with 
  a supervillain and things start to go badly for them, 
  Wolf-Dog pops up out of nowhere, springs to their 
  rescue, beats their opponent at the last second but gets 
  gravely wounded himself.  
       Whenever they break down and decide to help him, 
  the PCs find that Wolf-Dog’s description of his home 
  isn’t really all that helpful.  He has no sense of 
  geography and he’s way too hung up on little details 
  like where the general store is located and where his 
  grandma’s cabin can be found.  Yet there are 
  tantalizing hints.  He’s from the northernmost part of 
  North America, probably somewhere in northern 
  Canada, rather than Alaska.  He speaks English, rather 
  than French, but he knows some obscene French-
  Canadian slang.  
       After he has helped them out with more than one 
  fight and the PCs are really starting to accept him, the 
  state police show up and demand that the PCs turn 
  Wolf-Dog over.  He’s wanted for sticking up a 
  pancake house in another city, not long before he 
  appeared in the PC’s town.  They also suspect that he 
  may have broken into a fast food restaurant and eaten 
  some of their beef patties.   
       Wolf-Dog really did these things, and he looks 
  ashamed if the PCs confront him, but he’s too 
  embarrassed to confess.   
       If the PCs convince him to turn himself in, things 
  go really badly for him.  He tests positive for 
  marijuana use in lockup, which in the PCs state means 
  he can’t be released into their custody or let out on 
  bail.  Awaiting his arraignment in jail, he is savagely 
  assaulted by a gang and hurts one of them really 
  badly.  Now he’s going down for a felony, and may 
  not breathe free air for a long time.  And then he 
  escapes.   
       He runs to the Player Characters for protection, 
  certain that they’ll help him.  He’ll do this even if they 
  turned him over to the law, because while he feels hurt 
  and confused by their behavior, he’s not yet capable of 
  understanding that they could actually betray him. 
  They’re his pack, after all.   
       If the PCs take him in, they’ll find that he’s a good 
  deal meaner but still just as playful as when they first 
  encountered him.  He’s become prone to using 
  excessive force and is much easier to provoke into a 
  fight.   
       If they turn him in again, he breaks out while being 
  transported for trial.  This time he’s even meaner (he's 
  PL 11 now), and he fully understands that the PCs 
  betrayed him (10 points went to buying off his 
  "Foolishly Loyal" weakness).   
       He’s pretty upset with them, for betrayal is the 
  worst crime he can conceive of.  This might be a good 
  time to stock up on silver bullets.   
   
  2) Bad Dog! 
       Wolf-Dog falls in with the wrong crowd.  He is 
  robbing a waffle hut in Corpus Christi when he 
  encounters a local supervillain called the Lone Star 
  Lady.  He hits it off pretty well with this morose and 
  murderous parahuman, who introduces him to her 
  team—the Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys.  See the 
  entry on them later on in this book to get a sense of 
  what a dysfunctional mess poor naïve Wolf-Dog is 
  getting himself into.   
       Before long, the Lone Star Lady has an affair with 
  Wolf-Dog, mostly to get the attention of her former 
  boyfriend, Johnny Black (who is presently involved 
  with the team’s leader, the atomic superwoman who 
  calls herself Cimarron Starr).   
       This works entirely too well—Johnny becomes 
  insanely jealous.  This annoys Cimarron Starr, who 
  determines to teach the Lone Star Lady a lesson and 
  has a fling with Wolf-Dog herself.   
       Johnny is beside himself with rage, the Lone Star 
  Lady is furious, her own manic-depressive boyfriend, 
  the Texas Twister, is close to throwing one of his 
  homicidal tantrums, and Wolf-Dog himself does 
  nothing to make the situation easier.  He mistakenly 
  assumes that because both ladies were willing to be 
  his mate, he must therefore be the pack’s leader, and 
  he begins strutting around, boastfully giving orders.   
       Then all four of them try to kill him, and he flees in 
  bewilderment and terror.  Now he’s holed up in the 
  PCs’ town, waiting for the Corpus Christi Good Time 
  Boys to find him.  On a sudden impulse, he goes to the 
  PCs for help.  People say they help folks--why not 
  Wolf-Dog? 
   
   
   
  
    
  God 
  Real Name: Jesus Pilgrim Josephson 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 10 (+0) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 12 (+1) Wis: 20 (+5) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +5 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +6/+9 Defense: 
  +18/+17 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2/+8 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +2 Reflexes Save: +6 Willpower 
  Save: +11  
  Skills: Bluff +8, Concentration +10, Listen +10, 
  Sense Motive +11, Spot +10 
  Feats: Evasion, Headquarters (a fortified compound 
  in the woods upstate, equipped with a Garage, a 
  landing strip with small Hanger adjacent, improvised 
  Holding Cells, an Independent Power System [A 
  gasoline-powered generator], Living Space for God 
  and all his Minions, a Reinforced Structure, Staff  [15 
  of whom are PL 1, with one PL 2 Staff Member], six 
  Vehicles [three vans, a battered-up old 4-wheel drive 
  SUV, a tractor and a bulldozer] and a Workshop),  
  Inspire, Leadership, Minions (Loyalty Level 20 [PL 
  12+Charisma Bonus+Displays Special 
  Powers+Headquarters+Inspire+Leadership]) 
  Powers: Amazing Reflexes Save +6 (Extra: Also 
  Applies to Willpower Saves; Cost: 2pts), ESP +10 
  (Cost: 2 pts), Telepathy (Extras: Illusions, Memory 
  Alteration, Mental Blast, Mind Control; Cost: 6pts) 
  Equipment: Really cool sunglasses. 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Has no self-control, is 
  tempted to indulge himself and do foolhardy things to 
  gain momentary gratification, will not hold his ground 
  in combat once he has taken any Lethal damage unless 
  he spends a Villain Point 
   
  “Hush my child, still your tears, for you 
  are finally home. No more loneliness, no 
  more regrets.  I am the all-merciful, the 
  all-forgiving and the font of pure sweet 
  light.  Now go over there, my lamb, and 
  shoot that gentleman in the head—and 
  then yourself.”   
   
       They call him God.  He’s the lord of hosts, the 
  living incarnation of the universe’s ultimate power—
  or so say his followers.    
       In fact he is a potent psychic, with the ability to 
  dominate and control the minds of those around him.  
  He is worshipped by a small but fanatical cult who call 
  themselves the Circle of the Seventh Throne.  There is 
  a group of ten or so of his worshippers crammed into 
  an apartment in the PCs home city, and some enclaves 
  of similar size in other major urban areas.  He also has 
  a large, isolated farm upstate where about sixty of his 
  acolytes, wives and children reside.  God has ten 
  wives and is always looking for more.   
       Rumor has it that he’s stalked the Earth for a 
  century, but the truth is that his powers are inherited, 
  and his father and grandfather exploited them in 
  exactly the same way that he has.  
       He grew up in the Circle, was groomed to be its 
  new Deity, but by the age of 15 he couldn’t stand to 
  wait to be God any longer and slew his father in a 
  psychic duel that killed more than half of their flock.  
  It has taken him ten years to build the Circle back up 
  to its present strength.   
       The actual tenets of the Circle are a kind of militant 
  fundamentalist Christianity, with a lot of colorful 
  occult craziness ladled on top.  His vision of the 
  universe is vivid, if shallow, full of burning crowns 
  and three-eyed angels with wings of bronze and secret 
  words of power.  A lot of it resembles heavy metal 
  album cover art.   
       If the PCs somehow manage to speak to him in a 
  neutral setting, they’ll find that God is eager for their 
  approval, and desperate to show them that he’s a 
  cynical man of the world like them—that he doesn’t 
  really take being God so seriously as all that.  He is 
  not, however, willing to ever come out and directly 
  admit that he isn’t really God. Characters who try to 
  press him on this point make him Wrathful.  
   
  Using God in your campaign: Not all that 
  much of a megalomaniac, at least for somebody who 
  calls himself “God”, Reverend Josephson only half 
  believes his rhetoric.  He has no plans to take over the 
  world, destroy the world, expand the Circle into a 
  huge national organization, or indeed do much of 
  anything else except to dominate his flock and acquire 
  more wives.  
       Yet he could easily be tempted into getting into 
  more serious trouble.   For someone who dominates 
  other minds so easily, he doesn’t have much command 
  of his own.  Under his dignified, saintly facade he’s 
  foolhardy and weak, completely unable to resist his 
  impulses.  It would be very easy for an unscrupulous 
  fellow supervillain to lead him into participating in a 
  serious crime.  This is in fact the way the PCs are 
  likeliest to encounter him.   
       Unfortunately, he’s an undependable ally and an 
  inexperienced criminal, and is likely to make some 
  kind of serious mistake.  If he finds himself in a 
  desperate position, he’ll retreat to his farm, announce 
  that the end of the world is at hand and get ready for a 
  Waco-style siege.  This situation can rapidly turn into 
  a hideous mess, with local police, the FBI, the press, 
  demented cultists and perhaps even an enraged 
  supervillain or two whom God has let down all mixing 
  it up together.  Preventing a tragedy is going to be 
  tough.   
       There is plenty of evidence of the bloodbath from 
  ten years ago buried on the farm, and this fact will 
  make God even more desperate not to give his refuge 
  up.   
  
    
       Something of a coward when it comes to physical 
  combat, God won’t hesitate throw his followers (even 
  his wives and kids) at anyone who attacks him.  God 
  desperately wants to think of himself as a good man, 
  but as he gets more desperate and hemmed in, his 
  basically chickenhearted nature will get the better of 
  him, and he’ll discover that he’s actually capable of 
  doing just about anything, no matter how low, vicious 
  and despicable, if it saves his sacred hide.   
       If the PCs manage to break up his cult, but he gets 
  away in the confusion, he will become incredibly 
  vengeful, as much for what the PCs taught him about 
  himself as for destroying the sect he spent so much of 
  his life to build.  He’ll even become capable of 
  striking at their loved ones and family members to get 
  back at them, although he’ll be sickened by his own 
  cruelty.   
   
  Adventures With God: 1) God Steps Out to 
  Radio Shack 
       A young woman runs up to one of the PCs in their 
  secret identity, screaming and sobbing.  She pleads for 
  help, saying that God is chasing her, that God put 
  something in her brain that makes her crazy, that He 
  watches, He’s everywhere and He sees all—they have 
  to help her!   
       A quick scan of her mind will reveal that she is 
  psychotic, but that she believes herself to be telling the 
  truth.  She has memories of meeting God, memories 
  that seem oddly vivid and specific for hallucinations.   
       Before the PC has time to react, three large, 
  concerned-looking gentlemen in identical black 
  polyester suits and ties emerge from a van and try to 
  take the woman away.  They explain if asked that 
  she’s a member of their “community” and that she’s 
  been having psychological problems.  She’ll be better 
  off with her friends back at the farm—they know how 
  to take care of her.   
       They gently try to coax the woman into the van, but 
  she gets very agitated and starts screaming that God is 
  in the van, that he’s everywhere but right now he’s in 
  the van and she won’t go in there so God can make her 
  crazy again.  ( if the PC has a look, there is no one in 
  the van).   
       They smiling men won’t take no for an answer.  
  They remain calm, and try to persuade the PC while 
  they are struggling to get the woman into the van that 
  she’s better off back at the community surrounded by 
  friends who can look after her than she is on a psycho-
  ward.  Has the PC ever seen what the conditions are 
  like in a mental hospital, they ask?   
       If the PC wants, they can come visit the community 
  and see how they live for themselves. In fact the three 
  men are eager to give the PC their address.  The 
  community is always looking to make new friends.   
       If the PC manages to keep the woman with them, 
  she is grateful, but insane and difficult to look after.  
  Her memories are a tangle, but do seem to include 
  being one of God’s many wives, living on a farm and 
  then in a cramped apartment here in the city.  One 
  night she runs away while the PC looking after her is 
  asleep or out.   
       If the PC refused to take the community’s address, 
  it’s easy enough to find.  Any Player Character who is 
  looking for the community suddenly spots one of the 
  three men who took the woman away.  He’s handing 
  out religious pamphlets in a public park and he’s 
  happy to tell anyone who asks him how to find the 
  community.   
       The community is a large but cramped garden 
  apartment well outside the city, in a suburban 
  subdivision without any sidewalks, out where it would 
  be really difficult to get to anything without a car.   
       About ten of God’s followers live here, seven of 
  them women.  All of the women are pretty—He seems 
  to have a thing for skinny blondes.   
       God is absent when the PCs arrive.  The woman 
  who ran up to them on the street (her name is 
  Margaret Ford) is present, calm and exhausted.  
  Margaret seems sane, and tells the PCs that she’s 
  feeling much better now.  She thanks them for their 
  help and explains that her mind is once more whole 
  now that she is a bride of God again.   
       If the PCs ask where God is, one of the women 
  says “Radio Shack” but the others assure the PC that 
  God is present—in fact He’s everywhere.   
       If the PC insists on waiting for God, He doesn’t 
  show up.  After a little while, the members of the 
  community tell the PC to come back some other time.      
       Meanwhile, God has sensed that a powerful 
  parahuman (or whatever the PC is) has invaded his 
  sanctum and is talking to his wives.  This agitates Him 
  (He’s a jealous god) and brings Him into conflict with 
  the PCs.  If they won’t leave his apartment, he hits 
  them with a long-range psychic attack, warning them 
  off.  Otherwise, he just instructs his followers not to 
  talk to the PCs. If the PC doesn’t want to leave, and 
  the GM doesn’t want the conflict to heat up just yet, 
  an unrelated super-crisis suddenly comes up and they 
  have to go solve it.   Then, some time later, the sister, 
  girlfriend or other close female contact of a Player 
  Character suddenly joins God’s community and 
  becomes one of his brides.   
       Once He figures out how close his new bride is to a 
  local superhero, God panics, pulls out of the city and 
  retreats to his farm.  He may or may not send a 
  brainwashed assassin or two after the PCs. You can 
  also have him play cat and mouse with the PCs for a 
  while before fleeing, if that would be more fun.  He 
  will always try to hit them at a distance and always 
  avoid letting them see him directly, in the flesh.   
       Once he has fled, it will be very easy to interest in 
  the authorities in God’s activities and not at all hard to 
  track him down.  This will however precipitate the 
  standoff described above in the notes on Campaign 
  Use.  
   
  2) Vote God 
       A crooked politician gets in touch with God.  We’ll 
  leave his name, party and position blank, so that you 
  can work him into your campaign more easily.  This 
  could be anyone from a County Commissioner or a 
  City Alderman up to a Senator or possibly even the 
  President, depending on the needs of your game.  
  
    
  Ideally, it should be someone the Players already 
  know is dirty.    
       Whoever he is in your game, he’s up for re-election 
  and things don’t look good for him.  His opponent is a 
  real fire-breathing reformer with a groundswell of 
  populist support behind him. Things look so bad that 
  the incumbent is desperate enough to turn to the likes 
  of God.   
       He will pay God an enormous amount of money to 
  cripple his opponent’s campaign. The plan is simple.  
  God will appear at a public event where the 
  incumbent’s foe is speaking, take over his mind, and 
  force him to say ridiculous, outrageous things that will 
  cost him the election.   
       But things do not go as planned.  The stress of 
  having his mind taken over sends the victim into a 
  psychotic break and he goes into a crazed, foaming 
  religious rapture right there at the podium.  This 
  attracts way too much of the wrong kind of media 
  attention. Worse, at least a dozen witnesses saw God 
  at the scene, and two of them took pictures.  God tries 
  to track them all down and selectively erase their 
  memories, but this causes too many of them to go 
  insane and have religious meltdowns of their own. At 
  least one of them develops psychic powers and goes 
  on a brief rampage.   
       Soon the crooked politico who hired God starts 
  playing on his paranoia, and talks him into making the 
  rest of the witnesses kill themselves and/or one 
  another.   
       The PCs are confronted with a baffling web of 
  madness, death and bad religion.  A little investigation 
  shows that all the victims’ paths crossed at the 
  political rally where the first victim went crazy on TV. 
  What did they witness there?  Are there other potential 
  victims whom the PCs could still save?  Does one of 
  them have photos of God?   
   
  3) God Falls in With the Wrong Crowd 
       The Six Dollar Man somehow finds God’s phone 
  number and gives Him a call. He tempts God with 
  news of a major marijuana buy that he knows will take 
  place out at a junkyard on the edge of the city.  The 
  two of them could rip the buyer off really easily, using 
  God’s power over the minds of men.   
       It’s just about the perfect crime—neither nor the 
  buyer nor the seller can go to the police and they’re 
  just a bunch of hippies selling to a bunch of college 
  students—they’re not wired into organized crime or 
  anything like that.  Maybe God could even get into the 
  buyers’ brains and make them get off drugs.  That 
  would be like doing them a favor, almost.  They could 
  keep the grass themselves or sell it though the Six 
  Dollar Man’s contacts, whatever God wills.   
       The Six Dollar Man is lying on at least two crucial 
  points.  That’s why he communicates with God only 
  by phone—he doesn’t want Him reading his mind.   
       But even before the Six Dollar Man’s treachery 
  comes out, things start to go awry.  For the Six Dollar 
  Man’s long-suffering girlfriend Dottie has finally 
  decided to rat him out. She doesn’t dare run to the 
  cops.  Her boyfriend is actually planning to sell the 
  stolen drugs to some crooked police detectives, so 
  talking  to the cops might very well get her killed.       
       Instead she goes to the PCs and tells them 
  everything she knows.  She has never seen God in 
  person and she doesn’t know his name, but she does 
  know that the Six Dollar Man has invited another 
  supervillain in on the deal, and that he’s planning to 
  screw him over. 
       Which brings us to the things he has lied about to 
  God.  It’s not pot that’s up for sale, it’s crack.  And the 
  parties involved are not harmless hippies and clueless 
  college students, they’re bikers and Mafiosi.   
       And then the Player Characters burst onto the 
  scene.  When God sees everything go nuts, he panics 
  badly and starts making people kill one another.  Then 
  He tries to get back to His lair upstate, where he may 
  or may not decide that the end of the world has come 
  and start preparing for a siege by the feds, depending 
  on whether or not the PCs follow him. Even if they 
  don’t there are a lot of angry gangsters who now have 
  a bone to pick with God. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Helen Damnation 
  Real Name: Seiko "Psycho" Suzuki 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 16 (+4) Dex: 20 (+5) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 13 (+1) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +10 Attack Bonus (Melee): 
  +11 Attack Bonus (Ranged): +11 
  Defense: +22/+12 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +6 Fortitude Save: +6 
  Reflexes Save: +10 Willpower Save: +5   
  Skills: Balance +10, Climb +10, Bluff +10, 
  Diplomacy +11, Drive +13, Handle Animal +6, Hide 
  +10, Intimidate +10, Knowledge (Yakuza) +5, Listen 
  +8, Move Silently +10, Repair +5, Search +10, Spot 
  +8, Taunt +10 
  Feats: Accurate Attack, Assessment, Attack 
  Finesse, Chokehold, Dodge, Evasion, Far Shot, Great 
  Fortitude, Point-Blank Shot, Power Attack, Precise 
  Shot, Quck-Draw, Talented (Listen and Spot), 
  Toughness 
  Powers: Powers: Reincarnate +10, Super-Dexterity 
  +5 (Extras: Super-Senses, Super-Strength, Super-
  Wisdom; Flaw: Super-Strength only applies toward 
  skill checks; Cost: 6pts) 
  Equipment: Wrist-Mounted Pistol (+5 Lethal), 
  Sword (+5 Lethal), Vehicle (Psycho--Cycle; Move: 8, 
  Hardness: 8, Armor Bonus: 0; Cost: 9pts) 
  Weaknesses: Berzerker 
  Quirk: Crazy, irrational and unpredictably violent.  
  Does foolhardy things, has no impulse control.  
  Quirk: Enraged by any display of physical affection.  
  Will immediately attack anyone kissing, holding 
  hands, cuddling, etc., even if doing so puts her at a 
  tactical disadvantage. 
   
  "The Devil plumb throwed me outta Hell 
  on account of I raised so much ruckus 
  down there. So now I reckon I’m yore 
  problem, scout."  
   
       Queen of the pistol, the knife and the lariat, 
  sharpshooter extraordinaire, hell-raiser deluxe, Helen 
  Damnation was Perdition's own daughter.  A legend 
  across the violent plains of the Old West, her real 
  name and her origins are unknown. She claimed to 
  have given birth to herself on a bed of barbed wire and 
  broken whisky bottles.   
       A lot of people felt  that her skills with a rifle were 
  too good to be natural and that she must have sold her 
  sold to Lucifer to get them.  She enthusiastically 
  agreed, but said the Devil didn't want her soul once he 
  got a look at its condition, so she had to beat his 
  secrets out of him instead.  
       The truth lies somewhere in between.  She didn't 
  mention, for example, that she also bargained with the 
  forces of darkness for eternal life.  Eternal life, eternal 
  youth, eternal violence and chaos as well as a limitless 
  capacity for vice.  There was a catch, but she thought 
  little of it.  As the embodiment of the West's reckless, 
  savage spirit, she could only survive where the open 
  plains spread lawless and untamed.  
       For decades she sang and drank and killed and 
  spread glorious havoc hither and yon.  Then the West 
  began to evaporate beneath her.  Barbed wire and the 
  railroad strangled the world she loved, driving her 
  deeper and deeper into the Northwest.  Actual 
  uninhabited wilderness would not do, for she found it 
  intolerably dull-she liked the fringes of civilization 
  where there were bets to win and whisky to drink and 
  people to kill.  Those fringes had worn very thin by 
  the 1890s.   
       By the turn of the 20th century she had taken up 
  residence in Alaska, her legend and powers fading as 
  civilization relentlessly marched North.  In 1910 she 
  went down to the city of Chicago, hoping to die when 
  she set foot on its streets.  Instead she accidentally 
  discovered that there were whole huge areas of the 
  urban landscape where she was as strong as she had 
  ever been, for they knew no law but the gun.   
       And then the legend of the West began to grow, 
  exerting more and more power over the minds of 
  Mankind.  As it grew, so did the strength of her own 
  legend and so did her power.  Killers passed her secret 
  tales to one another and made strange offerings to her 
  on makeshift altars in tenement basements and 
  deserted rail yards.  
       Yet as the cities grew better organized (largely due 
  to organized crime, at first) her territory once more 
  began to shrink. A disastrous trip to Peoria in 1935 
  extinguished her corporeal form entirely, and since 
  then she has had to manifest herself in the bodies of 
  others.  Every ten or twenty years some luckless killer 
  conjures up the soul of Helen Damnation and is 
  consumed by her.  She burns up bodies like fuel, 
  causing so much trouble and chaos that despite the 
  blessing of eternal youth her host soon gets killed. She 
  generally dies laughing.   
       Helen will only inhabit the bodies of women, and 
  only if they are to her tastes.  She presently walks in 
  the form of Seiko "Psycho" Suzuki, a part-time drug 
  dealer and full time lunatic assassin for one of the 
  lesser-known Yakuza families in Honolulu.  Seiko was 
  wild, crazy and dangerous enough before Helen 
  Damnation came a-calling.   
       In person Helen is quite a handful.  She doesn't 
  completely subsume the host personality, so there's 
  still a lot of Psycho Suzuki left in her.  She talks fast 
  and often incoherently, in a kind of childish 19th 
  century slang that seems to be partly derived from 
  pulp adventure novels. Constantly loud, constantly 
  breaking things out of spite, largely driven by impulse, 
  she has a savage mean streak and her crazy antics 
  always culminate in violence.  It's not a good evening 
  if no one gets killed.  She is oddly asexual, and doesn't 
  hold with what she calls "mush stuff."  Any display of 
  
    
  physical affection is enough to set her off and provoke 
  a potentially fatal reaction.  
       One odd final note.  In 1965 a historian named 
  Morris Hipplewaite proved conclusively that Helen 
  Damnation never existed and that she was in fact the 
  creation of two different pulp authors, Hubert Stickle 
  and Leonard Creech, who both independently thought 
  the character up in 1868, apparently without any 
  knowledge of eachother. There never was such a 
  person, or even such a folktale.  Yet here she is.   
       If asked about Morris Hipplewaite Helen just 
  shrugs, giggles and says "He daid."   
   
  Using Helen Damnation in your 
  campaign:  If the Player Characters kill Seiko, 
  Helen may or may not be back. If she does reappear in 
  someone else's body, she'll remember them but unless 
  the PCs gave her a really exciting fight she won't go 
  out of her way to mix it up with them.   
       While she doesn't give a damn for honor or 
  fairness, she also doesn't hold grudges and won't 
  particularly resent an opponent who beats her. Indeed, 
  she doesn't seem to much care whether she wins or 
  loses a fight-she just finds the noise and motion 
  stimulating. 
   
  Adventures With Helen Damnation: 1) 
  A Fistfull of Damnation 
       The Osamu Yakuza and the Matsumoto Yakuza are 
  at war.  Their invisible empires stretch all around the 
  world, and their soldiers clash in secret from Sydney 
  to Osaka to Berlin. But their distant branches in the 
  Player Characters’ home city have no desire to fight 
  each other.  Boss Hojo is too reasonable and Boss 
  Yokoyama is too old (and in any case far too 
  cowardly).  The two clans have made only the most 
  tentative jabs at each other, and that purely for the 
  sake of form.   
       Enter Psycho Suzuki, AKA Helen Damnation.  
  She’s determined to provoke a conflict and will kill as 
  many people on both sides as are required to provoke 
  a war.   
       She hits Yokoyama’s nephew at a karaoke bar, she 
  hits Hojo’s wife’s brother while he’s getting a 
  massage, but unfortunately both men were hated and 
  feared by their bosses, who are actually relieved to 
  have them dead.  She kills more people, but the more 
  havoc she wreaks the more the two men resist doing 
  what she wants.  It’s obvious to Hojo that this is all 
  her doing, and Yokoyama is willing to believe him (or 
  anything else that will allow him to watch old samurai 
  movies and play dominoes undisturbed).   
       After she has killed enough of their soldiers, both 
  Oyabuns finally have no choice but to declare war—
  on Helen Damnation!   
       In the course of chasing her around Little Tokyo, it 
  becomes clear that she’s more than they can handle, so 
  they call in the Player Characters.  Both Oyabuns 
  would like to make a deal.  If the PCs can stop Helen 
  Damnation from slaughtering any more of their 
  nephews and grandsons, they will both turn 
  themselves in to the authorities.  Clever players may 
  suspect a trick, but in fact both men are completely 
  sincere.  Yokoyama was looking for a way to retire 
  anyway and Hojo figures he can still run things from 
  behind bars.   
       Unfortunately, neither one wants to risk losing 
  more men, so the PCs will have to face Helen 
  Damnation on their own.  She shouldn’t be hard to 
  find.  Just go down to Little Tokyo and follow the trail 
  of carnage.  
   
  2)  An Evening with Helen Damnation  
  Helen Damnation is on the loose and on the town.  
  Over the next hours she will raise random havoc until 
  she is stopped.   
       Just after midnight she turns up at an illegal dice 
  game in a parking garage.  She bets with a lot of 
  bravado, but she loses.  This makes her mad, so she 
  shoots the place up, wounding three people.   
       Then she drives her motorcycle the wrong way 
  through traffic and shows up at a karaoke bar at about 
  1:30.  She doesn’t like the music, hassles whoever is at 
  the microphone, and when they throw her out of the 
  bar she shoots out all the windows.   
       She’s driving the wrong way down another busy 
  street when she shoots the spotlight off a police car at 
  2:00 and leads them on a brief chase.   
       At 2:30 she crashes her bike into a video arcade 
  and continues on foot.   
       At 2:50 she spies a young Asian couple holding 
  hands in a park and is infuriated by this display of 
  “mush stuff.”  She chases them down and beats them 
  both savagely, putting the boy in the hospital when she 
  finds that he won’t kiss dog excrement even with a 
  gun to his head.  
       At 3:10 she steals a bike from a Japanese cycle 
  gang and leads them on a chase through traffic the 
  wrong way.  By 3:40 she has lost them, but the cops 
  spot her and she leads them on a second, longer chase.   
       At 4:15 she enters an illegal motorcycle race that a 
  different gang is sponsoring out on the freeway by the 
  edge of town.  She wins the race, by cheating 
  viciously.  When she gets disqualified she steals the 
  prize, and roars off into the night, pursued by the cycle 
  gang, then the cops as well, and then the other gang 
  she stole the bike from.   
       By 5:00 in the morning she’s leading a huge chase 
  through town as the sun starts to peek over the 
  horizon.  If the Player Characters haven’t caught up to 
  her already, they should encounter her here.   
       While the PCs can stumble across Helen 
  Damnation at any point in her rampage, the scenario 
  often works better if they hear reports of her bad 
  behavior at the dice game or the karaoke bar and 
  pursue her across town, trying to catch up as she 
  spreads more chaos. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Chapter 3: Major Threats 
   
  The Snow Queen, 
  aka Cold Marla, aka the 
  White Lady 
  Real Name: Marla Frost 
  PL: 15 
  Str: 10 (+0) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 16 (+3) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +18/15 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2/+15 (Force-Field) 
  Fortitude Save: +6 Reflexes Save: +8 
  Willpower Save: +7   
  Skills: Bluff +7, Diplomacy +9, Sense Motive +8, 
  Spot +7, Taunt +8 
  Feats: Accurate Attack, Attack Focus (Energy 
  Blast), Connected, Dodge, Expertise, Immune to Cold, 
  Infamy, Iron Will, Minions (Up to 35 PL1 thugs, 3 
  PL2 thugs, 1 PL3 thug and 1 PL4 thug) Point Blank 
  Shot, Power Attack, Power Immunity, Precise Shot 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Fortitude) +4 (Extras:  
  Reflexes, Willpower; Cost: 2pts), Energy Control 
  (Cold) +15 (Extras: Energy Field, Energy Shapes, 
  Force Field; Power Stunts: Energy Blast; Cost 5pts), 
  Slick +5 (Cost: 2pts), Teleport +10 (Extras: Extended 
  Teleport; Flaws: Can Only Teleport By stepping into a 
  mass of snow or ice, and can only Teleport out of 
  another mass of snow or ice on the far end; Cost 2pts) 
   
  “I have 56 flavors of agony on special 
  today.  Which one would you like?  
  Oooh, a triple-decker!  That’s a popular 
  order.”  
   
       She’s cold.  Marla Frost hasn’t felt anything about 
  anything for a long, long time.   By now she’s been a 
  criminal for so long, seen and done so many awful 
  things that it all blurs together, all feels like it 
  happened to somebody else. She can’t remember 
  everyone she’s killed, maimed or ruined.  Long past 
  guilt, long past going into emotional shock, long past 
  being surprised at what she’s capable of doing.   Even 
  her cruelty feels muffled to her.   
       But while she may just be going through the 
  motions, she still does it awfully well.  The Snow 
  Queen deals coke, primarily, but she can be hired on a 
  short-term basis for just about any criminal enterprise, 
  from assassination to bank robbery.  Highly sought 
  after, she has a reputation as a complete pro—steady 
  under fire, fearless and responsible.  She takes orders 
  without complaint, she always shows up on time and 
  she never shows up stoned.    
       Marla keeps moving when she isn’t in prison.  
  She’ll blow into town with a big pile of coke, cut some 
  unpopular local dealer out of his action, leave his 
  frozen, shattered corpse as a reminder for his friends 
  and relations not to trifle with her, make enough 
  money to buy more coke, and move on the moment 
  things start to get too hot.   
       She likes warm weather.  Despite her powers, she 
  despises cold climates—not because it causes her 
  discomfort, but because it reminds her of her 
  childhood in Duluth.  She hates the sight of people 
  staggering through snowy streets, wrapped up in 
  heavy coats with their noses leaking snot into their 
  mufflers.   
       Although the Snow Queen likes sultry 
  temperatures, she knows that her immunity to cold 
  puts her at an advantage, so her lair will usually be 
  inside a refrigerator truck, industrial meat locker or 
  some other big refrigerated place.  Her henchmen and 
  other criminal associates will stand there shivering and 
  passing out from the cold, while she calmly discusses 
  business, clearly unconcerned with their discomfort.  
  This helps inspire fear.   
       Sometimes she uses paid henchmen and sometimes 
  she doesn’t, depending on the nature of the job. If she 
  does hire thugs then she tries to keep them afraid of 
  her, but unlike some supervillains she doesn’t kill or 
  cripple them for making trivial mistakes. It’s too much 
  effort to hire new people, particularly if you give 
  yourself a reputation for butchering the help.   
       Superbly gifted at the art of intimidation, she 
  makes threats and talks trash with the best of them.  
  She also knows that fear is a better intimidation tool 
  than actual violence.  You can’t kill someone twice, 
  dead men don’t pay their debts and people with 
  nothing left to lose make bad enemies.  She will 
  certainly threaten a prospective enemy’s loved ones (if 
  she knows who they are), she may kidnap one and 
  leave another one dead and frozen on their doorstep as 
  a warning, but she’ll try hard not to take away 
  everything a mark has—unless of course that’s the 
  assignment.  
       Her fighting style varies according to the kind of 
  combat she finds herself involved in.  If she’s up 
  against a powerful opponent, or if she’s here to kill a 
  particular person and get away clean then she’ll hit 
  and run as fast as possible, using the element of 
  surprise if she can.  If on the other hand she’s there to 
  beat somebody up and terrorize them, she’s showy, 
  
    
  dramatic and cruel, fond of taunting the victim and of 
  tricks like freezing and shattering their fingers, ears, or 
  lips.   
       In person she seems distant, distracted, forbidding 
  and sadistic.  She often looks as though her mind is 
  somewhere else, but she still has a wicked sense of 
  humor. Only seldom does she bother to raise her 
  voice.   
       While she speaks standard English, and has only 
  the very faintest trace of a Minnesota accent, her 
  background is a white-trash chamber of horrors.  Her 
  family lived in a run-down trailer somewhere outside 
  of Duluth. She had one little brother, now deceased. 
  Her parents screamed at each other and wasted their 
  money on crank, while her schoolmates taunted her 
  for her ragged Salvation Army clothes.   
       When Marla was 12 her Mom stabbed her Dad and 
  got taken away by the cops.  Dad wound up in the 
  hospital, much too far away for his kids to reach him 
  on foot.  The family had been fighting eviction for a 
  month, and with both parents out of action, there was 
  nothing to prevent it now.  Marla and her little brother 
  wound up living in the woods at the end of the block.  
       Their Dad went into a coma and their nearest 
  relatives were in Ohio—and hated their branch of the 
  family in any case.  It was a bleak November for the 
  Frost kids.   
       And then a cold snap hit, sudden and savage as 
  lightning.   One night it was forty degrees, the next 
  night it was fifteen and Marla and her brother were in 
  immanent danger of death. By the time they realized 
  that they weren’t going to survive the night outside, 
  both kids were already suffering from hypothermia.   
       Little Tom was overcome first, so his sister carried 
  him.  When she could carry him no further, she left 
  him in the snow and wandered on alone.  She 
  collapsed herself a few hundred yards away.   
       It was Thanksgiving, she suddenly remembered.  
  What a strange time to die.   
       And as the snow covered her up, the spirits of the 
  cold North Wind came to her.  They were intrigued, 
  they explained, by the way she had left her little 
  brother to die, just to have a few more minutes of life 
  herself.  They respected that kind of thinking, and they 
  were prepared to offer her a deal.  She could have her 
  life and have their power, if she agreed to walk away 
  and never tell anyone that little Tommy was dying 
  there in the snow.  This sounded reasonable to her.   
       A few days later, she managed to hook up with a 
  coke dealer that mom knew, who liked girls Marla's 
  age.  She moved in with him for just long enough to 
  learn his whole client list, then froze him to death with 
  her new powers and took his stash.   
       She liquidated as much product as she could and 
  headed south, looking for somewhere warm.  
       For a long time Marla tried to keep her powers 
  secret, only using them when her back was to the wall.  
  This was a sound policy.  She was actually thrown in 
  prison and used her powers to escape twice without 
  anyone finding out that she was a parahuman. She was 
  able to lie low for long enough to take a lot of 
  community college courses, study elocution and 
  nearly get a Master’s Degree in Psychology.   
       Once the cat was out of the bag she used her status 
  as a supervillain to her advantage, playing the role as 
  well as she could, making people fear her and landing 
  big jobs with organized crime when she wasn’t in 
  school or prison.   
       She supposes her parents are probably both still 
  alive out there, somewhere, but she's never bothered to 
  check. 
   
  Using the Snow Queen in your 
  campaign: A versatile adversary, the Snow Queen 
  can be used as a kind of low-level master villain, 
  complete with henchmen, a secret base and a minor 
  Master Plan (usually something like: steal a big 
  diamond, trade it for lots of coke, sell the blow at a 
  massive profit, kill everyone who knows about her and 
  get out of town).  Or she can be a mercenary villain, a 
  temporary member of a team or even a personal arch-
  nemesis.  She’s done it all.  And none of it really 
  satisfied.  
   
  Adventures With The Snow Queen:  
   
  1) Death, With Sprinkles on Top 
       A drug dealer named Jimmy Mack Alcazar comes 
  to the Player Characters for help.  He swore to look 
  after his brother’s kids while he’s in prison, and now 
  one of them is dead and one of them is missing and 
  he’s so upset he can’t think straight and he doesn’t 
  know what to do.   
       It’s the Snow Queen.  She rolled into town just a 
  few days ago, somehow figured out that he knew 
  about a major coke deal that will be taking place 
  tomorrow, left his 16 year old nephew frozen and 
  shattered on his doorstep and took his 8 year old niece 
  away.   
       Then she called Jimmy Mack on his cell phone and 
  told him that she would appreciate his assistance with 
  her plan to rip off the coke.  She didn’t let him speak 
  to his niece or anything, he doesn’t know if the little 
  girl is alive or dead, but he gave it all up anyway, told 
  her everything he knew.  She never gave his niece 
  back and anyway everyone is going to know that 
  Jimmy Mack tipped off the Snow Queen so he’s dead 
  anyway and they’ll probably kill his niece too.  The 
  PCs have just gotta help him, he says.  He’ll do 
  anything.   
       And the strange thing is, he’s telling the truth.  The 
  Snow Queen is up to her usual tricks.  She appeared in 
  town last week, scoped out the drug scene, froze some 
  fingers and ears off people until she found someone 
  who could tell her something useful, and is now 
  getting ready to steal a big shipment of cocaine.   
       To help out with the heist and with distributing the 
  blow afterwards, she has recruited a gang of thugs, 
  dressed them up in ice cream man uniforms and 
  christened them the “Waffle Cone Gang.”  With their 
  scars, tattoos and gold teeth they don’t really look like 
  the kind of guys you’d want to buy ice cream from, 
  but they do look like the right kind of guys to sell you 
  
    
  coke.  They drive around in ice cream trucks and they 
  turn the music on when they’re about to do a drive-by 
  shooting.   
       The Snow Queen’s current lair is a meat locker in a 
  warehouse out by the airport.  She doesn’t keep Jimmy 
  Mack’s niece there.  In fact the little girl rides around 
  in the back of one of the ice cream trucks and has been 
  having a pretty good time eating ice cream all day and 
  playing with the thugs.   
       The coke deal is going to take place in the parking 
  lot of a used tire depot, under a huge grinning 
  fiberglass statue of a gorilla.  Both parties know and 
  trust one another, and neither one is bringing a lot of 
  bodyguards.  And then the tinkling sound of ice cream 
  trucks is heard in the distance…  
   
  2) A Dish Served Cold 
       The Snow Queen always assumed that her useless 
  parents were still alive out there somewhere. In fact 
  her mom died years ago in a prison brawl, and her 
  father, who never fully recovered from his injuries, 
  died from a botched surgery just last spring.   
       Due to an administrative foul-up they actually 
  performed the wrong surgical procedure on her father. 
  Ordinarily, the doctors performing the surgery would 
  have noticed that something was wrong, but the chief 
  surgeon was blasted out of his mind on coke 
  (ironically enough) and none of the other staff wanted 
  to question his judgment.  
       The Snow Queen was shocked by how badly the 
  news of her parents’ death has affected her.  She 
  thought she was long past caring about anything like 
  this, and yet it has made her a weeping wreck.   
       At first she considered pursuing litigation against 
  the people responsible for her father’s death, but the 
  state where her father lived in the last years of his life 
  has a law that limits medical malpractice suits to a 
  ridiculous pittance. After talking some more with 
  lawyers and doing a little independent research of her 
  own, she has noticed that there was a startling rise in 
  the number of malpractice-related deaths in that state, 
  once the law went into effect.   
       She takes a certain grim satisfaction in the 
  knowledge that a lot of other people are suffering the 
  way she is. Nevertheless, it’s not enough.  Everyone 
  must die. The assisting doctors who should have 
  corrected the chief surgeon, the filing clerk who made 
  the error, the hospital administrators who overworked 
  the staff until they started making lethal mistakes, the 
  lobbyists who got the law passed, the legislators who 
  voted for it, the governor who signed it, the head of 
  the medical association that pushed for it, and maybe 
  the board of the insurance company that backed them, 
  if she has time.  They will all die. Horribly.   
       She’s saving the chief surgeon for last, for she 
  wants him to know that she is coming.  She hasn’t 
  decided whether or not to kill herself afterwards, for 
  selling the coke that eventually found its way up his 
  nose and into his brain, shorting out his judgment and 
  killing her Dad. 
  
    
  Black Thunder 
  Real Name: Powers Cage 
  PL: 16 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 18 (+4) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +7 Attack Bonus (Melee): +17 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +18 Defense: 
  +19/+15 Speed: 40 
  Damage Save: +16 Fortitude  Save: +5 
  Reflexes Save: +3 Willpower Save: +4   
  Skills: Hide +10, Knowledge (Southeast Asian 
  Criminal Underworld) +5, Languages (Chinese, 
  Indonesian, Spanish, Thai, Vietnamese), Listen +9, 
  Medical +5, Move Silently +10, Spot +8, Survival +9 
  Feats: All-Out Attack, Chokehold, Dodge, 
  Durability, Expertise, Improved Critical (“Strike” 
  attack), Improved Grapple, Improved Initiative, 
  Improved Trip, Infamy, Power Attack, Rapid 
  Takedown, Surprise Strike, Stunning Attack, 
  Takedown Attack, Track 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +6 (Cost: 1pt),  
  Deflection +6 (Cost: 2pts), Running +2 (Cost: 2pts), 
  Strike +10 (Cost: 2pts), Super-Strength +5 (Extras: 
  Amazing Save [Damage], Protection; Cost: 6pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Won't harm innocent 
  bystanders or allow them to come to harm. 
   
  “Stop trying to kill me for a minute and 
  I’ll tell you what really happened at Muy 
  Trahn.” 
   
       One of the most wanted criminals in American 
  history, he’s been running from the law for thirty years 
  and hasn’t been caught yet.  He’s a traitor, a killer, a 
  selfish monster and one of America’s most dedicated 
  enemies.   
       A front-line superhero in Vietnam, he was always 
  dangerously unstable, prone to anti-American tirades 
  and disobeying orders.  The Army put up with his bad 
  attitude and Communist leanings perhaps more than it 
  should have, since he was tremendously effective on 
  the battlefield—but then again no one could have 
  known what he was eventually going to do.   
       During the defense of Muy Tranh Village he fought 
  bravely against impossible odds, almost single-
  handedly fending off a massive Viet Cong assault.  He 
  felt he deserved the Medal of Honor for that, and 
  when he received a Silver Star instead, he deserted and 
  joined the other side.   
       At first no one wanted to admit that this could have 
  happened, that any American serviceman could be 
  selfish enough to drag shame down on his country, 
  fighting his own comrades and staining the honor of 
  the Armed Forces.  Yet it was so.  For the next twenty 
  years he turned up all across the Far East, fighting 
  America’s allies, getting entangled in the international 
  drug trade.  After that he seemed to slow down, 
  perhaps feeling his age, but all the signs indicate that 
  he’s still out there somewhere, plotting the downfall of 
  America.  
       Capturing Black Thunder has been a high priority 
  for the American Intelligence community for the past 
  three decades, but despite a few close brushes they 
  haven’t caught up with him yet.  If the Player 
  Characters ever manage it, perhaps they’ll find out the 
  truth.  He’s eager to talk about what really happened, 
  and he’ll gladly tell anyone who listens.   
       As you may have guessed, most of the official 
  story on Black Thunder is a lie, but some of it is just 
  an oversimplification.   
       He made a lot of mistakes, he freely admits.  
  Powers Cage was a happy-go-lucky, carefree teenager 
  from Georgia.  He’s older and wiser now, but in 1968 
  he was a wild and thoughtless kid.  The restrictions 
  black folks had to endure in rural Georgia didn’t sit 
  well with him and his family was sure that he would 
  mouth off in front of the wrong people and get 
  lynched, sooner or later.  They encouraged him to join 
  the Army, and he did.  Somehow he didn’t grasp that 
  this would mean getting sent to Vietnam.   
       The Army detected his latent superhuman powers 
  in Basic Training, and had him sent to a special six-
  week program at Fort Dix.  After a course of stimulant 
  injections and Rage Therapy, his abilities manifested 
  and he was ready to be transferred to Fort Meade in 
  Maryland for advanced parahuman training.  It never 
  happened.  Superhumans were desperately needed on 
  the front lines, so they shipped him off to Da Nang 
  without anything more than the most basic instruction 
  in how to use his powers.  He was issued a costume 
  and assigned to an infantry platoon as a combat 
  specialist.  He hadn’t had time to go to Officer 
  Training School, so they made him a Private, First 
  Class.   
       His unit was deep in the back country of Da Nang 
  Province, a heavily contested zone.  They had 
  encounters with the enemy every week out there.   
       It didn’t take him long to realize how useless his 
  superhuman powers were in jungle warfare.  He was 
  really strong, and he could project energy out of his 
  fists, drastically enhancing the power of his blows.  If 
  he concentrated really hard he could throw a bolt of 
  energy out of his hands, and fry a man in his boots up 
  to a few yards away.  None of which made any 
  difference at all, except in close combat, which never 
  seemed to happen.   
       His energy blasts didn’t have the range of a rifle, 
  and they made a lot more noise.  He could actually 
  form a kind of energy shield that would block 
  incoming bullets, but only if he knew what direction 
  they were coming from—something you never knew 
  out in the bush.  What did it matter that he could lift a 
  jeep over his head?  When was that ever going to 
  
    
  come up in a war like this one?   
       Worse, his costume made him a walking target for 
  snipers.  They always killed the guy with powers first.  
  The other grunts in his platoon didn’t even want to 
  stand near him on patrol. After he figured this out he 
  tried to wear his super-duds as little as possible, even 
  though the officers got on his case about it.   
       Like a lot of guys, he took drugs to dull the 
  constant stress and tension.  This got him written up 
  on suspicion a couple of times, which he compounded 
  by getting involved in the “Dap” controversy.   
       The “Dap” was a special, super-complicated 
  handshake that black servicemen gave eachother to 
  show their solidarity with one another.  It could go on 
  for minutes, if you let it.  In 1969 the Armed Forces 
  cracked down on the Dap, on the grounds that it was a 
  symbol of “Black Power” subversion.  Nobody told 
  Black Thunder this until he was caught doing the Dap 
  by a new lieutenant (who was himself black) and 
  disciplined for it.   
       It was tough being a black man in the Army, 
  fighting for a country that oppressed you at home.  
  Lynching was still a fact of life in the South, black 
  people had only gained the universal right to vote four 
  years earlier.  A lot of black servicemen felt conflicted 
  about the war.   
       The enemy knew this, and would periodically 
  distribute leaflets aimed at undermining their will to 
  fight. Crudely made and badly translated into English, 
  they were a hoot to read and sometimes a group of 
  black soldiers would gather around to chuckle over a 
  particularly silly one.  Black Thunder got caught doing 
  this (by the same officer who caught him doing the 
  Dap), and this time he was nearly sent up on charges 
  for reading commie literature.   
       All of these things weighed heavily on him, but he 
  was too busy trying to stay alive to let it get him 
  down.  And stay alive he did, one way or another, until 
  he was finally getting close to the midway point of his 
  term, and his first extended leave.  
       He had his heart set on going to Bangkok, where 
  the other guys said that the food was cheap, the 
  women were extremely friendly, and nobody cared 
  that you were black.   
       Then along came the incident that would make him 
  into first a hero and then a fugitive.  
       There were two ways of handling a patrol.  You 
  could go from point Alpha, to Point Bravo, to Point 
  Charlie, to Point Delta, like you were supposed to.  Or 
  if you knew the guys in your patrol, you didn’t like 
  getting shot at and you all agreed not to snitch, you 
  could just go off somewhere else and make sure to 
  turn up at point Delta on time.   
       As his hours in the bush grew short, Black Thunder 
  grew jealous of his life and started ditching his patrols 
  more and more.  He liked to spend time in the nearby 
  village when he could.  A country boy himself, it 
  always interested him to see how the farmers lived, 
  how different their lives were from his own.   
       One evening, he and the guys had ditched their 
  patrol, and were wandering through the village of Muy 
  Tranh, when they unexpectedly came under fire.  The 
  Viet Cong had marked this hamlet as being loyal to 
  the wrong side, and they were here to teach it a lesson.   
       The four American soldiers returned fire, which 
  surprised and alarmed the attacking VC, who suddenly 
  weren’t sure how heavily defended the village might 
  be.  Darkness fell, the four Americans were effectively 
  pinned down, and the fighting dissolved into 
  confusion as a heavy evening thunderstorm settled 
  over the village.   
       Some time around nine o clock the VC decided to 
  take the hamlet, and moved in among the huts despite 
  the pouring rain and the terrible visibility.  This was 
  the moment Black Thunder and his abilities had been 
  made for.   
       He crept between the houses, keeping low and 
  killing any VC he found, the sound of the storm 
  masking the sound of his powers in action.  He’s not 
  sure now, but he must have killed between fifteen and 
  twenty men that night.  The rest panicked, the VC 
  pulled out, unsure of the enemy’s strength, and Black 
  Thunder began to wonder if they would give him the 
  Silver Star instead of a Court Martial.  It was not to be.  
       Wounded in the fighting, he was sent to a field 
  hospital, where he spent the rest of his time before 
  they put him on the plane to Bangkok. To his 
  amazement, nobody back at headquarters seemed to 
  know or care that his patrol hadn’t been where they 
  should have been on the night in question.  They were 
  eager to have superhuman heroes, and bent over 
  backwards to give him his Silver Star.   
       But they take a soldier’s entire service record into 
  account when deciding what decorations to award, and 
  they denied the other three men their medals, on the 
  grounds that all three of them had at one point or 
  another been seen giving the “Dap” handshake and 
  reading commie pamphlets.  This galled Black 
  Thunder badly.   
       On the transport plane, headed for Bangkok, he 
  could hear anti-aircraft fire and he began to wonder if 
  he was going to be one of those unlucky souls who got 
  blown up on their way to take leave.  Everything he 
  hated about the Army seemed to come crashing in on 
  him at once.   
       When they arrived, he found Bangkok to be as 
  great as everybody said it was.  It was a fascinating 
  city, the people were nice, and for the first time in his 
  life, no one seemed to care that he was black.  Soon he 
  hooked up with a young lady who was far too pretty to 
  have ever gone out with him back home, and he began 
  to seriously consider deserting.   
       A lot of guys went AWOL in Bangkok.  The MPs 
  always found them after they burned through their 
  money and their girlfriends kicked them out the door.  
  But it seemed to him that there had to be a lot of 
  places like this all across Southeast Asia, and that if he 
  went far enough, they wouldn’t catch him.  He’s been 
  running ever since.   
       Black Thunder had no idea that his powers would 
  make him such a target.  In fact his desertion made 
  headlines nationwide.   It was a grave embarrassment 
  to the Nixon Administration, and their inability to 
  catch him made it worse.  The armed forces and the 
  
    
  intelligence community have a serious grudge against 
  the man, more for what he symbolized than for what 
  he actually did, and many within their ranks still hate 
  him with an irrational fury.   
       Life on the run was not as easy as he had hoped.  
  He tried hiding in Laos, then Malaysia, then 
  Indonesia, then the Philippines.   
       He was able to rent his powers out to various 
  armed factions in Laos and to the occasional bandit 
  gang.  He never felt good about doing this, but he had 
  to eat.  He liked bodyguard work best, because it was 
  easy and he usually didn’t have to hurt anybody.  
       More than one secret CIA strike force came after 
  him, and a couple of superhero teams got close.  He 
  always tried to do them as little damage as he could 
  while making his escape, but some guys got killed 
  anyway.     
       By the early 1980s he had saved enough money to 
  settle down for a while in Bali, a place he has come to 
  dearly love. He lives quietly there and keeps a very 
  low profile.  
       The CIA hasn’t come close to him in years.  In fact 
  they may not be trying very hard any more.  However, 
  Jim Flint of the mercenary super-team Executive 
  Solutions hates Black Thunder in a way that isn’t 
  entirely sane, and continues to hunt for him in a low-
  key kind of way.  Whenever the PCs get a lead on 
  Black Thunder’s whereabouts, Flint will too, and he’ll 
  send an assassination squad. 
       Black Thunder has regularly tried to send cash 
  home to his family, but they regard him as a shameful 
  disgrace and will have nothing to do with the money 
  he sends. He can’t blame them.  They endured a lot of 
  grief from the FBI on his behalf.  
       In person, he is thoughtful, calm and reasonably 
  articulate.  He’s grown up a lot since his days as a 
  young hothead and he no longer has anything to 
  prove.  It’s difficult but not impossible to get him 
  riled. While he has a lot of regrets, he is basically 
  cheerful by nature and tries not to burden other people 
  with them.  Aware that he hasn’t had a chance to get 
  much education, he is interested in the world around 
  him and always enjoys learning new things.   
       He has had to kill more people than he likes, and 
  tries hard not to do it if he doesn’t have to, but he is 
  still capable of murder if he’s pushed too far or his 
  back is to the wall. The sad truth is, he enjoys killing a 
  lot more than he cares to admit to himself.  
   
  Using Black Thunder in your 
  campaign:  This is the guy your Players will all 
  want to fight eventually—the legendary supervillain 
  who no one ever caught.  The PCs should hear about 
  Black Thunder long before they ever get even the 
  faintest lead on where to find him.   
       He is a tough combatant, not so much because of 
  his raw power as because of his experience and skill.  
  However, if the PCs fight him he’ll probably be more 
  focused on getting away than on taking them down—
  although he might teach a cocky young hero a brutal 
  lesson to keep them off his trail.  
       If you’d rather bring Black Thunder to your Player 
  Characters, rather then send them halfway around the 
  world to chase him, there are only two things that 
  might tempt him back onto American soil.  The 
  possibility of amnesty, or a threat to his surviving 
  family members.  Whenever he surfaces or wherever 
  the PCs hunt him down, rest assured that the boys 
  from Executive Solutions are just one jump behind 
  him. 
  Adventures With Black Thunder:  
  1) Echoes of Distant Thunder  
       The Player Characters suddenly get the first fresh 
  lead in years on one of America’s most wanted 
  criminals—Black Thunder himself.  We’ll tentatively 
  say he’s in Indonesia, but that’s really just one way to 
  run the scenario.  In fact you could have the PCs find 
  Black Thunder anywhere in the Far East but Japan. 
      Perhaps the right thing to do would be to notify the 
  federal authorities of his whereabouts, but few PC 
  groups will ever take that route.  Most Player 
  Characters will instead want to personally confront 
  him.  
       But someone else has also found the lead, and sent 
  the lads from Executive Solutions after the same 
  target.  Executive Solution M (the former superhero 
  once known as Major Maximum) hates Black Thunder 
  with a mad passion, despite having never met the man, 
  and will jump at the chance to kill him.   
       The PCs catch up with Black Thunder first, and 
  find that he’s willing to talk to them, either before or 
  after they capture him.  The old fugitive has just 
  finished telling his story when the goons from 
  Executive Solutions break down the door.  Even if the 
  PCs have already captured and bound the man they 
  will attack, clearly intent on killing him.  If the PCs 
  look tough and already have Black Thunder prisoner, 
  the team from Executive Solutions will demand that 
  the PCs hand him over for an “on-site field 
  execution.”   
       How the PCs deal with this situation and whether 
  or not they’re willing to fight beside one of America’s 
  most hated enemies is up to them.   
   
  2) My Brother is the Thunder 
       Black Thunder’s younger brother, Quentin Cage, 
  has made a real success of his life.  He’s a tax lawyer 
  by trade, and lives in the suburbs of the PCs’ home 
  city.  A retiring man with little interest in public life, 
  Quentin has the same superpowers as Black Thunder, 
  but he tries to conceal them.  One night he gets pushed 
  too far—perhaps his daughter gets murdered or dies of 
  a drug overdose, and he kills the person responsible.  
  The coroner can see that the dead criminal has been 
  killed by Black Thunder (nobody else’s powers leave 
  marks like that).  Can the country’s most wanted 
  supervillain actually be back on American soil?   
       To complicate things, the real Black Thunder 
  catches wind of this in the press, knows instantly who 
  must have committed the crime and comes back to 
  
    
  America to take the rap for his little brother. But first 
  he intends to lead the authorities on a merry chase, just 
  for old time’s sake.  And then just as the PCs figure 
  out what’s really going on, the team from Executive 
  Solutions breaks down the door… 
   
   
   
   
  .
  
    
  The Death Angel 
  Real Name: Ibrahim bin Ismail 
  PL: 16 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 13 (+1) Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +7 Attack Bonus (Melee): +17 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +18 Defense: 
  +19/+15 Speed: 30/ 80 (Teleport) 
  Damage Save: +14 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +5 Willpower Save: +5   
  Skills: Diplomacy +6, Hide +8, Intimidate +8, 
  Knowledge (Terrorist Underground) +5, Knowledge 
  (European Nightclub Scene) +5, Languages (English, 
  French, Turkish), Listen +6, Move Silently +8, 
  Survival +6 
  Feats: Ambidexterity, Attack Finesse, Connected, 
  Dodge, Expertise, Great Fortitude, Improved 
  Initiative, Improved Two-Weapon Fighting, Infamy, 
  Iron Will, Lightning Reflexes, Penetrating Attack (Big 
  Scary Knives) x2, Surprise Attack, Toughness, Two-
  Weapon Fighting 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +10, 
  Teleportation +16 (Extras: Energy Blast, Explosive 
  Effect, Extended Teleport; Power Stunts: Fullisade 
  [Note: the Death Angel cannot use his energy blast 
  attack in the same round as he makes a Fullisade 
  attack], Power Immunity, Turnabout; Flaws: Energy 
  Blast has no range and cannot be aimed at anyone  
  specific--it just radiates out of the Death Angel's 
  position in an explosive blast, Energy Blast only 
  detonates when the Death Angel teleports out of a 
  location; Cost: 3pts) 
  Equipment: Pair of Big Scary Knives (+5 Lethal 
  Damage; Cost: 1pt) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Fanatically loyal to his 
  comrades (albeit not to Islam) would never rat any of 
  his fellow terrorists out or give up any information 
  that would interfere with their plans, even if this puts 
  him at a disadvantage. 
  Quirk: Bigot (Cannot work effectively with Jews, 
  women of loose virtue or anyone he suspects of being 
  homosexual; he will attack these targets in preference 
  to anyone else, even if this puts him at a tactical 
  disadvantage) 
   
  “Three hundred years ago there was no 
  crime, no drugs, no homosexuality, no 
  women’s liberation.  Because people still 
  are fearing God. You must understand 
  that these things are all a Western 
  invention--the West fears Islam and will 
  sink to any depth to destroy it.  Even 
  inventing homosexuality is not beyond 
  them. But now the fist of God is here to 
  drive it down their throats.  And I am 
  he.” 
   
       Everyone can now see that the Angel of Death was 
  a bad idea.  But back in the 1980s, when he was 
  fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, it didn’t seem like 
  such a poor concept to back a superhuman Muslim 
  Fundamentalist with a lust to kill infidels.  We weren’t 
  the infidels he had in mind.  At least not yet.  Alas, in 
  recent years this has changed and now the Angel is 
  coming for us all.   
       Ibrahim bin Ismail was an upper-middle class 
  Omani, educated in America, seemingly destined to be 
  a corporate lawyer like his father.  He affected a kind 
  of angry, radical Islamic posture at Yale, since it 
  impressed girls and gave him some bad-boy swagger. 
  He was one of many rich young tough guys, fond of 
  vintage scotch, cashmere sweaters, new model 
  Mercedes and vicious anti-Semitism.   
       Like most of his associates he felt that Reagan was 
  the only hope for America, that poor people had better 
  shut up and stop whining, that Salman Rushdie had to 
  die and that sorority girls were implicitly asking for it 
  if they willingly entered your frat house.  And of 
  course that Allah was the One True God and 
  Muhammad was his prophet.  
       Always eager to outdo one another and prove that 
  they were hard, many of them went to fight the 
  Soviets in Afghanistan, at least for a little while.  As 
  the muhadjjadin rebels advanced on Kabul, a 
  surprising number of them wore designer sunglasses 
  and really expensive shoes.  An even more surprising 
  number of them stayed on to join the Taliban once the 
  Soviets were driven out.   
       We don’t know exactly when Ibrahim’s powers 
  first manifested themselves.  We do know that he first 
  went to Afghanistan in 1982, while taking a semester 
  off from Yale, and that he was almost immediately 
  using his superhuman abilities to wreak bloody havoc 
  on the Russians.  He made a number of trips over the 
  next two years, and was growing wildly in popularity 
  with the rank and file muhadjjadin when the CIA 
  contacted him.  
       The Company felt that a muhadjjadin superhero 
  was an irresistible asset.  They gave him some 
  training, plus a course of operations at a semi-legal 
  clinic in Switzerland to enhance his powers yet 
  further, and began to funnel a lot of money and 
  equipment to his ever-growing band of followers. 
  They named him The Angel of Death.   
       He did a spectacular job, and in so doing met the 
  one great love of his life—war.  Ever since he was a 
  child he had a taste for hurting things, but he found 
  that in combat it blossomed into a bottomless, never-
  ending hunger.  
       While he met some of the other rebel leaders, 
  Abdul Haq and Muhammed Omar and Osama bin 
  Laden, he always stayed somewhat aloof from them.  
  Nor did he ever bother to do much actual leadership, 
  even though men gathered around him constantly.  He 
  
    
  was always a bit of a lone wolf and it was always the 
  fighting itself that most interested him.   
       When the Soviets finally left, he could easily have 
  played a role in the new government but he wanted to 
  go where people were still killing eachother.  Over the 
  course of the 90s, he has fought for the militant 
  factions of the PLO, for the Chechen rebels, for the 
  Taliban and for the Muslim Sudanese in their 
  unending war against the non-Islamic tribes in the 
  south of the country. He has even worked in Lebanon 
  for Hezbollah, despite the fact that they are a Shiite 
  organization (he himself is proudly Sunni in his 
  beliefs).  He has never been an active member of Al 
  Quaida, allthough they have his phone number. 
       In person he is utterly ferocious, as well as being 
  something of a pompous jerk. He loves to hold forth 
  about the decadent West with its crime and drugs and 
  homosexuality etc, ad nauseum.  A spoiled brat for the 
  first half of his life, it has never left him, entirely. 
  While he claims to conduct himself honorably in 
  combat, and that he won’t strike a man in the back, 
  take hostages or kill innocent people, as soon as the 
  fight starts to go against him he will forget all this and 
  do whatever he thinks will work.  
       He still likes nightclubs and good whisky and 
  Rolex watches and is incapable of seeing his own 
  hypocrisy.  Despite his rhetoric, his faith is weak and 
  chiefly serves as an excuse to hurt people.  The real 
  god he worships in his heart is war.   
   
  Using The Death Angel in your 
  campaign:  One of the big threats lurking in the 
  background, make sure your PCs have heard all kinds 
  of awful stories about the Death Angel before they 
  meet him in person.  They can encounter him in any 
  part of the Islamic world, although he may also 
  perform the odd assassination in Europe or even the 
  US itself.  He always works for Islamic groups and he 
  always seeks out combat.  He’s much more 
  comfortable fighting in an actual bush war than in 
  some kind of urban insurgency, but these days he isn't 
  picky and can turn up anywhere that Islam's enemies 
  need to be killed.   
   
  Adventures With The Death Angel:  
   
  1) Look Homeward Angel 
        The Death Angel’s old CIA handlers want to draw 
  him into a trap, but don’t want to draw attention to the 
  fact that they used to be associated with the man.  So 
  they leak his contact information, secret code-phrases, 
  countersigns and so forth, to an underworld snitch 
  who has connections to superheroes.  
       This particular snitch knows the Player Characters, 
  and runs straight to them with the information. The 
  PCs are now in a position to set a trap for one of the 
  most wanted men on earth.   
       We’re not going to be very specific here about how 
  you would actually contact the Death Angel, or what 
  the snitch is like, so as to make this easier to work into 
  your campaign.  If the PCs are at a point in their 
  adventures where they could just drop everything and 
  travel halfway around the world, then have them go to 
  a non-working payphone in the Paris Metro, press 
  some code word into the keypad and then go wait 
  behind the metal detectors at Charles de Gaulle airport 
  (or go through something equally elaborate).   
       If the PCs are working stiffs who can’t afford plane 
  fare out of state, they should leave a message and five 
  hundred dollars in a particular locker at the bus 
  station, and call a certain cell phone number, so that 
  the Death Angel’s cousin Ali knows to come pick the 
  money up and tell Ibrahim that somebody wants to see 
  him (or something equally simple).   
       The snitch’s CIA handlers give him a cover story 
  on how he got the information, but it’s rushed, flimsy 
  and easy to dismantle with a little detective work.  
  Shortly after giving the PCs the contact information, 
  the snitch turns up dead.   
       CIA Case Officers Hawley and Geffen introduce 
  themselves to the PCs soon after the snitch dies, and 
  explain that they would like to help them trap the 
  Death Angel.  The Death Angel’s people must have 
  killed the snitch, they explain.  Hawley and Geffen 
  were tracking him, thinking he had information on 
  Ibrahim, which is how they found the PCs.   
       Austin Hawley is a plump, distinguished looking 
  older gentleman with a huge swoop of white hair and 
  expensive taste in suits.  Glenora Geffen is a tiny dark 
  woman with short hair and a thick southern drawl.  
  Both are accomplished liars and both are willing to 
  kill to achieve the mission objective, but neither one is 
  particularly athletic or an especially good shot.  They 
  kill people by writing memos. Let the help do the 
  manual labor.  
       They agree to assist the PCs set the trap and they 
  even provide the services of a sniper, on loan from a 
  security contractor in North Carolina, who can watch 
  the target area in case things get dicey.  They will also 
  be willing to give the PCs as many weird spy gadgets 
  as they might care to request.  They’re not allowed to 
  carry out operations on American soil, so this will 
  officially be the PCs’ operation, and they won’t 
  officially be involved.   
       Hawley and Geffen are as good as their word, but 
  something really doesn’t seem right about them.  They 
  are horribly condescending and fake, treating the 
  Player Characters like children, explaining things too 
  slowly and repeating them too often.  If the PCs reject 
  their help they will have them tailed, and a sniper will 
  be waiting at the scene regardless of what they do or 
  where they set up the meeting.  
       Unfortunately for everyone involved, when the 
  Death Angel appears, his first words are: “What could 
  the CIA possibly want from me this time?  It’s been 
  more than ten years since we’ve been in touch. Could 
  I still owe you any favors, Mister Hawley?” 
       Case Officer Hawley will frantically signal the 
  sniper, who will attempt to kill the Death Angel and 
  the PCs.  A three cornered fight is likely to erupt, and 
  the Death Angel is likely to get away.   
   
   
  
    
  2) An Angel in the Outfield 
       The day before a major sporting event, a Player 
  Character spots the Death Angel scouting out the 
  venue.  It seems incredible, but there he is, one of the 
  most hunted men in the world, standing there on a 
  crowded public place in broad daylight.   
       This scenario works best if the PC is in their secret 
  identity, with friends who don’t know their secret.  
  Their friends haven’t noticed the Death Angel, and if 
  they do, they’re convinced that it couldn’t really be 
  him. Not here on the street in the middle of the day.           
       Whether the PC is with their friends or not, the 
  Death Angel is standing in the middle of a big crowd 
  of people—if he teleports away he might kill dozens 
  of them.   
       How is the PC to deal with this situation?.  If they 
  try to trail him, he may very well spot them and a fight 
  will erupt right there on the spot.  If they succeed in 
  trailing him discreetly, he goes to a mid-price hotel 
  downtown, where he is staying in the room of another 
  guest—a businessman from Saudi Arabia.  It may be 
  safer to fight him there, but he could still damage the 
  hotel and cause a lot of collateral damage in the 
  process.  And what sinister plan does he have in store 
  for tomorrow?  
       If the GM is feeling mischievous, then the Death 
  Angel has no sinister plan at all—he’s just here to 
  watch the big game! 
   
   
  
    
  Doctor Moloch, 
  Phd. 
  Real Name: Dr. Moloch, Phd. 
  PL: 16 
  Str: 20 (+5) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 18 (+4) Wis: 18 (+4) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +20 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +19 Defense: 
  +29/+25 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +4 Willpower Save: +4   
  Skills: Diplomacy +8, Knowledge (Blasphemous 
  Secrets and Forbidden Lore)+14, Listen +7, Spot +6 
  Feats: Darkvision, Durability, Immunity (Aging, 
  Cold, Heat, Pressure, Radiation, Starvation, 
  Sufocation) 
  Powers: Super-Strength +13 (Extras: Protection, 
  Thunderclap; Cost 6pts) 
  Weaknesses: Vulnerability: Holy objects.  And 
  not just Christian ones.  The object must be genuinely 
  revered by someone—you can’t just hold two sticks 
  up like a cross to fend him off, but any such object 
  will do (unless of course it’s revered by satanists). 
   
  “Why Captain Eldritch!  How good it is 
  to see you again!  And how is Liberty 
  Lass these days?  Recovering well from 
  our last encounter, I hope?  I hate to 
  have to say it, but I’m afraid my current 
  master wants me to kill you in some truly 
  disgusting ways—he seems to think I 
  should be terribly impressed by his  
  boring depravities, as though these 
  uninspired mutilations of the flesh 
  weren’t something I already see every 
  day in Hell.  But I don’t mean to waste 
  your time with my difficulties.  Shall we 
  just get down to it then?”  
   
       Filth-Lord of the Third Infernal Legion, Plangent 
  Wreaker of Obscenities on the Heads of the Lost and 
  the Damned, and Professor Emeritus of Depraved 
  Studies at the Burning College of the 34th Hell; for the 
  living incarnation of absolute evil he’s not really such 
  a bad guy.  Certainly he intends to wreak wondrous 
  and unthinkable abominations upon Mankind, but it’s 
  really just a job to him.  The truth is that he’s deeply 
  bored with Evil.  He is unimpressed with bloody 
  sacrifices and demented acts of worshipful carnage.  
  Unspeakable perversities make him roll his eyes—he’s 
  seen it all before.  Any idiot can slaughter children 
  over a bowl as far as he’s concerned.   
       In person he is pleasant, congenial, and a good host 
  (although he does often have a tired and rueful air 
  about him).  He will greet the players cordially if he’s 
  met them before, ask about the health of mutual 
  acquaintances and how things are going in their own 
  lives before he gets down to the business of killing 
  them.  
       Despite his weary contempt for human evil, it is his 
  job and he knows a lot about it.  In any conversation 
  with Doctor Moloch, he’s likely to utter at least one 
  hideously accurate insight into the nature of the 
  universe, but he does it distractedly, as though he can 
  barely be bothered to pay attention. When he makes a 
  point, he likes to use examples from Seinfeld (you’d 
  think that as the embodiment of all that is foul and 
  wrong he’d be more into Friends than Seinfeld, but in 
  fact he’s fond of George Costanza). He does have his 
  dignity and he doesn’t like to be taunted, but he’s 
  more likely to look hurt than enraged if someone 
  insults him.  Sarcastic is about as aggressive as he 
  gets, at least in conversation.   
       In combat, on the other hand, he goes right for the 
  throat.  A swift and efficient fighter, he wants the 
  brawl to be over as quickly as possible so he tries to 
  incapacitate or kill his opponent as fast as he can, 
  preferably by hitting them in a weak spot with 
  everything he has.  It is true that he may sometimes 
  handicap himself against really puny opponents, 
  reading a book or doing a crossword puzzle with one 
  hand while he fights them with the other.  But he 
  doesn’t do this to show off—he does it because he’s 
  bored.  
       It’s really quite unusual to encounter demons this 
  powerful outside of Hell itself.  Someone at his level 
  of the Infernal Hierarchy shouldn’t be running around 
  the Material Plane kicking in bank vaults and battling 
  superheroes hand-to-hand, he should be attending 
  Planning Committee sessions and teaching advanced 
  seminars in Evil.   
       Alas, three years ago the late sorcerer Hubert 
  Shackley found Moloch’s true name and published it 
  on the Internet.  How someone like Shackley managed 
  to get his hands on such an incredibly potent secret 
  remains unknown, but it hardly matters.  Now any 
  cheapjack magician with a web-browser and a set of 
  black candles can yank poor Dr. Moloch up out of 
  Hell and force him to run their shabby errands.   
       He is forever having to miss Planning Committee 
  sessions and interrupt seminars to come up here and 
  waste his time kicking in bank vaults and fighting 
  superheroes hand to hand.  He’s not really sure what 
  to do about it, although he supposes that human 
  civilization will fall eventually.   
       If the players manage to destroy his physical form 
  he can still be summoned at some later date, in which 
  case he won’t hold a grudge.   
       If they get access to his true name (which he is 
  compelled by the laws of Darkness not to tell them 
  himself) then he will be only too grateful to obey 
  
    
  commands like “return to Hell, ye devil-spawn” or 
  “never again shalt thou trouble Mankynde” and he will 
  thank them for it.  However, only an actual sorcerer 
  can use his name effectively, and then only if they are 
  willing to go through a lengthy, disgusting and 
  morally dubious ritual.  The GM should improvise the 
  details, but it should be the kind of thing that you can’t 
  do in the middle of combat and that you wouldn’t 
  want to go through again if you could avoid it.   
       Dr. Moloch is a loyal ally--as a summoned and 
  bound entity he frankly doesn't have any other choice. 
  He will frequently make wry observations about what 
  an idiot his current boss is, but he’s not willing to 
  betray them or to reveal anything about them that a 
  superhero could use to their advantage.  He already 
  has a few choice plans for his current master once they 
  reach his domain, and he’s willing to wait.   
       Be warned, whenever Doctor Moloch appears in 
  person on the Earth, the Forces of Light send 
  Azeraphel the Screaming Angel to stop him, and she's 
  a lot less pleasant than he is.  See her individual entry 
  to learn all the frightening details. 
   
  Using Doctor Moloch, Phd. in your 
  campaign: While he can turn into a one-joke 
  character if you’re not too careful, Dr. Moloch can 
  actually get funnier and funnier each time the PCs 
  encounter him, as they come to understand his plight 
  better and he gets to know them and enjoy their 
  company.   
       His plot hook, while it’s really specific, is actually 
  flexible enough that you can use him for a bunch of 
  different types of crimes.  Because he’s forever getting 
  sent on petty, trivial errands by idiots, he could 
  participate in amazingly minor or amazingly major 
  capers—whatever works for your campaign. Even so, 
  use him sparingly to keep the joke from getting stale.   
   
  Adventures With Doctor Moloch, Phd.:  
   
  Seven Crowns of Stupid and a Diamond or Two 
       Doctor Moloch, PhD, gets dragged up out of Hell 
  by a twenty year old Svengali named Melvin 
  Dumbrowski, who wants to impress his pack of 
  giggling teenage girlfriends.  Melvin orders him to 
  retrieve the Seven Crowns of Crime—lost artifacts of 
  the Black Atlantean Age, now scattered and vanished.  
  Whosoever possesses them will know the ultimate 
  embrace of shadows and become the Lord of Night, 
  master of darkness and blood.   
       Doctor Moloch patiently explains that he can’t 
  retrieve the Seven Crowns of Crime because there’s 
  no such thing—in fact Melvin just made them up now.  
  But Melvin and his pimply handmaidens won’t listen.  
  They will have Seven Crowns of Crime, and that’s 
  that.   
       The first Crown of Crime is supposed to be located 
  in a secret chamber underneath the Museum of Natural 
  History.  Inwardly rolling his eyes, Dr. Moloch 
  smashes his way into the Museum at midnight.  He 
  breaks open a secret chamber under the basement and 
  does in fact find a lost forbidden book of blasphemous 
  secrets from beyond time and space (the dreaded 
  Gerflugelmacht Codex of Manfred the Unbelievably 
  Insane), but of course no Crown of Crime.   
       Alas, Melvin is not satisfied with the book and 
  declares that Doctor Moloch has failed him.  The next 
  crown must be in a safety deposit box kept by an 
  ancient European family in one of the city’s most 
  exclusive private banks. Of course Dr, Moloch doesn't 
  find it there, although he does find some swell 
  diamonds—one of them as big as a sparrow’s egg.  
  But Melvin didn't want diamonds, he wanted a Crown 
  of Crime.  And so it goes.   
       The PCs find out at some point in Dr. Moloch's 
  pointless crime spree that someome is breaking into 
  creepy, ominous locations and stealing who-knows-
  what kind of arcane artifacts for some terrible 
  unknown purpose.  All the signs point to a demon of 
  incredible power—the kind of entity who almost never 
  gets summoned to the earth in the flesh.  What 
  frightful scheme is afoot?  How to stop it?  
       To complicate matters, one of Melvin’s acolytes 
  has started reading the Gerflugelmacht Codex for 
  herself.  And then Azeraphel the Screaming Angel 
  shows up… 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Azeraphel, the 
  Screaming Angel 
  Real Name: Azeraphel 
  PL: 16 
  Str: 20 (+5) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 14 (+2) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +20 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +19 Defense: 
  +29/+25 Speed: 30/50 (Flight) 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +4 Willpower Save: +2   
  Skills: Acrobatics +8, Intimidate+10, Knowledge 
  (Punishments), Listen +8, Spot +12 
  Feats: Detect Evil, Durability, Immunity (Aging, 
  Cold, Heat, Exhaustion, Pressure, Radiation, 
  Suffocation), See Invisibility, True Seeing 
  Powers: Flight +10 (Cost: 2pts), Super-Senses +9 
  (Cost: 2pts), Super-Strength +12 (Extra: Protection; 
  Cost 5pts), Telepathy +10 (Cost: 2pts) 
  Equipment: Flaming Sword +15 (Lethal 
  Damage) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Crazy fanatic, will attempt 
  to punish bystanders for trivial crimes even if it 
  distracts her from her mission or puts her at a tactical 
  disadvantage.  
  Quirk: Incapable of lying. 
   
  “Stop struggling!  This is going to hurt a 
  lot worse if you keep wriggling around 
  that that!  Disgusting little mortals, why 
  will none of you sit still for your rightful 
  punishment?!”   
   
  A tedious angel, sent here to oppose the evil Doctor 
  Moloch.  For the living embodiment of all that is 
  good, she’s a royal pain to deal with.   
       She has no idea how human society works and no 
  desire to learn, so she is forever making grievous 
  errors and wreaking havoc whenever she appears in 
  the mortal world.  Intolerant and humorless, if she sees 
  someone commit a sin, no matter how trivial, she will 
  attempt to punish them for it (usually by inflicting 
  pain on them with her mental abilities—only the very 
  worst sins merit maiming or death).  Time and again, 
  she will detect someone committing some minor act of 
  wickedness like eating when they aren’t really hungry 
  or wishing they didn’t have to go to work, scream 
  “Gluttony!” or “Sloth!” and administer discipline on 
  the spot.    
       This often brings down the wrath of superheroes 
  who don’t understand that she is above mere human 
  law.  Inevitably they commit the heinous sin of 
  attacking her and must be punished quite severely.  
  She does not bother to explain herself to the heroes 
  she finds herself fighting.  If you attack her, you’re 
  clearly damned in any case, so what would be the 
  point of trying to talk with you?   
       As you might expect, her tendency to get 
  sidetracked by minor evils hampers her effectiveness 
  at blocking Doctor Moloch’s activities.   
       In person she is tiresome, dangerous company.  
  Incapable of relaxing or being anyone’s friend, prone 
  to screechy rants about the power of light, she does 
  not care about anything but her mission.   
       It’s rare to see angels of her rank down here in the 
  sordid, itchy realm of physical reality, and she is 
  keenly aware of the fact that it’s beneath her (see the 
  entry on Doctor Moloch to find out why two such 
  unreasonably powerful supernatural entities keep 
  getting summoned to the Material Plane). She hates it 
  here, and considers it a huge indignity to have to 
  descend into the grubby imperfection of mere reality.   
       Heroes who try to ask her about big philosophical 
  questions or cosmic truths will get some arrogant 
  response about people with impure hearts not being 
  capable of understanding the answers.  She may even 
  consider these questions to be impertinent or prideful, 
  and try to punish the questioner.  
       A supernatural hero who knows what she is can 
  probably talk her into an alliance, provided that they 
  are willing to help her hunt Doctor Moloch and don’t 
  mind submitting to her leadership.  She will probably 
  want to punish them for Pride, especially if they wear 
  a costume, but once she has done this she will regard 
  the matter as settled and won’t pester them about it 
  again.  It’s tough to be her ally, since she won’t be 
  questioned and demands such impossibly high 
  standards of behavior.   
       Not a subtle combatant, she considers any form of 
  stealth or subterfuge to be dishonorable and won’t 
  tolerate it in her allies.  She announces her presence 
  loudly and demands that opponents face her head on.  
  Honorable to a fault, she won’t hit an opponent from 
  behind or strike them while they’re preoccupied with 
  some other combatant.   
       If she encounters Doctor Moloch she will refuse to 
  do anything but attack him until either he or she is 
  dead.   
   
  Using Azeraphel, the Screaming Angel 
  in your campaign: The Screaming Angel is a 
  great way to lead the player characters onto some 
  scheme that Doctor Moloch has been dragged into.  
  She only appears if her nemesis has been summoned 
  to the earth once more, (although now that his true 
  name has gotten out on the Internet this happens far 
  more than she would like).  Unless she gets 
  completely sidetracked any adventure which involves 
  her is likely to lead to a confrontation with her enemy.  
  In fact, that’s about the only place it can lead. 
       If the Screaming Angel actually gets destroyed, she 
  can come back in a later scenario anyway, just like 
  Doctor Moloch. 
  
    
   
  Adventures With Azeraphel, the 
  Screaming Angel: Typically, a Screaming 
  Angel scenario goes something like this.  Azeraphel 
  appears in the middle of an urban area, beats up a 
  bunch of luckless civilians for crimes like coveting a 
  flashy car or touching themselves improperly at night, 
  draws down the wrath of the Player Characters and 
  gets incapacitated by them.   
       After knocking her out of action, the players learn 
  that she was sent here by the Forces of Light to oppose 
  some unbelievably powerful Force of Darkness.  
  Something so huge and terrible that it’s almost 
  unheard of in the secret occult history of the world—
  Doctor Moloch (Phd) himself!  And now they’ve just 
  clobbered the only thing that could stop him!  Ulp!   
       It looks like the PCs will have to face the evil 
  Doctor Moloch themselves, but could any mere 
  mortals be up to the task?  Then it turns out that he’s 
  actually been summoned by some pointless pimple-
  faced adolescent Satanist to go rob a bank, or 
  something equally banal.   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  The Hammer of 
  Doom 
  Real Name: Khalid al Warhadi 
  PL: 17 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +18 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +19 Defense: 
  +19/+15 Speed: 30/85 (Flight) 
  Damage Save: +7 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +4 Willpower Save: +10   
  Skills: Bluff +5, Diplomacy+6, Forgery +5, 
  Languages (Arabic, French, Parsi, Pashtun), 
  Profession (Businessman) +5, Spot +7 
  Feats: Connected, Immunity (Cold, Heat, 
  Suffocation, Pressure), Indomitable Will, Infamy, Iron 
  Will 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage, Will) +5 (Cost: 
  2pts) Energy Control (Light) +17 (Extras: Explosive 
  Effect, Flight, Force Field; Power Stunts: Energy 
  Blast, Power Immunity; Cost: 5pts), Sensory 
  Protection +5 (Cost: 1pt) 
   
  “You continue to defy me.  I think you 
  must have a sick and crazy appetite for 
  your own self destruction.  I admire that, 
  I respect it, but don’t think this will save 
  you.  You see I am the sort of fellow who 
  feels only two things—contempt for the 
  weak and disgust for the crude.  I 
  haven’t yet decided which to kill you for, 
  but I shall.”   
   
       Something of a legend in law-enforcement circles, 
  Khalid al Warhadi is one of the most dangerous men 
  alive.  He’s committed spectacular acts of theft from 
  India, to Pakistan, to Malaysia, to New York City, and 
  has never spent a night in jail.   
       People are often surprised to find out that he’s a 
  New Yorker by birth, and that English is his first 
  language.   
       He was always a criminal.  His father was a Syrian 
  drug dealer on the streets of Brooklyn, and Khalid and 
  his brothers grew up to follow in his footsteps.  
       When he was six, some bigger kids overpowered 
  Khalid at an alley game of soccer, and sent him home 
  bruised and crying.  His father beat him worse and 
  told him to go out there and get revenge.  To 
  everyone’s surprise, he grabbed a kitchen knife, ran 
  back out into the alley and stabbed a big kid in the 
  throat. Alas, it wasn’t one of the right kids.  People in 
  Khalid’s family were still laughing over this funny 
  little episode decades later.   
       To this day he says that was the last time he ever 
  killed in anger, for he had learned a crucial lesson 
  from it—if you kill in anger, you make mistakes and 
  people laugh at you.  He killed a few more times over 
  the course of his childhood, and once had to execute 
  one of his little brothers on his father’s instructions, 
  but he never did it out of anger.  
       By the time he was twelve he had grown into a 
  seasoned hood, and helped his father out with every 
  aspect of the business.  Then one day a superhero fell 
  from the sky over Brooklyn.  Badly hurt and unable to 
  speak, the caped man lay bleeding on the curb and 
  gestured desperately for help.  People didn’t know 
  what to do about it, so they called Khalid’s dad, who 
  was an important man and would surely have some 
  idea.  And he did.  Draining off some of the caped 
  man’s blood and spinal fluid, he injected it into three 
  of his sons, to see if it would give them superpowers.   
       Two died, but Khalid did not.  Reasoning that 
  Khalid had survived because he was the oldest, Father 
  injected himself.  He guessed wrong, and perished in 
  agony, leaving Khalid to carry on the family business.   
       The boy had bigger ambitions than being a mid-
  level drug dealer, and there was no way for an Arab to 
  move beyond that level in New York—the Sicilians 
  had things locked up tight.  So he liquidated as much 
  product as he could, turned most of the business over 
  to his uncles and started hiring out his newly acquired 
  superhuman talents to the underworld at large.   
       He put himself through prep school and was 
  halfway through college by the time he participated in 
  an infamous drug-house massacre (the so-called 
  “SoHo Bloodbath” that the New York Post gleefully 
  made into a household name) and had to leave the 
  country.  He was 17.   
       Going to the Middle East was the best thing he had 
  ever done.  Things were wide open over there and a 
  man could rise as far as his talents might take him, 
  provided he was willing to get his hands a little dirty.  
  By the time he was 20 Khalid was an internationally 
  famous supervillain and his wealth and fame have kept 
  growing ever since.   
       A professional super-criminal with no ambitions 
  beyond getting rich and staying alive, Khalid has no 
  desire to rule the world, blow it up, or turn it into an 
  Islamic paradise.  Instead he wants to gamble, buy 
  expensive cars, date pretty girls and drink really good 
  wine. Not that he appreciates really good wine, but he 
  feels that it’s the kind of thing a successful man ought 
  to drink.    
       Despite his humble origins he has trained himself 
  to speak knowledgably about things like wine and 
  gourmet food. He sometimes tries too hard to show off 
  his new-found sense of taste, and he still often gets 
  things wrong, to the amusement of the aristocratic 
  master villains he imitates. He’s trying to learn how to 
  appreciate art, but his total lack of feeling hampers 
  him here. He may want to ask a captured superhero 
  about art, if they look suave and “classy”, discussing 
  the subject stiffly and uninsightfully until he gets 
  
    
  frustrated and has them killed.  
       He has no regular contact with his family anymore. 
  If anyone were to track them down they would find a 
  gang of quarrelsome, murderous drunks, stabbing their 
  cousins over ancient grudges and a few grubby yards 
  of Brooklyn street.  Only one of his brothers is still 
  alive, and Khalid hasn’t seen him in years.  Khalid 
  claims to feel vaguely sentimental about his surviving 
  niece and nephew, but if someone were to hold them 
  hostage he would let them die and get even with the 
  kidnapper later. 
       Quiet and guarded, he seldom gets mad, and real 
  hatred is as foreign to him as mercy or compassion.  
  Above all else, he is reasonable.   
       Khalid won’t hesitate to torture or kill if it’s 
  expedient, but he takes little relish in it—people are 
  just silly toys made of meat to him.   
       Calm and professional, Khalid doesn’t bother with 
  grudges or losing his temper.  He also doesn’t leave 
  witnesses. Tidy and methodical about cleaning up 
  after a job, he has no qualms about killing someone 
  who only might have seen too much.   
       He’ll take hostages if he has to, and he’ll kill them 
  if it makes sense to, but on the whole he tries to avoid 
  messy situations like that.  Better not to get yourself 
  into the kind of jam where you’d have to take a 
  hostage in the first place.   
       While Khalid does sometimes rent himself out as 
  muscle or for bodyguard duties, he’s much happier if 
  you hire him to plan and execute a major act of theft.  
  He prefers to steal from other criminals, since they 
  can’t go to the police and he prefers to hit locations 
  without any bystanders (it’s a lot harder to hunt down 
  and kill potential witnesses when there are fifty of 
  them).  He might knock over a semi-truck full of 
  smuggled cocaine out on the freeway, or nab a 
  shipment of AK-47s on the docks at midnight, but he 
  most certainly would not walk into a crowded bank at 
  noon and demand that they give him all their money.  
       It is not safe to be his partner for any length of 
  time.  People who team up with him eventually learn 
  too much about him and that can’t be allowed to 
  happen.  Dead men tell no tales, he often says, and 
  shrugs.    
       It’s almost a shame that he doesn’t do more 
  mercenary work—he’s highly sought after and 
  respected in that world (or at least he was until 
  September 11, 2001).   
       He’s a genuine rarity in the criminal underworld, a 
  true professional.  A good hireling, he takes orders 
  without complaint and stays absolutely loyal (until the 
  moment his personal security is threatened).  He 
  doesn’t show up late, he never drinks on the job, he 
  doesn’t pick fights with the other guys and he doesn’t 
  try to grab more than his fair share.  That’s nothing 
  short of a miracle.   
       September 11th badly disrupted Khalid’s life and 
  career.  He couldn’t give a damn for Islam, but 
  because he’s an Arab supervillain everyone assumes 
  he’s a fanatical Muslim terrorist and no one wants to 
  work with him.  In fact there are American gangsters 
  that he’s known for years who would now kill him on 
  sight.  His jobs are drying up and his contacts won’t 
  talk to him.  For the first time in his life, he’s not sure 
  what to do.   
   
  Using The Hammer of Doom in your 
  campaign: The Big Bad Villain from overseas—
  the Player Characters should hear about the Hammer 
  of Doom long before they ever meet him.  Build up a 
  confrontation with the man before it happens.  Let 
  them know they’re in trouble.   
       While he makes a tough opponent for a team, your 
  players may be relieved to find that he’s unlikely to 
  become the personal nemesis of any individual PC. He 
  would hunt someone down if he thought their survival 
  might pose a threat to him, but he wouldn’t do it just 
  because they beat him in a fight, or anything stupid 
  like that.   
   
  Adventures With The Hammer of 
  Doom:  1) Seventeen Ghost Swords and a 
  Hammer of Doom  
       The Hammer of Doom allies himself with the 17 
  Ghost Sword Triad in Hong Kong.  Unsure what to do 
  with this powerful but dangerous new resource, the 
  Ghost Swords send him to the US, to destroy their 
  competition in a number of big cities.   
       He annihilates the White Lotus Society in San 
  Francisco, lays waste to the Long Fang Tong in 
  Chicago, decimates the 39 Crazy Fist Gang in 
  Cleveland, and he may be on his way to your town 
  right now.   
       Once it becomes clear that Khalid is back on 
  American soil, every superhero in the country is going 
  to want to fight him, as will quite a number of villains 
  and organized crime families.  The challenge is in 
  predicting where he’ll next appear. Give the Player 
  Characters a chance to figure out the pattern to his 
  attacks before any of the other hunters kill or imprison 
  him.  Once the PCs realize that he’s eliminating the 
  enemies of the 17 Ghost Sword Triad, it will be easy 
  to figure out from the last attack where the next target 
  is going to be.  He’s hitting them as efficiently as he 
  can, always moving to the closest possible target by 
  the most direct route.   
       The nearest enemies of the Ghost Swords are… 
  well in fact we’re going to leave the specific name and 
  location open, so as to make this easier to work into 
  the campaign.  The target could be in the PCs home 
  city, but it could also require them to make a trip to 
  some distant metropolis, depending on the resources 
  available to them.   
       Unfortunately, at least one supervillain figures the 
  pattern out too, and shows up at the last second to 
  attack Khalid themselves, complicating the fight and 
  (probably) letting the Hammer of Doom escape.   
       Once this happens, the 17 Ghost Swords realize 
  that someone in the US must be on to them, and they 
  drop Khalid like a hot skillet.  He is now stranded 
  deep inside the country, with no support and nowhere 
  to hide.  He’s going to have to fight his way out and it 
  isn’t going to be pretty.  Neither is what’s going to 
  
    
  happen when he gets back to Hong Kong.  The 
  Hammer of Doom is going to come down on the 17 
  Ghost Swords Triad like a… well, like a Hammer of 
  Doom.  
       When the PCs next catch up with him, he will offer 
  them an interesting deal.  Why not help him escape?  
  It would prevent a lot of additional havoc and he’s on 
  his way to punish the people responsible for all this 
  chaos right now. If they stop him now, they’ll be 
  letting the Ghost Swords slip through the net, and 
  they’re the real criminals here—or so Khalid says.   
   
  2) The Hammer Drops 
       The Hammer of Doom decides that the Player 
  Characters have meddled in his affairs for the last 
  time, and conceives a fiendish plan to be rid of them 
  for once and for all.  It will take some effort and 
  expense, but his cost-benefit analysis shows that it will 
  be worth it in the long term.  
       To make this work, he will first need a secret lair. 
  In order to save funds and time, he appropriates the 
  deserted headquarters of a superhero team he wiped 
  out in the late ‘90s.  Then he gets some disgraced 
  nuclear technicians from a former Soviet Republic in 
  Central Asia to build a crude atomic pile to power the 
  base. An unscrupulous security firm in Denmark 
  provides him with security staff—mostly former 
  members of elite European military units, selling their 
  expertise to whoever can pay.  His headquarters is 
  crude, improvised and uncomfortable, using only a 
  fraction of the leaky old base, but it will serve for the 
  purpose at hand.   
       He kidnaps a troop of girl scouts, locks them up 
  near the reactor, and then alerts all the major news 
  outlets, mailing them all videotapes that explain his 
  demands (none of them are willing to play any of 
  these tapes on the air, but they’re all happy enough to 
  report on the contents)   
       He wants a hundred million dollars in ransom. 
  That’s not as much as it sounds like—the operation 
  itself cost sixty million. If the city doesn’t pay, he’ll 
  send the atomic pile into a meltdown, killing the 
  hostages and rendering a lot of the surrounding 
  territory uninhabitable. He says that he wants the PCs 
  to come handlethe negotiations.  If anyone else sets 
  foot on the premises, he’ll set off the chain reaction.   
       This is all a trap.  The moment the Player 
  Characters enter the complex, the guards start firing 
  on them and a voice starts counting down from ten 
  minutes.  When the PCs smash their way down to the 
  bottom level, or when five minutes are left, the 
  countdown suddenly stops, Khalid’s voice comes on 
  over the intercom and says “sorry—I lied.”  The 
  reactor’s cooling tanks rupture, the lower level floods 
  with boiling radioactive water, the Hammer of Doom 
  starts calmly walking toward the secret escape hatch, 
  and everybody else dies.   
       Like most of Khalid’s schemes, this one is 
  incredibly risky and unbelievably ruthless.  To murder 
  the PCs, he is also prepared to kill everybody 
  connected with this enterprise.  The hired mercenaries, 
  the technicians, the kidnapped scouts, thousands of 
  innocent bystanders—they’re all going to die.   
       It will be very hard to beat him. The Hammer of 
  Doom is on the far side of the complex from the 
  overheating nuclear reactor.  The PCs can rescue the 
  girl scouts, try to contain the impending atomic 
  disaster, or go catch the Hammer of Doom.  At most, 
  they should be able to accomplish two of these 
  objectives.  Even if they divide their forces enough so 
  that they can have some heroes working on the reactor 
  controls while others get the scouts to safety and still 
  another group goes after the Hammer of Doom, 
  they’re unlikely to have enough manpower to actually 
  take him down without risking the other two 
  objectives.   
       As an added twist, perhaps after he gets out, the 
  Hammer of Doom thinks for a moment about how 
  pointless and unsatisfying everything turns out to be in 
  this dull gray world, changes his mind, and walks back 
  into the complex to die. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Captain Valiant 
  Real Name: Rex Skinner, Capt USAF 
  PL: 19 
  Str: 19 (+4) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 13 (+1) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +9 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +6 Defense: 
  +15/+14 Speed: 30/95 (Flight) 
  Damage Save: +14 Fortitude Save: +14 
  Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower Save: +1   
  Skills: Bluff +7, Intimidate +10, Knowledge (Law) 
  +6, Knowledge (Super-Criminals) +6, Listen +8, 
  Profession (Astronaut) +5, Spot +8 
  Feats: Attractive, Connected, Durability, Fame, 
  Headquarters (the Valiant Retreat--a palatial estate in 
  Maui where he goes for solitude.  His closest 
  neighbors are George Hamilton and Charo, isolated on 
  their own fortified estates.  The Valiant Retreat is 
  equipped with a state-of-the art Communications 
  Center, a Dock for private boats, an automatic Fire 
  Prevention System, a giant Garage that can 
  accomodate the vehicles of whoever might come to 
  visit him, an Olympic-quality Gymnasium that has 
  been specially equipped to meet the special needs of 
  the superhumanly strong, a Hanger and landing strip 
  for any private aircraft a guest might bring with them, 
  a fully stocked Infirmary, an Isolated Location, the 
  Captain's famous Crime Library, Living Space for up 
  to 19 guests, a giant heated indoor Pool, its own 
  independant Power System, the best Security System 
  that Honeywell can design, a dedicated household 
  Staff [consisting of of 40 PL 1 servants and 
  maintenance personnel, 4 PL 2 Security Consultants, 2 
  PL3 Mechanics, a PL 4 shiatsu massage therapist and  
  a PL5 physician], and a seldom-used Workshop; it 
  also has PL4 assigned to "Gadgets" [super heroic 
  visitors are always leaving one or another gadget lying 
  around and the Trophy Room is full of weird stuff 
  captured from various master villains] which Captain 
  Valiant may be able to use to suprise unwelcome 
  guests), Immunity (to Cold, Heat, Poison, Disease, 
  Pressure, Suffocation), Minions (the Valiant Scouts [a 
  worldwide group of 110 PL1 junior detectives 
  dedicated to emulating the life and legend of Captain 
  Valiant, most of them juvenile delinquents who joined 
  the Scouts under court order as an alternative to jail], 
  plus 11 PL 2 hangers on [various assorted members of 
  his enterogue and personal staff], 6 PL 3 lawyers, 3 PL 
  4 publicists, 2 PL 5 business managers and 1 PL 6 
  bodyguard), Penetration Vision, Ultra-Hearing 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +10 (Extras: 
  Fortitude Save; Cost: 2pts), Flight +19 (Power Stunt: 
  Super-Flight; Cost: 2pts), Super-Strength +19 (Extras: 
  Protection, Thunderclap; Cost: 7pts) 
   
   
  “Look at this. It’s the medal President 
  Ford gave me. See, it says ‘a grateful 
  nation thanks you’. You got one of 
  these? Because when you do, then you’ll 
  have earned the right to question me.” 
   
       He’s not the world’s mightiest man, or America’s 
  most popular superhero.  In fact there may be as many 
  as two or three superheroes who are better known and 
  have more personal power than Captain Valiant.   
       He’s fought America’s enemies around the globe 
  since the 1960s and has battled some of the most 
  terrible monsters ever to walk the earth. He’s stood on 
  the surface of the moon and visited other dimensions. 
  Three different presidents have pinned medals on his 
  chest.   He may even have saved the world.   
       None of which makes him a very nice guy.  As a 
  superhero, he has few equals.  As a human being, he 
  has grave flaws.  
       Captain Valiant is as much an industry as a 
  individual now, and his publicists and business 
  managers keep his public image wholesome (although 
  lately he’s been toying with the idea of trying more of 
  a  “bad boy” thing) but in person he is all but 
  unbearably obnoxious.  Vengeful, quick to take 
  offense, callous to his wife and distant to his children, 
  he is so aggressive and competitive that he 
  compulsively dominates any social situation that he 
  finds himself in.  He will hit on your girlfriend right in 
  front of you.  He will take food off your plate, taste it 
  and insist that the waiter bring you something else 
  whether you were enjoying it or not.  He will not be 
  questioned.   
       Captain Valiant has never been a government-
  sanctioned hero, but most law enforcement agencies 
  willingly cooperate with him and he has become 
  something of a law unto himself. He has long enjoyed 
  limited immunity from prosecution, and after the 
  September 11 attacks he was granted the legal 
  authority to execute super-criminals on the spot if 
  there is no other recourse and they pose a grave threat.  
  He’s never had to use it, yet.   
   
  Using Captain Valiant in your 
  campaign: A change of pace from super-thieves 
  and world-conquering arch-villains, Captain Valiant is 
  meant as a personal rival/nemesis for an individual 
  Player Character. Not a criminal per se, he is still a 
  bad enemy to have.  Powerful, popular, well-
  connected and immune to most forms of prosecution, 
  he makes an implacable and dangerous foe. Of course, 
  this is also a more subtle kind of emnity than having 
  someone kick in the roof of your secret headquarters 
  and challenge you to fight.  The theme has to be 
  introduced with some care.  Try the adventure below 
  for some ideas. 
   
   
   
  
    
  Adventures With Captain Valiant:   
   
  Forever Valiant  
       Try introducing Captain Valiant to your players the 
  following way.  In an unrelated adventure, the PCs 
  hear on the news that Captain Valiant has killed a 
  villain that they have fought themselves.  This should 
  be a supervillain that the PCs know isn’t really 
  dangerous.  Don’t go so far as to make it someone as 
  sympathetic as, say, the Unicorn or Broken Arrow.  A 
  pitiful crazy villain like Grim Diddle would be just 
  about ideal, as would an honorable villain like Mr. Fist 
  or some poor lost soul like Woodchuck Man.   
       This is the first time Captain Valiant has actually 
  had to use his authority to kill a supervillain and it has 
  caused some controversy.  When television reporters 
  ask him why he did it, he tells them “This was a 
  parnormal criminal, which makes that my call. Life 
  and death, it’s my choice to make and it’s not open to 
  question.  Criminals should be aware of that.  It sends 
  an important message.”   
       When the reporters press him further, he says that 
  they don’t understand the paranormal threat, and tells 
  a disgusting anecdote about some foul atrocity a 
  super-criminal committed twenty years ago, as though 
  it were somehow relevant.  To the PC’s surprise, the 
  assembled reporters treat this as though it were a real 
  answer and seem favorably impressed.  This is the last 
  the PCs ever hear of the incident. It abruptly vanishes 
  from the news the next night.  
       Several adventures later, one of the male Player 
  Characters with a secret identity gets a chance to have 
  dinner at a really hip, expensive restaurant with his 
  girlfriend.  If he doesn’t have a regular girlfriend then 
  make it a woman he’s romantically interested in--
  maybe she is a beautiful co-worker who has always 
  scorned him in his secret identity while yearning for 
  his superhero self.  In either case it should be someone 
  he doesn’t live with and who doesn’t know his secret 
  identity.   
       Some sort of minor crisis comes up (make it a 
  mugging if there’s nothing going on his personal life 
  that you can use) and the PC arrives late.  To his 
  surprise, Captain Valiant and his entourage have 
  picked tonight to visit this particular restaurant, and 
  the PC’s girlfriend is sitting with them.  
       The Player could attempt to deal with this in a 
  bunch of different ways.  Whatever he does, things go 
  badly wrong.   
       If he tries to sit down at the table with Captain 
  Valiant, the headwaiter and the manager intervene and 
  try to prevent him.  If he asks his date to come sit with 
  him, she agrees and looks embarrassed.   
  The manager will present himself  and tell the PC that 
  the lady is Captain Valiant’s guest and that he must 
  stop harassing her (in fact the Captain just walked in, 
  saw her sitting by herself and had the manager invite 
  her over to sit with him).  The lady will insist that 
  she’s all right and the manager will reluctantly depart.   
       Even though there are other tables available, the 
  staff will seat the PC and his date right beside Captain 
  Valiant’s party, who are loud and smoke cigars and 
  can’t be persuaded to stop.   
       At a certain point, the PC will catch Captain 
  Valiant staring at him, puffing on a cigar. Then he 
  shakes his head with contempt and looks away.   
       Dinner conversation may become strained.  
  Whenever the PC and his date leave, a seedy looking 
  member of Captain Valiant’s entourage walks after 
  them, hands the young woman a card and whispers 
  something in her ear. He goes back to the table after 
  giving the PC a long cold look.   
       When the PC asks his date what that was about, she 
  says shamefacedly “He said ‘once that guy drops you 
  off, call this number and we’ll come pick you up.”        
       Things remain awkward for the rest of the evening.  
  When the PC drops her off, she doesn’t want him to 
  come up, explaining that she’s really tired and kind of 
  wierded-out from the evening’s events.   
       If he stays to watch, she does indeed go upstairs.  If 
  he decides to stand guard in a jealous fury, some 
  urgent crisis suddenly comes up across town.   
       If by this point you have the player worked up into 
  a such a paranoid frenzy that he actually neglects his 
  duty and keeps standing there, Captain Valiant averts 
  the crisis and saves the day, winning himself yet more 
  glory.   
       No matter what happens, the PC’s girlfriend (or 
  date) stops answering her phone for two weeks.  Then 
  Captain Valiant leaves town, and she suddenly 
  becomes available again.   
       If pressured, she says that yes she did hang out with 
  Captain Valiant and his entourage a little over the past 
  two weeks  It was fun.  He was a real gentleman. If the 
  PC is ignoble enough to ask her if anything happened, 
  she giggles and says “We just talked.  He’s a really 
  nice guy.”  
       If the PC pouts or complains that he was treated 
  unfairly, she scowls and points out that nobody got 
  physical with him.  Not everybody who has a run in 
  with a celebrity gets off that easy.  The rap singer RZ 
  Dawg Killah’s bodyguards beat a guy to death in the 
  same kind of situation just last year.  They got away 
  with it too. The PC was lucky that Captain Valiant is 
  such a nice guy. She won’t discuss the matter further.  
  Whether the PC wants to continue seeing her is his 
  affair.  
       The next time the PCs encounter Captain Valiant, 
  he swoops down unexpectedly out of the sky and 
  defeats the villain they were fighting.  What happens 
  next depends on how the PCs react.   
       Some players will no doubt want to attack him 
  right there, bewildering their teammates and bringing 
  down the ire of the authorities.  Most will be angry 
  with the Captain and make insulting remarks about his 
  conduct as a hero.   
       He will take offense, boast about his 
  accomplishments (see the quote at the top of this 
  section) and fly off in a huff.  He won’t try to take 
  credit for the villain the players just took down, but 
  the papers will give it to him anyway. The PC who 
  insulted or questioned him has just made a dedicated, 
  lifelong enemy.   
       For one last twist of the knife, a little while later 
  
    
  the nation is stunned as Captain Valiant stands 
  accused of murdering his wife.  The player characters 
  have to track him down (or they get a good lead on his 
  whereabouts, perhaps through the wronged PC’s 
  former girlfriend).   
       When they find him, he claims that an evil robot 
  duplicate committed the deed and that he’s tracking 
  the machine back to whichever of his old enemies 
  built it.  This robot has been running around 
  impersonating him and fouling up his reputation for 
  some time, he claims.  Or maybe it was mind-control--
  things like this happen to him a lot and he can't bother 
  to keep them straight anymore.  Anyway his actions 
  are above question, his record speaks for itself and he 
  doesn't know what kind of person would be 
  unpatriotic enough to suggest that he's actually guilty 
  of the crime.    
       The PCs probably won't buy this and will attack 
  him.  After the PCs beat him, or when both sides are 
  exhausted from fighting, an evil robot duplicate of 
  Captain Valiant bursts onto the scene and attacks 
  everyone.  But does that mean that he was telling the 
  truth?  Could he have had the robot built himself and 
  told it to kill his wife?  It’s salvaged memory banks 
  will seem to show that he did, but is that a trick?  
       And here’s an added detail; the robot has only been 
  active for a few weeks. It was really Captain Valiant 
  himself who killed that harmless supervillain and 
  ruined the PCs date.  Even if he is innocent, he’s not a 
  nice guy.  Nor will he ever forgive the PCs for 
  attacking him.   
       If someone has a chance to ask him candidly why 
  he killed that supervillain, he'll grin and say that it was 
  an experiment--he's been thinking about trying for a 
  tougher, "bad-boy" kind of image and he wanted to 
  see if it would work.  Did they like it?   
       If asked about breaking up the PC's big night out, 
  he doesn't remember it that well, and keeps getting it 
  confused with a similar incedent that happened a few 
  weeks earlier in Pittsburgh.  He does however point 
  out that: "You know a lot of guys are proud when I do 
  their woman.  Sometimes they even ask me to.  I guess 
  that just shows the limits of your patriotism." 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Chapter 4: Teams 
   
  The Nowhere Men 
   
  Membership: Woodchuck Man (A scrofulous, 
  lice-ridden and unsavory human woodchuck, who 
  prowls the city’s alleys late at night, looking for food), 
  The Ratcatcher (arch-wino and urban shaman, he 
  communes with the pavement and knows all the 
  secrets of the rat, the pigeon and the roach),Grim 
  Diddle (a hapless, insane old derelict who moans 
  instead of speaking, and who has been cursed with the 
  ability to drain the life force out of others).   
   
       They say that something haunts skid row.  Even the 
  gang kids won’t go there after dark in groups of less 
  than ten.  Bums whisper to one another of something 
  that has claimed the territory for its own, and although 
  none of them will say the name, they all know where 
  to find the freshly scribbled graffiti that reads “The 
  Nowhere Men.”  Now the tabloids are starting to take 
  an interest, which might prove to be unwise…  
       The Nowhere Men are a collection of misfits and 
  outcasts who live in the tunnels underneath the PCs' 
  city. They steal food to survive and occasionally come 
  to blows with the youth-gangs who prey on homeless 
  people. Setting derelicts on fire used to be a popular 
  way for the city’s youth to spend their evenings, but it 
  isn’t any more.   
       Out of the three Nowhere Men, only the one called 
  Grim Diddle is actually dangerous, and even he isn't 
  precisely evil--just muddled and insane.   
       The one called the Ratcatcher is a sort of urban 
  shaman who lives in communion with the city and can 
  feel disturbances in the flow of its systems.  Some 
  time last year he detected a pair of strange presences, 
  lost and hungry, wandering through the tunnels 
  beneath the streets.  He was curious about these 
  strangers, and had the city lead them to his lair.  They 
  were a weird but friendly woodchuck-man and an 
  insane old derelict whose skin glowed blue in the dark.  
  The three of them banded together for mutual support 
  and they have been looking after one another ever 
  since.  
       Once they started getting in fights with gang-kids, 
  the Ratcatcher came up with the idea of painting their 
  name on their turf, to show that certain locations were 
  under their protection. That way they wouldn’t have to 
  get in fights all the time—the kids would know to 
  avoid certain areas and leave the bums there alone.  
  This policy has worked, although it has also led to 
  rumors and urban legends about the “Nowhere Men” 
  and may lead superheroes to come investigate them.   
       The city's homeless population doesn't know much 
  about them, apart from the name, although they are  
   
  certainly aware that someone has been keeping the 
  gangs off their case.  Most of the city's homeless 
  would be willing to aid and shelter the Nowhere Men 
  in a crisis, particularly the Ratcatcher, who has long 
  been a semi-mythical folk hero to the wretches on 
  Skid Row.   
       We don't know quite where Grim Diddle and 
  Woodchuck Man came from--neither one of them can 
  speak articulately.  When the Ratcatcher found them 
  Woodchuck Man was already trying to care for Grim 
  Diddle on his own.  For the GM's convenience we're 
  going to leave it undetermined.  Perhaps they both 
  broke out of the same bio-warfare lab or perhaps 
  Woodchuck Man just found Grim Diddle lying in an 
  alley somewhere and decided that he needed help.   
   
  Threat Level: Scary though they can seem, the 
  Nowhere Men aren’t much of a threat to anything.  
  They want to be left alone, and to keep any more bums 
  from getting set on fire.  This seems to be the limit of 
  their ambition. They aren’t even particularly interested 
  in hurting the gangs—they just don’t want them to set 
  anyone else on fire. Grim Diddle can be a menace if 
  left to his own devices, but they try to keep that from 
  happening as much as possible.  Still, there are 
  occasions when Woodchuck Man is off scavenging for 
  food and the Ratcatcher is too drunk to keep Grim 
  Diddle from floating off on his own, moaning and 
  muttering and spreading fear as he goes.   
   
  Base of Operations: The Nowhere Men live in 
  the service tunnels under the city where the Player 
  Characters operate.  They change their lair on a 
  regular basis, sometimes taking up residence in a 
  storm sewer, sometimes in a service shaft off a 
  subway tunnel (if the PC's city has subways) or in 
  some other warm dry spot.  They don't need much 
  space, just enough for the three of them to lie down.  
  The Ratcatcher is inhumanly gifted at finding them 
  one good niche or other in which to hide.   
       Wherever they have set up their lair, it looks much 
  the same--a pile of flattened out boxes with old clothes 
  heaped on top of them to provide a sleeping space, 
  with empty bottles of inexpensive wine scattered all 
  around.   
       Woodchuck Man will probably have set up a web 
  of threads nearby, which will ring a tiny bell next to 
  his ear and wake him up if anyone approaches them 
  while they sleep.  The Ratcatcher can detect intruders 
  with his powers, but he’s often too drunk to do it.  
   
  Organization: The Nowhere Men can barely be 
  said to have any organization at all.  They don't 
  
    
  exactly have a leader, since each of them has personal 
  limitations that prevent them from playing that role. 
  Grim Diddle is too crazy, the Ratcatcher is too drunk 
  and Woodchuck Man can't speak. In any case they 
  don't really seem to need a leader.  They just share 
  their meager resources and give one another support.      
       The Ratcatcher watches over Grim Diddle while 
  Woodchuck Man is off stealing food and Woodchuck 
  Man watches over them both when the Ratcatcher is 
  too drunk to be of much use. They like one another 
  and they get along very well--even Grim Diddle seems 
  somehow comforted by the presence of the other two.   
   
  Tactics:  If they are trying to fend off a group of 
  young toughs who are intent on setting winos on fire, 
  the Nowhere Men will try to be as scary as possible 
  when they attack, while at the same time roughing the 
  kids up as little as they can.  The Ratcatcher’s ability 
  to control rats, roaches and pigeons works well here, 
  as does Woodchuck’s Man’s foul smell and fearsome 
  appearance.  
       If they are about to scare off some kids, then the 
  Ratcatcher will summon up a swarm of roaches, rats 
  or pigeons, make them spell out some kind of 
  threatening message, and then once everyone is 
  already freaked out by the sight Woodchuck Man 
  and/or Grim Diddle will suddenly pop up and look 
  scary.  This is the only strategy they have. It has 
  always worked, every time they use it, the kids all run 
  away.  The Nowhere Men have no idea what they 
  would do next if they tired it and the kids didn’t run—
  they’d probably get scared and flee the scene 
  themselves.  
       In any actual brawl they will all fight as 
  individuals, with no coordination whatever, but 
  they’re much more likely to panic and try to get out of 
  there.  
   
  Using The Nowhere Men in your 
  campaign: The Nowhere Men are a small, low-
  powered team, intended as a challenge for heroes who 
  are just starting out. They are a mystery to be solved 
  as much as an enemy to fight.   
       Even though they aren’t that tough, the GM can 
  make them plenty scary by keeping them mysterious.  
  Adventures that involve the Nowhere Men should 
  have lots of dark, dingy alleys, hissing steam grates, 
  figures glimpsed for an instant on rooftops, roaches 
  and rats scuttling around in a weird and unnatural way 
  (the Ratcatcher loves to scare people off by having his 
  little friends spell out words like “Stay Away” or “The 
  Nowhere Men”).  Everything should happen at night.   
       Once the Players have solved the mystery of who 
  and what the Nowhere Men are, they will then have to 
  resolve the more difficult question of what to do about 
  them.  They really don't mean anyone any harm, yet 
  they have to steal to stay alive.   
       It's not going to be possible to reintegrate 
  somebody like the Woodchuck Man into normal 
  human society, especially if sinister forces are ready to 
  drag him off to some secret lab the moment he 
  resurfaces.  Grim Diddle's chances look almost as 
  bleak, and Woodchuck Man won’t let anyone take him 
  away.   
       If the PCs decide to let the Nowhere Men continue 
  their shadowy existence, they won’t hold a grudge 
  even if the PCs beat them up.   
       The Ratcatcher is a wonderful source of 
  information when he’s sober, and could make an 
  excellent part-time ally.   
   
  Adventures With The Nowhere Men:  
   
  Guardians of Nowhere 
  The PCs are drawn to Skid Row by the reports of 
  mysterious happenings there.  Or perhaps they have a 
  midnight encounter with Woodchuck Man, stealing 
  some edibles from a shuttered fast-food restaurant, and 
  the strange creature flees to Skid Row, where the PCs 
  suddenly remember that weird things have been 
  happening.   
       The homeless folks who inhabit the area after dark 
  aren’t willing to say much about the Nowhere Men, 
  but they are willing to direct the PCs to the graffiti 
  which the Ratcatcher leaves to mark their turf.  As 
  soon as they see the graffiti, the Nowhere Men notice 
  them and strange stuff starts to happen.  Rats and 
  crows seem to watch them as though spying on them.  
  Swarms of roaches cross their path.  Perhaps they 
  catch a brief glimpse of Woodchuck Man watching 
  them from a rooftop, or hear Grim Diddle moaning 
  and muttering in the storm sewers beneath them.    
       Then, while they are out patrolling for signs of the 
  Nowhere Men, the PCs instead come across a bunch 
  of cruel rich teenagers (under a bridge or in a vacant 
  lot or possibly even in the tunnels under the street, if 
  the PCs have gone there), who are nervously trying to 
  work themselves up to doing something—the PCs 
  can’t quite see what it is.  They are whispering about 
  the Nowhere Men, and why nobody does “this” 
  anymore, but it’s all too unclear to make out.  There’s 
  a lot of nervous giggling.   
       Then a swarm of roaches erupts across a facing 
  wall, the rustle of pigeon wings is heard from 
  everywhere and rats begin to scuttle across the edges 
  of the scene.  Before everyone’s horrified eyes, the 
  swarming roaches form the words “Get Out!”  and the 
  rats all squeak at once.  Then, Woodchuck Man leaps 
  out into plain view, waving his arms and chittering 
  freakishly, while Grim Diddle appears on the other 
  side, glowing and moaning and floating through the 
  air.  The teenagers scream and run.   
       If the PCs choose this moment to intervene the 
  Nowhere Men panic and run for it too, except for poor 
  Grim Diddle, who they are going to have to come 
  back and rescue.   
       As soon as the PCs enter the fray, they can see that 
  the teenagers were about to set an unconscious bag 
  lady on fire.  How they deal with this situation is up to 
  them. 
   
   
  
    
  Woodchuck Man 
  Real Name: Unknown (may not even 
  have one) 
  PL: 8 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 14 (+2) Cha: 8 (-1) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +9 Defense: 
  +20/+20 Speed: 40 
  Damage Save: +5/+7 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +7 Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower 
  Save: +2   
  Skills: Hide +9, Move Silently +9, Listen +9, Spot 
  +9, Survival +8 
  Feats: Dodge, Durability, Evasion, Fast Healing, 
  Great Fortitude, Improved Grapple, Surprise Strike, 
  Tracking, Ultra-Hearing 
  Powers: Combat Sense +3 (Cost: 1pt), Natural 
  Weapons +6 (Cost: 2pts), Running +2 (Cost: 2pts), 
  Super-Senses +4 (Cost: 2pts) 
  Weaknesses: Disabled (can't speak to either 
  human beings or woodchucks) 
  Disturbing (Looks like a hairy great woodchuck, 
  suffers a -5 penalty on Bluff and Diplomacy checks, 
  can't function in normal human or groundhog society) 
  Vulnerable (to Dazzle attacks). 
   
  “Squeak!  Chee-chee!” (gestures 
  inquisitively at a PC’s wristwatch)  
  "Eep-squeak?”  
       
  A scabby, filthy, lice-ridden woodchuck-man, who 
  roams the city at night, looking for things to eat.  His 
  hygiene is appalling, his habits are gross and 
  uncivilized, he knows nothing of humanity's laws.  
  Yet he is also friendly and cheerful, happy and good 
  natured.  He can't speak and only understands a few 
  words of English, but if approached the right way he's 
  more likely to offer the PCs some of his meager food 
  than he is to attack them.   
       The Woodchuck is extremely loyal to the other 
  Nowhere Men, particularly Grim Diddle, who he 
  senses is unwell and needs care. He's better equipped 
  to scavenge for food than they are and spends more 
  time away from their lair.  He is likely to be the first 
  team member the PCs encounter, as he is the one who 
  commits the most crimes (theft, breaking and entering, 
  skulking around looking like a giant woodchuck, etc.)  
       If confronted while stealing food his first impulse 
  will be to drop everything and run away.  He'll fight if 
  cornered, or if he has some item he's unwilling to 
  drop.   
       Not a particularly sophisticated tactician, he will 
  always be more interested in getting away than in 
  hurting anybody.  He won’t attack non-combatants 
  and he certainly won’t take hostages.   
       Woodchuck Man may present something of a 
  moral dilemma for heroes who capture him.  He’s a 
  lawbreaker, but he’s not malign. Prison clearly isn’t 
  the right place for him and removing him from the 
  urban environment isn’t really a viable way to help 
  him. He knows nothing but the city and the sewers.  If 
  some well-meaning superhero released him into the 
  wild he would be terrified and all but incapable of 
  coping.  Integrating him into human society is going to 
  be a slow and difficult process.  Perhaps the best 
  option is actually to leave him alone, but supply him 
  with enough food so that he doesn’t have to steal.        
       Woodchuck man bears the scars of many surgical 
  procedures under his fur, but although he’s clearly 
  escaped from some kind of illegal lab somewhere, he 
  can’t really explain how or where.   
       The GM should feel free to use him to lead the PCs 
  to whichever mad scientist or secret gene-warfare lab 
  seems appropriate to the campaign.  This will help to 
  link adventures together, and to move the Player 
  Characters from the Nowhere Men to more powerful 
  opponents.   
   
  Adventures With Woodchuck Man: 
  Somebody Stop That Woodchuck! 
  One night at around 2:00 AM, Woodchuck Man finds 
  a woman lying on a street corner. She is dying from 
  the injuries her fiancé gave her while explaining his 
  concerns about the state of their relationship.      
       Woodchuck Man can tell that she is unwell, so he 
  brings her to a place where he can see lots of other 
  humans (a hip outdoor café) and leaves her there. She 
  has a wonderful shiny thing around her neck, which he 
  keeps, unaware that it’s a diamond necklace.  He also 
  doesn’t realize that at least twenty people saw him 
  stooped over her form, and that one of them took his 
  picture.   
       Soon the city is in an uproar, panic is in the air and 
  everyone is talking about the monster.  His victim 
  languishes in a coma, unable to tell the story of the 
  attack, but her injuries speak for themselves.   
       Her fiancé, Chad Armitage, is distraught and 
  wracked with remorse at having lost the necklace.  It 
  belonged to his grandmother and it’s supposed to be 
  given to the woman who will become his wife—it’s a 
  family tradition.  He’s desperate to have it back.   
       By an odd coincidence he was one of the rich 
  young bravos who used to set bums on fire down on 
  Skid Row.  He has actually seen the Nowhere Men 
  once before, and has some idea where to find them.  
  He also has some bored, violent young friends from 
  his old gang who would be willing to help him hunt 
  for the necklace, and maybe do the Nowhere Men 
  some harm just for old time’s sake.  Meanwhile he and 
  his influential family pester the authorities and the 
  press about having the monster caught and the 
  necklace recovered.   
       The Player Characters should enter this situation 
  unsure of what is really going on. Then, as Chad, the 
  police and perhaps an angry mob are about to get into 
  
    
  a confrontation with poor puzzled Woodchuck Man, 
  the victim wakes up and tells everyone what really 
  happened. But is there still time to prevent a lethal 
  conflict? 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  The Ratcatcher 
  Real Name: Jacob "Jake" Bukowski 
  PL: 7 
  Str: 8 (-1) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 16 (+3) Int: 
  16 (+3) Wis: 18 (+4) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +5 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +18/+17 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +8/+10 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +10 Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower 
  Save: +9   
  Skills: Craft (Chef) +2, Hide +5, Move Silently +4, 
  Knowledge (His City) +10 
  Feats: Detect (danger to his city), Dodge, Evasion, 
  Great Fortitude, Improved Initiative 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +5 (Extra: 
  Fortitude, Willpower; Flaw: Only works inside the 
  limits of his city; Cost: 2pts), ESP +6 (Flaw: Only 
  works inside his city; Cost 1pt), Obscure (cloud of 
  bugs and pidgeons) +7 (Flaw: Only works inside the 
  limits of his city; Cost: 1pt), Telepathy +7 (Extra: 
  Mind Control; Flaws: Only works within the city 
  limits, only works on vermin [rats, pidgeons, 
  cockroaches, etc] or on native-born lifelong residents 
  of his home city; Cost: 1pt) 
   
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Hopeless drunk (spends 
  much of the time in a useless inebriated stupor) 
   
  “Well sit yerself down young feller.  
  Have a taste of hobo stew.  The city told 
  me you’d come—whispered it to me on 
  her reeking asphalt breath.  I know 
  you’re here to kill me, but yer still a 
  guest until you do, so pull up one a them 
  cushions an’ let's us talk a while.”   
   
  A grinning, filth-smeared wino who wears a motley 
  assortment of mismatched clothing.  He looks a bit 
  like a clown with his comical assemblage of clothes, 
  and his five-o-clock shadow and his constant smile 
  reinforce this effect.   
       The Ratcatcher communes with the city's living 
  heart and knows its secret ways. He can speak the 
  language of the pavement and learn who walks or 
  drives upon her. He is friend to the pigeon, the rat and 
  the roach.  He knows their secret tongues and can see 
  through their eyes.   
       He doesn’t much care for violence, but he will 
  reluctantly protect his two comrades if he must, 
  smiling and uttering strange drunken/wise 
  pronouncements about the city all the while. He’s not 
  a sadistic man, and would never take hostages or 
  endanger innocents.  While he can call upon swarms 
  of vermin to protect himself and his comrades, the 
  Ratcatcher only does this as a last resort--he's afraid of 
  getting his little friends hurt.   
       While the Ratcatcher is usually drunk and often 
  incoherent, he knows an enormous amount about the 
  city and will gladly share his knowledge with anyone 
  who cares to ask.  He's almost always happy and has a 
  kind of jovial Zen-like calm, having found 
  Enlightenment in the bottom of a wine bottle.  Rats 
  and roaches crawl across him constantly and he treats 
  them like his children.   
       Is he the living incarnation of the city's spirit?  
  That's hard to say--he didn't just appear out of 
  nowhere, he has a birth certificate and parents and a 
  former life.  If he is some kind of living urban deity 
  then he became one, rather than being born that way.    
       If the Player Characters approach the Ratcatcher as 
  a friend rather than an enemy, they’ll find him to be an 
  incredibly useful source of information, when he’s 
  coherent enough to talk.  He can also be a difficult and 
  tenacious foe, if the PCs have done him some lasting 
  harm.  He might seek revenge against an opponent 
  who kills one or both of his friends, but he’ll maintain 
  his jovial demeanor the whole time.   
       Befriending him is easy.  Helping him get off the 
  streets is difficult.  He prefers to live in the tunnels and 
  he wants to remain a drunk. In fact his powers and his 
  role as an urban shaman are both dependant on his 
  being a kind of arch-derelict and he doesn’t want to 
  neglect his duties as the city’s secret confessor.  If he 
  isn't there to listen to the city's awful hidden agonies, 
  who will be?   
   
  Adventures With The Ratcatcher:  
  Lord of Winos, Prophet of Doom 
       The Ratcatcher sees something coming—
  something that will reduce his beloved city to rubble.  
  Unable to cope with this terrible vision, he has lapsed 
  into an alcoholic stupor, and then delirium tremens.   
  As he suffers and sweats through the sickness and 
  hallucinations, the city begins to convulse.  Power 
  systems flicker erratically, in disturbing patterns.  
  Vermin come scuttling up from the sewers, spelling 
  out frantic, incomprehensible messages.  Street 
  psychotics chant ominous scraps of Shakespeare and 
  Baudelaire.  
       After the Player Characters have seen a few of 
  these weird signs and portents, a deformed pigeon 
  comes to them.  Fluttering crrokedly with its 
  malformed wings, it tries to lead the PCs to the 
  Ratcatcher’s sickbed.  The PCs must overcome 
  Woodchuck Man’s suspicions, help keep Grim Diddle 
  from getting loose, and interpret the critical clues that 
  the Ratcatcher gives them in his raving delirium.  
       Meanwhile, on a rooftop high above the city, a 
  group of cultists nears the completion of their work.  It 
  has taken the Sisterhood of the Screaming Stars fifty 
  years to create this moment, and now within a day 
  they will draw down destruction on the metropolis.  
  For the stars have aligned and the rituals have been 
  performed and the coming of the Unthinkable One is 
  
    
  at hand!   
       The Unthinkable One kills cities, but it doesn’t just 
  munch them up like Godzilla—it rots them from 
  within, kills their soul, invisibly wrecks their economy 
  and fragments their populace.  Over the next few years 
  the city will fall to wrack and ruin, with the invisible 
  miasma of the Unthinkable One hanging over it all.   
       It will begin with the death of the Ratcatcher (from 
  alcohol poisoning).  No arch-derelict will rise to 
  replace him and the city’s screams will go unheard, 
  unsoothed by drink.   
       The Sisterhood conducts its rites on top of a 
  bizarre-looking art deco skyscraper that their founder 
  designed shortly before killing himself.  It looks like 
  the work of a madman, but it’s one of the most 
  exclusive addresses in the city.   
       The strange, non-Euclidian designs on the roof 
  serve as a focusing lens for unwholesome energies, 
  and the building has been the site of a surprising 
  number of bizarre deaths and weird disappearances.  
  In fact anyone who lives there for any length of time 
  starts to develop odd compulsions and neurotic habits, 
  which they practice in secret.  None of the PCs have 
  ever been inside.   
       All five of the ranking members of the Sisterhood 
  are wealthy society doyens in their eighties or nineties.  
  Four of them are confined to wheelchairs.  There are 
  about twelve younger members, ranging in age from 
  seventy to sixteen—all of them morbid, shy women 
  from the city’s best families.   
       When the ritual reaches its climax, all seventeen 
  cultists will jump off the top of the building, trusted 
  nurses shoving the older members’ wheelchairs over 
  the side.  None of them will ever hit the ground, or 
  ever be seen again.   
       Breaking up the ritual or preventing the mass 
  suicide will permanently foil the Sisterhood’s efforts, 
  and gain the players their enmity.  A lot of these ladies 
  have the money and power required to do the Player 
  Characters some serious damage.  But a wave of 
  depression and suicide decimates their ranks not long 
  after the PCs stop them, limiting their ability to strike 
  back.   
       The Ratcatcher recovers, and the city lumbers on 
  its unhappy way. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Grim Diddle 
  Real Name: Unknown (does not 
  remember it himself) 
  PL: 9 
  Str: 10 (+0) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 6 (-2) Wis: 8 (-1) Cha: 6 (-2) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +9 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +10 Defense: 
  +20/+19 Speed: 30/40 (Flight) 
  Damage Save: +10 Fortitude Save: +7 
  Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower Save: +-1   
  Skills: None 
  Feats: Darkvision, Durability, Great Fortitude, 
  Immunity (Starvation, Suffocation), Trance 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +5, Drain 
  (Constitution) +9 (Power Stunt: Penetrating Attack x2; 
  Cost: 2pts), Flight+8 (Cost: 2pts), Mental Protection 
  +9 (Cost: 2pts), Paralysis +9 (Cost: 2pts), Protection 
  +9 (Cost: 2pts) 
  Weaknesses: Disturbing (insane old derelict 
  with glowing blue skin, suffers a -5 penalty on Bluff 
  and Diplomacy checks, can't function in normal 
  human society) 
  Quirk: Totally Nuts (behavior is almost random and 
  frequently harmful to both himself and others, 
  incapable of meaningful conversation) 
  Vulnerable (to Dazzle attacks.) 
   
  “Unnnh! Maaaaa! Whether up through  
  my skins of flaming heart burning 
  burning so cold over the sky--Lutes!  
  Lobsters! Nuuuuuuuuh!”   
   
  A lost, tormented street psychotic, incapable of taking 
  care of himself.  Grim Diddle doesn't even have what 
  it takes to survive as a bum.   
       Instead of speaking, he moans.  His skin is pale and 
  glows faintly in the dark.  His eyes do not look human.   
       The Woodchuck and the Ratcatcher tend to him, try 
  to calm him through his nightmares and see that he is 
  fed.  They are amazingly patient and understanding 
  with him, and somehow he senses their affection, and 
  knows not to use his powers on them.  Yet sometimes 
  he escapes their care and wanders off to commit 
  random acts of havoc.   
       Grim Diddle has been cursed with the ability to 
  suck the lifeforce out of anyone he comes near.  
  Constantly cold, he craves the warmth of others and 
  when he isn't curled up in a heap or rocking back and 
  forth muttering to himself, he roves aimlessly around 
  seeking warmth to drain.  His companions try hard to 
  keep him from wandering off and drawing attention to 
  himself, but the Woodchuck is frequently gone and the 
  Ratcatcher is frequently too drunk to know what's 
  going on.   
       Although he won’t attack his caregivers, no one 
  else is safe from him.  When he comes floating down 
  the street at midnight, glowing a ghostly blue and 
  mumbling insane nonsense, look out!  He isn’t so 
  much merciless as he is unaware of the harm that he 
  does—perhaps incapable of understanding.   
       In combat, he really doesn’t use any tactics at all.  
  He directly approaches his chosen target, but can get 
  distracted if some other warm body gets in the way.  If 
  hurt, he retreats.  If cornered, he lashes out.  He won’t 
  take hostages or threaten non-combatants—that’s far 
  beyond his mental capabilities.   
       No one but the other Nowhere Men can reason with 
  him, even via telepathy, but he’d respond well to 
  Emotion Projection.   
       No one really knows where he came from or how 
  he got his powers.  The other Nowhere Men have no 
  idea, and if anyone ever manages to cure his shattered 
  mind, they’ll find huge gaps in his memory that 
  effectively obscure it.   
       Like Woodchuck Man, Grim Diddle can be used as 
  a bridge to the monster-making mad scientist or secret 
  government and/or corporate laboratory of your 
  choice.  Once the PCs have subdued and studied him, 
  they can follow the clues (his surgical scars, the place 
  where Woodchuck Man and the Ratcatcher found 
  him) back to the master villain responsible.   
   
  Adventures With Grim Diddle:  
   
  1) A Midnight Snack 
       Late one night Grim Diddle gets away from his 
  caregivers and floats off down the subway tunnels.   
       First he scares off a pair of maintenance workers, 
  then the half-asleep passengers on a late train spot him 
  through the windows, and then he then he floats onto 
  an almost deserted subway platform and panics 
  everyone there.   
       Reports reach the Player Characters of a monster in 
  the subway, working its way down the line. Or 
  perhaps a PC happens to be on the train that passes 
  him in the tunnels, or walks on to the subway platform 
  just as everyone is fleeing.  
       If the PCs don’t catch him in time, he will reach a 
  station where two major lines come together, just as a 
  sporting event lets out and the tunnels flood with 
  spectators on their way home.   
       Meanwhile, Woodchuck Man and the Ratcatcher 
  are also tracking Grim Diddle, and will catch up with 
  him just after the PCs do.   
   
  2) We Love You Grim Diddle, Come Home! 
       Fliers with Grim Diddle’s face on them start 
  appearing all over the city.  “Have you seen this 
  man?” the fliers ask.  There is a phone number.   
       If the Player Characters call the number, they speak 
  with an attractive woman in her forties who gives her 
  name as Lorna Canby.  She doesn’t want to talk about 
  this on the phone, and asks to meet them in person.   
       Grim Diddle is her father, she says.  His real name 
  is Victor Lang. He was a career government worker 
  
    
  from Pennsylvania, who didn’t talk about the details 
  of his job, even to his family.  He used to go on long 
  trips overseas that he would never discuss. They 
  always assumed he was a spy.   
       About five years ago he took on some kind of 
  outside consulting work for something called the IF 
  Foundation and disappeared.  Before left, he told 
  Lorna’s mother that he might be gone for two months.  
  That was the last his family ever heard from him, until 
  Lorna saw his face in a tabloid piece on the Nowhere 
  Men.  His wife has been dead for three years and he 
  doesn’t even know.  Can the Player Characters help 
  her find him?   
       Alas, this is all a lie.  “Lorna” (her real name is 
  Hilda Glick) has been hired by some Russian mobsters 
  who want to catch Grim Diddle and have him fight 
  other superhumans in a pit. She has a tranquilizer dart-
  gun on her person, a van with stolen license plates and 
  a pair of burly Russo-American henchmen named 
  Greg (Gregor) and Mikey (Mikhail) who work as 
  bouncers at a local club.   
       In fact she knows nothing about Grim Diddle’s 
  origins.  Or, if the GM wants to use Ms. Glick as a 
  bridge to whatever supervillain or sinister conspiracy 
  produced Grim Diddle, she’s working for them.  In 
  this case she still has no idea who he really is and she 
  doesn’t know much about her employer, either.  Her 
  thugs know even less.  None of them are agents of 
  anything, just part-time criminals who’ve been hired 
  to do a job. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Vernichtung 5 
   
  Membership: The Moebius Man (the closest 
  thing the group has to a leader, an articulate, cruel 
  young man who has the ability to warp space with the 
  power of his brain), Der Shriek (a dimwitted, violent, 
  incoherent teenager who can knock walls down with 
  the force of his screams), Blitzenhammur (a lightning-
  wielding supervillain from the Nazi era, who is 
  beginning to feel serious doubts about having signed 
  on with an outfit as disturbing and dangerous as 
  Vernichtung 5), Der Totenkopf (a horrible, psychotic 
  madman with vast atomic powers, who the team 
  unwisely broke out of a secret prison near Wurms) and 
  Zyclon B (a silent and deeply disturbed teenage girl, 
  whose very thoughts are poison).    
   
       Vernichtung 5 (usually called "V-5" for short) is a 
  loosely organized gang of superhuman teenage white 
  supremacists, who have spread havoc and death all 
  across Germany for the past year.  The name means 
  something like "Annihilation 5," although it doesn't 
  translate very well.   
       V-5 is the brainchild (if the term can be applied to a 
  group this short on brains) of the Moebius Man, an 
  infamous young German neo-nazi paranormal.  One of 
  Germany’s most hated new supervillains, the Moebius 
  Man is more articulate than most skinheads, and an 
  inspiring leader to the collection of psychotics and 
  super-thugs he has gathered around himself.  The 
  group’s aims are unclear, apart from a vague and 
  hopeless desire to somehow return the Third Reich to 
  power.   
       From Berlin to Stuttgart, from Munich to Hamburg, 
  they have crisscrossed the country in a bloody trail of 
  random carnage, killing hapless guest workers and 
  robbing banks with little purpose or plan.   
       And now they just got really dangerous.  At a 
  facility outside of Wurms, they found the secret prison 
  built to hold Der Totenkopf, a world-class supervillain 
  whose very existence is a closely guarded secret.  
  They let him out, and he joined the team in gratitude. 
  Or at least we think it was gratitude—the man is so 
  hopelessly insane that it’s hard to understand anything 
  about his motives.   No one seems to know what he 
  intends, but how could it possibly be anything good?   
   
  Threat Level: Before they unleashed Der 
  Totenkopf on the world, Vernichtung 5 was a 
  disorganized rabble of angry superkids with relatively 
  low-level powers.  They were particularly weak on 
  defense—almost all their powers were attacks of some 
  kind and they had no idea how to coordinate them 
  effectively.  They had no formal rules or established 
  tactics.  Only the Moebius Man’s strong personality 
  kept them together.   
       All these things are still true, but now they have 
  Der Totenkopf standing silently at their side, ready to 
  melt their opponents into radioactive sludge.  They 
  have already defeated a team of young Austrian super- 
   
  anarchists (der Nachtmuzik), killing three of them in 
  the process, and devastated one of the European 
  Union’s special anti-parahuman police units.  
       The German media likes to comment on 
  Vernichtung 5 as though they were some kind of 
  insane, inexplicable aberration, which just came out of 
  nowhere.  Yet the sad truth is that there are people 
  who sympathize with their views all across Germany.  
  They are heroes to innumerable angry young 
  skinheads, who treat them like celebrities.  
       White supremacists in nearly every town in 
  Germany are willing to hide V-5 from the authorities, 
  provide them with drugs and groupies and whatever 
  else they need.  As a result, the team can go to ground 
  and vanish between jobs, moving invisibly through the 
  skinhead underground until it’s time to surface once 
  again.   
       This works particularly well in conjunction with 
  the Moebius Man's powers.  He's a teleporter, and is 
  powerful enough to whisk them away to one of their 
  safe havens in a flash if they suddenly need to retreat.  
  This is what kept them alive until they found Der 
  Totenkopf.   
   
  Organization: Vernichtung has no common 
  uniform or theme (apart from neo-nazism).  The 
  Moebius Man has had some emblems with the team’s 
  “V-5” logo put together for them to wear on their 
  costumes in an attempt to drum up more team 
  solidarity, but not all of them can be persuaded to 
  wear them.   
       Nor does V-5 exactly have rules.  The Moebius 
  Man is the team’s center and he dominates the others 
  through his strong personality and the strength of his 
  oratory.  Der Shriek is totally devoted to him, although 
  he’s too uneducated and distractible to understand 
  much of what his idol is saying.  Zyclon B is a loose 
  cannon (but them again aren’t they all?), bloodthirsty 
  and difficult to control.  She’s in love with der 
  Totenkopf but mortally afraid of him. She never 
  speaks, and it’s hard to predict what she’s going to do 
  next.  Blitzenhammur is a hired gun who the Moebius 
  Man brought on board to replace a dead team-mate 
  (Der Totenkopf killed him for some senseless, crazy 
  reason). While Blitzenhammur is easily the calmest, 
  most experienced and most disciplined member of the 
  team, he now has serious doubts about V-5 and the 
  kinds of things they might ask him to do.  He might 
  have considered deserting, despite this being against 
  his rigid code, but frankly he’s so scared of Der 
  Totenkopf and the Moebius Man that he doesn’t dare 
  betray them—at least not yet.   
       For his part, der Totenkopf stays apart and aloof 
  from the rest of the team.  He could be the leader if he 
  wanted to, but he seems to either be uninterested in the 
  job or too crazy to understand it.  When the team 
  attacks a target he attacks it too, when they come 
  under attack he helps to defend them, but for the most 
  part he just follows them around. Sometimes he stays 
  silent for days, other times he rants and raves for hours 
  on end.  He’s extremely scary, and even the Moebius 
  
    
  Man is beginning to regret associating with him.    
   
  Base of Operations: The Moebius Man’s 
  powers allow Vernichtung 5 to turn up all over 
  Germany.  They spend more time in the small 
  industrial towns of the East than anywhere else, since 
  that’s where their grassroots support is strongest.  
  They have no single fixed headquarters, but people are 
  always willing to put them up.   
       If they come under too much pressure from the 
  authorities, or if they should suddenly decide to get as 
  far away from Der Totenkopf as possible, then they 
  could easily relocate to Norway, where many kids in 
  the Black Metal scene would be willing to give them 
  aid and shelter.  They could just as well go to Austria 
  or Russia, where they also have fans, or who knows, 
  maybe the United States?  The Moebius Man is 
  powerful enough that with some effort he could 
  relocate them almost anywhere on Earth. The only 
  reason they’ve never ventured outside of Germany 
  before is that they’re scared to.  None of them speak 
  Norwegian, let alone Russian, and the Moebius Man is 
  the only one who is articulate in English.  
   
  Tactics: V-5’s tactics might be charitably described 
  as simple and direct.  They prefer to pick on targets 
  who are weaker than they are, stalking, taunting and 
  threatening them before murdering them. They 
  particularly like to terrorize victims into performing 
  grotesque acts to save themselves, and then kill them 
  anyway.   
       They aren’t yet used to facing opponents of equal 
  strength, and haven’t quite worked out how to do it. 
  When faced with other superhumans, V-5 will all 
  attack at once, possibly getting in one another’s way 
  or even getting caught in one another’s’ attacks. Der 
  Shreik is way too enthusiastic in combat and doesn’t 
  always make sure his teammates are out of the range 
  of his attack. Zyclon B barely even cares if she 
  accidentally hits a teammate and Der Totenkopf 
  doesn’t care at all.   
       If the Moebius Man ever figures out how to 
  coordinate his powers with the others, they could 
  become incredibly effective.  As of yet, he hasn’t, and 
  he may not live long enough to do it.  He has realized 
  that he can use his powers to block incoming attacks 
  against his teammates as well as against himself, but 
  that’s about the limit of his tactical sense.   
   
  Using Vernichtung 5 in your 
  campaign: Vernichtung 5 is either a gang of self-
  destructive youths on a rapid course to their own 
  doom, or a powerful recurrent enemy that is just in its 
  earliest stage of development. Which it turns out to be 
  depends on the both the GM and the players.   
       V-5 can be encountered in a number of different 
  ways.  While they do have an agenda that vaguely 
  involves world domination, they also pull hold ups 
  and attack random civilians. The PCs could be called 
  in to stop them from blowing up a nuclear power 
  plant, to foil their efforts to rob a bank or even face 
  them as an American white supremacist's hired 
  muscle.  Perhaps they'll spend their whole career in 
  Germany, or perhaps they'll turn up in the PCs home 
  town tomorrow, on the run from the European 
  authorities and spoiling for trouble.  
       They make a good nemesis for a team that is just 
  starting out, and if they don’t self-destruct it can be a 
  lot of fun to watch them grow and evolve with the 
  PCs.   
       They’re plenty scary and evil, but weak enough for 
  most PC groups to beat.  Even Der Totenkopf is 
  nowhere near as much a threat as the press makes him 
  out to be—his weaknesses are just too crippling.  He 
  may space out or get obsessed by some pointless thing 
  in the middle of a battle and he’s far too insane to 
  direct his attacks wisely.  The others trip over one 
  another like homicidal keystone cops.  In fact the 
  Moebius Man is really the team’s most dangerous and 
  durable member.  He just doesn’t know it yet.  
   
  Adventures With Vernichtung 5:  
   
  1) Coming Soon to a Fistfight Near You 
       Vernichtung 5 appears in the Player Characters’ 
  home town, eager to start some trouble.  The heat was 
  getting too intense back home, so the Moebius Man 
  finally decided that it was time to emigrate.  He’s not 
  quite sure how he managed to transport them that far, 
  and he’s not sure he could do it again.   
       A white supremacist youth organization called the 
  Vanguard is putting them up for the time being.  The 
  Vanguard has chapters all over the US, but they can’t 
  offer the team nearly as much protection as their 
  European counterparts, so here they have to keep a 
  lower profile.  Back home in Germany V5 managed to 
  stay above the petty squabbles that divide the white 
  supremacist community, but here in the states that 
  isn’t possible.   
       One of the few things that can make a white 
  supremacist group a lot of money is skinhead hate 
  music.  There is a huge underground market for this 
  stuff, which the Vanguard has long been cut out of.  
  But now with V5 at their disposal, that is quickly 
  going to change.    
       After making a couple of public appearances and 
  holding some rallies, V5 sets out to consolidate the 
  Vanguard’s power.  They will visit all five of the 
  current underground white power music labels, and 
  convince them to surrender or die.  All five of them 
  are paranoid, twitchy skinheads, of course, and most 
  have heavily armed gangs of thugs backing them up.   
       Once the Player Characters realize that there’s a 
  war on for the control of white supremacist music, 
  they may be faced with a moral dilemma.  They don’t 
  want to have to defend nazi punks, yet if they don’t 
  make some kind of a stand, not only are people going 
  to die, but the American neo-nazi movement will 
  change from a fractious, disorganized tangle of 
  different warring factions, into a unified, well 
  organized, well funded movement with it’s own 
  supervillain team.    
  
    
   
  2) Coming Soon to a Fistfight Near Nobody 
       Vernichtung 5 appears in the Player Characters’ 
  home town, eager to start some trouble.  The heat was 
  getting too intense back home, so the Moebius Man 
  finally decided that it was time to emigrate.  He’s not 
  quite sure how he managed to transport them that far, 
  and he’s not sure he could do it again.   
       But this is not like Germany, the team quickly 
  discovers.  Here they have no friends, nowhere to stay, 
  no supporters that they can reach.  The big slum areas 
  of an American city are not a hospitable place for a 
  gang of White Supremacists who barely speak 
  English.   
       There may be places in the decaying blue collar 
  neighborhoods near downtown or out in the redneck 
  areas beyond the suburbs where they could find allies, 
  but they have no idea where these places are or how to 
  reach them.  So instead they take up residence under 
  an abandoned factory in an industrial zone and venture 
  out only for food and other supplies.  The tension is 
  unbearable, and Der Shreik, Zyclon B or der 
  Totenkopf is almost sure to go out on a rampage 
  sooner or later.   
       And this is the way the PC’s encounter V5, as a 
  unit of soldiers lost behind enemy lines, committing 
  random acts of savagery and havoc until the Moebius 
  Man drags them home to their secret lair.  Either the 
  PCs will eventually track them down and end 
  everything in a huge climactic battle with the factory 
  collapsing all around their ears, or der Totenkopf will 
  start walking toward some major American landmark 
  with the intention of ripping it down with his bare 
  hands.  And perhaps he’ll succeed, if the PCs don’t 
  stop him.   
   
  3) Coming Soon to a Fistfight Near Everybody  
       Vernichtung 5 appears in the Player Characters’ 
  home town, eager to start some trouble.  The heat was 
  getting too intense back home, so the Moebius Man 
  finally decided that it was time to emigrate.  He’s not 
  quite sure how he managed to transport them that far, 
  and he’s not sure he could do it again.   
       They have no allies at hand and no way to find 
  them, so they steal a Winnebago and set out on the 
  road to see their new country and try to make contact 
  with other neo-nazis.  They slice a bloody arc across 
  the heartland of America, spreading pointless terror 
  and mayhem wherever they go, stealing to stay alive 
  and killing for the sheer twisted hell of it.  A lawless 
  pack whose only rule is “thrill me,” on a crazed cross 
  country mission of murder.  Can anyone stop this 
  gruesome rampage?   
       The Moebius Man is capable of creating warps big 
  enough to drive their whole land-yacht into, which 
  makes it almost impossible to catch them with 
  roadblocks.  Yet the PCs can certainly track them 
  across country (just follow the screams and smoke), 
  and der Totenkopf’s love of demolishing famous 
  landmarks and blowing up nuclear power plants 
  makes it all too easy to tell where they’re headed next.        
       As an added complication, after V5 has been on the 
  road for a few months, they actually do gain a 
  following among the scattered gangs of white power 
  lunatics that spread like lice across the nation’s 
  underbelly.  This network isn't a strong or as all-
  pervasive as the neo-nazi underground in europe, but 
  so long as they stay in the right places V5 can always 
  find shelter, and soon they may have a ragtag army 
  riding with them. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Der Totenkopf 
  Real Name: Unknown 
  PL: 13 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 10 (+0) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 8 (-1) Wis: 8 (-1) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +7 Defense: 
  +16/+15 Speed: 30 (60 while flying) 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +0 Willpower Save: +8   
  Skills: Intimidate +12 
  Feats: Chokehold, Durability, Improved Grapple, 
  Immunity (to Cold, Disease, Heat, Poison, 
  Suffocation, and Radiation) Infamy, Power Immunity 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +8 (Source: 
  Mutation; Cost 1pt), Amazing Save (Will) +9 (Source: 
  Mutation; Cost 1pt), Energy Control (Radiation) +13 
  (Extras: Energy Field, Energy Absorbtion, Explosive 
  Blast; Power Stunt: Penetrating Attack; Source: 
  Mutation; Cost 5pts) Super-Strength +10 (Extras: 
  Protection, Shockwave: Cost: +6) 
  Weaknesses: Disturbing (looks like a burning 
  nuclear skull, makes all Bluff and Diplomacy checks 
  at a –5) 
  Quirk: Totally Insane (does weird, random, irrational 
  stuff, frequently getting into trouble or putting himself  
  at a diadvantage) 
   
  “The world is dying of cancer.  It needs 
  radiation therapy.  It must bathe in the 
  warm nuclear glow of my love, to be 
  purged of its impurity.”  
   
       Created to be a secret living weapon that the G-8 
  nations could call upon to discreetly solve their 
  problems, Der Totenkopf was a terrifying failure.  An 
  atomic superman with crazed messianic fantasies and 
  a crusader's zeal, he was about the worst thing that 
  could have possibly come crawling out of the test 
  chamber.   
       His creators put him under continual sedation at a 
  secret sanatorium outside of Wurms, while they tried 
  to figure out how to un-create him.  Then they forgot 
  about him.  This was a mistake, for Vernichtung 5 
  found him, woke him up and suddenly went from 
  being a pack of hateful bullyboys to a genuine 
  menace.  With the Totenkopf on their side they can 
  threaten a lot more than a few guest workers.   
       He is headstrong, megalomaniacal and far too 
  crazy to control, but of course this isn't such a problem 
  in a group like V5, where control isn't really an issue.  
  Der Totenkopf loves to rant about Nietzsche and 
  fascism, the purity of Nordic blood and his crusade to 
  cleanse the world in atomic fire.  He likes to quote 
  Nietzsche, passing the mad philosopher’s observations 
  off as his own.  He can sound surprisingly reasonable 
  when he does this, but it’s only because he doesn’t 
  understand what he’s saying.   
       He has no friends, no close associates outside of his 
  team-mates and almost no memory of his former life.  
  His current beliefs were probably always a part of 
  him, but they became impossible to hide once he 
  underwent the transformation process and had a 
  psychotic break.   
       His current mental stability is tenuous at best and 
  he is prone to irrational and pointless acts of savagery. 
  As an example, when the team woke him up, told him 
  that they were Vernichtung 5 and that they wanted 
  him to join them, he wanted to accept, but was terribly 
  upset by the fact that there were already five of them.  
  How could he join the team if it was already full?  He 
  immediately killed two of their members so that there 
  would be room for him to join, and then apologized 
  for having miscounted and killed one person too 
  many.  
       If you are using the second book in this series 
  ("More Bad Guys") then Der Totenkopf was 
  considered for membership in the Legion of the 
  Damned, but they rejected him--this is the guy whom 
  even the Aleph and Doctor Zed think is too crazy and 
  dangerous. The Moebius Man probably wouldn't mind 
  stepping aside and letting him lead the group, but the 
  Totenkopf isn't really equipped for it and while he 
  doesn't take orders he doesn't give them either.  
       He visibly isn't human anymore and is extremely 
  unnerving to be around for any length of time.  It's not 
  just that he never takes off his skull mask, or talks 
  about anything but his obsessions.  He also doesn't 
  breathe, or sweat.  He holds utterly still when he isn't 
  in motion, like a mannequin.  He also sleeps standing 
  up, with his eyes open.  You don't want to look at 
  those eyes, even when he is asleep.  You don't want to 
  see what is in them.   
   
  Adventures With Der Totenkopf:  
   
  1) Why Didn’t I Think of That? 
       Der Totenkopf has conceived a cunning plan that 
  cannot fail!  At least it sounds cunning to him.   
       He will leave his erstwhile allies in V5, go to a 
  crowded train station at rush hour, kill a bunch of 
  people at random and take the rest hostage in the 
  station’s main atrium.  This should attract lots of cops 
  and superheroes, whom he can then kill. In the 
  meantime, he’ll kill some hostages, one at a time, so 
  as to keep from getting bored.  
       And that’s it.  That’s the whole plan.   
       If someone asks what his demands are, he’ll say 
  something like “send more cops.”   
       After a while the Moebius Man appears and asks 
  him what the next part of the Plan is.  The atomic 
  monstrosity becomes confused and says that he hadn’t 
  thought of anything.   
       The Moebius Man gently asks if this is another one 
  of those plans where eventually they have to send 
  
    
  everybody, so he gets to kill everybody in the whole 
  world?   
       Yes, der Totenkopf replies.  He thinks so. But that 
  would take too long—could they just go home 
  instead?  The Moebius Man agrees.   
   
  2) And Zarathustra Said “Two Scoops of Rum 
  Raisin in a Waffle Cone, Please.” 
       An irrational craving for ice cream siezes der 
  Totenkopf.  He starts walking towards a big industrial 
  park, muttering “I shall have it” to himself, with the 
  rest of the team trailing nervously behind him.   
       They get spotted from the air and the government 
  tries to intercept them before der Totenkopf can reach 
  his target.  There are at least three potential targets in 
  that park which he could cause widespread havoc, and 
  they move to block his path to all three.  But they have 
  miscalculated.  He isn’t headed for the chemical works 
  or the foundry or the power plant, but for the frozen 
  desert factory, off to one side.   
       The Player Characters arrive at the scene just in 
  time to see him change abruptly change course.  
  Where can he be going?  The authorities are trying to 
  intercept him at the wrong spot!  They’ll never be able 
  to re-deploy fast enough---it’s up to the PCs to catch 
  up with him and stop him from committing some 
  horrible crime.   
       To their surprise, instead of going into the frozen 
  desert factory itself, he walks into the refrigerated 
  warehouse next door.  What sinister deed does he 
  intend to commit there?  “I shall have it,” he mutters.   
       When they confront him in the warehouse, he is 
  gorging himself on a five gallon tub of ice cream, but 
  when he sees the Player Characters, he roars “No 
  sprinkles! For so Zarathustra spake unto Nietzsche!  
  No sprinkles—he really said that!” and attacks.   
       As soon as the Moebius Man figures out what is 
  really going on here (the big radioactive weirdo 
  wanted some ice cream) he will teleport V5 to safety 
  in disgust, taking der Totenkopf with them. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  The Moebius Man 
  Real Name: Karl Anton Moebius 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +4 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +5 Defense: 
  +13/+12 Speed: 30/50 (Teleportation) 
  Damage Save: +2/+5 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +2 Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower 
  Save: +1   
  Skills: Diplomacy +5, Hide +5, Intimidate +5, 
  Move Silently +5, Speak English +3, Taunt +5 
  Feats: Dodge, Evasion, Leadership, Inspire 
  Powers: Deflection (Teleports incoming attacks 
  away from himself; Extras: Deflect Others x2 [can 
  deflect any attack within 100 feet, whether aimed at 
  himself or not], Reflection; Cost 5pts), Teleportation 
  (Extras: Extended Teleport, Portal; Cost 4pts) 
  Equipment: Armor +3 (thick leather coat), 
  Bayonet (+3 Lethal) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk:  Bigot (The Moebius Man 
  is not capable of cooperating with members of other 
  ethnic backgrounds and he will attack them in 
  preference to all other  targets, even if doing so puts 
  him at a tactical disadvantage) 
   
  "Kill your parents.  Then eat them.  This 
  is the only way you will ever be free."  
   
       Karl Anton Moebius isn’t a typical German neo-
  nazi.  Articulate and educated, the product of a good 
  home, he doesn’t even shave his head.  His parents are 
  successful, politically progressive, upper middle class 
  Yuppies from Stuttgart.     
       His mother, Maria Moebius, was once a member of 
  a tiny Maoist parahuman terror group called the “Red 
  Legion” in the late 1970s.  The Red Legion carried out 
  a few random bombings and one failed bank robbery 
  before it broke up in an argument over some little 
  ideological point.   
       Many of the other members went to jail, but 
  Maria’s superhuman abilities kept her out of the 
  clutches of the law for long enough to marry a 
  handsome young banker and move to a house in the 
  suburbs.  She was a cold, self-absorbed parent, but not 
  an abusive one.   
       It’s hard to freak your parents out when your mom 
  knew the Bader-Meinhoff gang, but Karl managed to 
  find something she’d disapprove of.  He listened to 
  Norwegian black metal, read white supremacist 
  literature and hung around with lower class skinheads 
  all through his teenage years.   
       When he was 17, Karl accidentally discovered that 
  he had inherited his mother’s parahuman abilities, and 
  could fold space with the power of his mind.  This 
  made it easier to sneak out after dark, and gave him 
  the idea for what became his life’s central ambition.  
  He would assemble a group of skinhead supervillains 
  and bring the world to its knees.   
       In college he became a vocal student advocate for 
  the far right, and continued to search for superhuman 
  white supremacists like himself.  By his sophomore 
  year his parents had enough of him and severed all 
  contact and financial support.  He hasn’t spoken to 
  them since, which is a shame, since his real notoriety 
  was just beginning.   
       That summer he helped stomp an Ethiopian guest 
  worker to death, got caught, and came up with a legal 
  defense that made headlines across Germany.  He 
  couldn’t be held for murder, he claimed, since his 
  victim was black, and therefore wasn’t human.  He 
  would be willing to plead guilty to a lesser charge of 
  cruelty to animals, he said.  When the authorities 
  responded with a shocked refusal, he announced that 
  they had in that case forfeited their right to hold him, 
  and teleported out of custody.   
       This incident made him a hero to Germany’s 
  skinhead underground, which combined with his 
  superpowers and natural leadership ability, suddenly 
  made him a force to be reckoned with.  Certain that he 
  would be gunned down by the cops at any moment, 
  Karl intensified his search for others like himself, and 
  within six months he found Der Shreik, Zyclon B and 
  two other parahuman kids (both now deceased) who 
  shared his vision.  Calling his group Vernichtung 5, he 
  set out on a campaign of random terror and havoc 
  across central Europe.   
       They probably would have slaughtered a few more 
  hapless guest workers and perhaps blown up a 
  landmark or two before getting captured or killed, but 
  last month they made an amazing find which has 
  transformed the group into something far more 
  dangerous.  On the outskirts of Wurms, they 
  discovered the secret prison of an unbelievably 
  powerful white supremacist supervillain called der 
  Totenkopf, and released him.   
       The Moebius Man has no intention of challenging 
  der Totenkopf for the leadership of the group, but in 
  fact the Totenkopf seems to have no interest in being 
  in charge, so for the moment he remains the de facto 
  leader of V5.  He’s also starting to have nightmares, 
  and to wonder if this was ever such a good idea.   
       The Moebius Man is a scary presence, with his 
  ghostly white makeup and air of quiet, horrible 
  intensity.  In love with the supervillain mystique, he 
  likes to wax philosophical and poetic about his beliefs 
  and frequently posts on the Internet.  However, he 
  isn’t as clever or as educated as he thinks, and often 
  comes across as a pretentious, affected fool.   
       Now that his group actually has the firepower to 
  wreak some world-class havoc, he isn’t quite sure 
  which target they should pick.  To tell the truth, he 
  hadn’t really thought it through.   
       Unbeknownst to the Moebius Man, if he ever gets 
  himself into a situation where he is about to die in 
  
    
  public, his mother will suddenly teleport onto the 
  scene and come to his aid, wearing her old costume 
  from the Red Legion, screaming Marxist slogans and 
  embarrassing him half to death.  She tells herself that 
  she’s doing this because she loves her son in spite of 
  everything, but in fact she also feels jealous of all the 
  fun he’s been having, and hates to be upstaged.  See 
  her stats later on in this section.  She’s a lot more 
  powerful than her wayward son.   
   
  Adventures With The Moebius Man:  
   
  1) Play That Funky Music, White Boy 
       The Moebius Man was frustrated in his efforts to 
  turn V5 into a band (they’re all the kind of guys who 
  would have to play bass) but he is determined to make 
  a name for them in the White Supremacist recording 
  world nonetheless.  He wants to put together a spoken 
  word album and he’s on his way to Kalispell, Montana 
  to make contact with a maverick producer named 
  Lemuel Scroggins, who runs an underground label 
  called White Death Records.   
       The Moebius Man doesn’t realize that the 
  American nazi scene is a maze of dangerous, violent, 
  heavily armed factions who constantly struggle to 
  control the music trade, and that allying himself with 
  Scroggins will upset a lot of other factions.   
       Not long after word reaches the PCs that the 
  Moebius Man has been sighted in Montana, the 
  national neo-nazi organization that Lemual Scroggins 
  belongs to (the so-called “Blood-Banner Front”) 
  collapses in an internal conflict and the struggle is on 
  to gain control of White Death Records.  A rival group 
  tips off the PCs as to where they can find Karl 
  Moebius and just as they arrive at Lemuel Scroggins’ 
  basement apartment in Kalispell, a hit team from a 
  rival gang arrives at the scene and riddles the place 
  with bullets.   
       A three way battle probably ensues.  If the Moebius 
  Man gets away, then he’s unsure whether his powers 
  are strong enough to return him to Germany without 
  killing him, and so he is stranded here for now, on the 
  run and looking for a way to survive.   
   
  2) A Good Day to Die Badly 
       The Moebius Man suddenly turns up in West 
  Virginia, frightened and alone.  He presents himself at 
  the fortified compound of Taylor Dane, a prominent 
  white supremacist who publicly supports V5, and 
  takes refuge there.   
       Dane is the leader of a national organization called 
  the Invincible White Brotherhood of the Iron Fist—
  one of America’s larger post-Klan hate groups.  
  Someone in his large, fractious organization lets it 
  leak that one of Europe’s most wanted supervillains is 
  staying with at the Brotherhood’s compound, and 
  pretty soon Dane and the Moebius Man find 
  themselves surrounded by the federal authorities.  A 
  standoff develops, which turns into a siege.   
       The PCs are called in to help (or show up on their 
  own once it comes to their attention that a notorious 
  supervillain has been cornered) and discover that the 
  Moebius Man is actually desperate to talk to them.   
  That’s why he hasn’t just teleported away.   
       Der Totenkopf has gone crazy, he explains.  He’s 
  about to lead the rest of the team in an attack on a 
  nuclear power plant that could devastate a huge swath 
  of central Europe.  The Moebius Man doesn’t want to 
  die, and now that he’s had a chance to think about it 
  he doesn’t really know if he’s wants all those millions 
  of people to die either.  The attack is probably 
  underway right now, but he could take the Player 
  Characters there, if they let him.    
       If your Player Characters have no easy way to get 
  to Europe and you sense that they would never trust 
  the Moebius Man enough to let him teleport them 
  there, then the plant is actually in Western 
  Pennsylvania rather than in Germany.   
       There is one additional complication.  Unlike the 
  Moebius Man, Taylor Dane is a fanatic who would 
  love nothing more than to die in a blaze of glory.  If 
  the PCs leave the scene, the siege will continue and 
  innocent people really could get hurt. Yet the lives of 
  millions could be at stake!  How to resolve this ethical 
  dilemma?     
       Meanwhile, the other four members of V5 really 
  are attempting to assault a nuclear power plant.  Their 
  chances of causing a lethal meltdown are up to the 
  GM, depending on where the campaign is going.  The 
  attack could be a shabby exercise in stupidity, with 
  little to no chance of success, or this could be the final 
  climactic conflict that brings V5 down at last.  If it 
  turns out to be the latter then Der Shreik will switch 
  sides when he sees what his friend the Moebius Man is 
  doing, and Blitzenhammur will wish that he could 
  (alas, his code prevents it).  The army will show up, 
  the press will show up, and so could Mother Moebius. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Blitzenhammer 
  Real Name: The Honorable Baron 
  Heinrich von Hammurhold 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 15 (+2) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +12 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +11 Defense: 
  +23/+19 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +6 Willpower Save: +1   
  Skills: Acrobatics +5, Diplomacy +5, Knowledge 
  (Nazi underground) +3, Knowledge (World War 2) 
  +5, Spot +5, Speak Portugese +5, speak Spanish +2 
  Feats: Attack Finesse, Attack Focus (Armed 
  Melee), Immunity (Aging), Lightning Reflexes 
  Powers: A gentleman would not stoop to having 
  anything so deplorably vulgar as superpowers (ugh!) 
  See “Equipment” instead. 
  Equipment: The Strangshield: Deflection +10 
  (Flaw: Device; Cost: 1pt), The Blitzenhammur: 
  Energy Control (Electricity) +10 (Extras: Energy 
  Absorbtion, Energy Field; Flaw: Device; Cost: 3pts), 
  Weapon +10, Armor +4 (Cost: 1pt) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk:  Unwavering, irrational 
  devotion to the 19th Century European officer's code.   
  Among other things, it forbids him to harm a fellow 
  officer who has surrendered, drive an automobile (a 
  gentleman will not lower himself to the status of a 
  servant by driving his own car), betray his side's 
  secrets, disobey an order or let an insult go unavenged 
  by violence. 
   
  "Just shut up and die, you pointless, 
  dirty little person."  
   
       The world is full of haters and white supremacists, 
  but actual real-live nazis are a rarity these days.  Old 
  age claimed the ones who weren’t killed in the war or 
  hunted down by the Israeli security services.  Time 
  devours all things.  Yet it hasn’t devoured 
  Blitzenhammer, who still looks as young today as the 
  first moment he put on his Wehrmacht uniform in 
  1939.   
       He is the last surviving member of Einsatzgruppen 
  X, a German parahuman team assigned to hunt down 
  Allied superheroes on the battlefield.  A titled Baron 
  from Swabia, in the easternmost part of Germany, he 
  inherited his powers from his father, and his father 
  before him.   
       His ancient, powerful, moribund family goes back 
  to the era of the Teutonic knights and beyond.  At least 
  since the days of Charlemagne the eldest male heir of 
  his family has been the secret protector of the 
  Lightning Hammer and the Strangshield, ancient 
  occult artifacts of incredible power.  The 
  Blitzenhammer may actually have been the hammer of 
  Thor, or perhaps the thing that the legend of Thor was 
  based upon.   
       The Von Hammurhold family itself has always 
  been apolitical, far too rich and ancient to concern 
  itself with kings and Reichs and their affairs.  But 
  when Swabia was threatened in the first World War, 
  the Junkers of the Blitzenhammer sent son after son to 
  protect the family’s possessions in the trenches.  All of 
  them wielded the Blitzenhammer and Strangshield 
  against the Prussian Empire’s enemies and all of them 
  died.  By the war’s end the family fortune was in 
  tatters and its lineage all but depleted of sons.  They 
  barely noticed the rise of the Nazis, joining the 
  National Socialist Party purely because that was what 
  one did.   
       Heinrich, the family’s last heir, answered 
  Germany’s call in 1939 and was shipped off to invade 
  France with a parahuman unit known as 
  Einsatzgruppen X.  Throughout the war Heinrich saw 
  little of the Nazis’ dark side and never really 
  understood what was happening to the Jews sent out 
  of France for “resettlement.”  His smug, stolid 
  aristocratic outlook and lack of imagination shielded 
  him well—but it still doesn’t excuse him.   
       Once the tide of the war turned, Einsatzgruppen X 
  found itself pushed back further and further into 
  central Europe, taking terrible losses as they went.   
       During the Battle of Berlin the surviving members 
  were supposed to sacrifice themselves in the city’s 
  defense, but Heinrich didn’t see the need to shed his 
  noble blood for a grubby little lower-middle-class 
  politician like Hitler.  Instead he lay low.  Then after 
  the war he made his way back to France and like so 
  many former Wehrmacht and SS soldiers, he joined 
  the French Foreign Legion.   
       This seemed the proper course—he was the only 
  Von Hammurhold left, his family estate was gone, 
  absorbed into communist Poland, and he had nothing 
  left to protect but the family’s occult relics.  The rigid 
  European officer’s code would have normally required 
  him to blow his brains out, but since his mortal duties 
  weren’t yet completely discharged, a disgraceful death 
  in the ranks of Le Legion seemed an acceptable 
  substitute.   
       To his surprise, he found that the Legion was full 
  of Germans, although they only spoke their native 
  language to one another in whispers after lights-out. 
  The penalties for speaking any language but French 
  were incredibly severe.  Beatings were standard 
  punishment for even the most trivial offenses in the 
  Foreign Legion, and Heinrich heard more than one of 
  his new comrades grumble that discipline hadn’t even 
  been this harsh in the SS.  He spent some unhappy 
  years fighting insurgents in Algeria, before they 
  shipped the Legion off to Vietnam.   
       By now it was the 1950s, and Heinrich noticed that 
  he wasn’t getting any older.  He supposed that this 
  was because he hadn’t created any heirs and couldn’t 
  pass the family relics down.  The Blitzenhammer 
  
    
  didn’t want to be left without a wielder, although it 
  was going to be hard-pressed to keep him alive in 
  Vietnam.   
       As the Legion marched through the streets of Paris 
  prior to its departure, it struck Heinrich as funny that 
  the crowds were wildly cheering so many of the same 
  men who had tramped through these streets as hated 
  occupiers, not long before.   
       Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the French 
  steadily lost the first Vietnam War, years before 
  America had a chance to do the same.  The Foreign 
  Legion was pretty well annihilated over the course of 
  the war, the bones of former SS men and Hitler Youth 
  littering the jungle.   
       Better-connected Party officials were living safe 
  lives in South America, and after few years of service 
  in Southeast Asia Heinrich was determined to join 
  them.  He got a transfer to French Guiana, cashiered 
  out of the Legion there and set off to what he hoped 
  would be a comfortable existence in Buenos Aires.  It 
  didn’t last.   
       The Nazi community had deep roots in Argentina, 
  but once its pro-fascist leader, Juan Peron, fell out of 
  power they were scattered to the winds.  Many fled to 
  places like Paraguay and lived hand-to-mouth, one 
  step ahead of the nazi hunters.   
       This seemed undignified to Heinrich, who instead 
  moved to Portugal, and began hiring himself out on a 
  short-term basis to whoever would pay him.  He spent 
  part of each year fighting in squalid third-world 
  conflicts and the rest of the time stretching his pennies 
  as far as he could, to avoid having to take another such 
  job for as long as possible.   
       By the mid 1980s the mercenary wars in Africa had 
  all but completely dried up and he was forced to hire 
  himself out part-time to criminal organizations.   
       The 1990s bought him some extra work in the 
  former Yugoslavia, but they wanted him to do 
  repellent things there and he tried to stay out of their 
  clutches as much as he could.   
       The Moebius Man had heard of Blitzenhammer, 
  who was something of a legend in neo-nazi circles, but 
  never suspected that he was real until the Totenkopf 
  said something about remembering his phone number.  
  To the Moebius Man’s shock the number worked and 
  Blitzenhammer was more than willing to sing on with 
  Zerstoiten 5.  He now regrets taking the job.   
       An actual Nazi, he is nonetheless shocked and 
  horrified at how vicious, brutal and crazy the Moebius 
  Man’s organization is.  He always managed to 
  maintain his psychological equilibrium by denying 
  that the Nazi atrocities ever happened, but these kids 
  actually seemed to revel in them—not even the Serbs 
  did that.    
       It’s against his cold and rigid code to betray an 
  employer, but he wants to get away from Vernichtung 
  5 as fast as he can.  The problem is, he’s scared to 
  death of them.   
   
   
   
  Adventures With Blitzenhammer:  
   
  1) Storm Warning 
       V5 attends a skinhead rally, which turns into a riot. 
  Blitzenhammur is left wounded and unconscious on 
  the field. His teammates lost sight of him in the brawl 
  and had to leave when the authorities turned up in 
  force.  
       To make this incident easier to work into your 
  campaign, we’re not going to specify exactly where it 
  happens.  Depending on the characters’ reach, it could 
  be Europe or it could be their own hometown.  It may 
  actually work best if the incident happens in a 
  relatively small community outside the city that will 
  take the PCs a little time to reach, but that isn’t a 
  complete hardship to get to.   
       The local authorities have taken Blitenhammur into 
  custody, and they are nervously waiting for a special 
  federal unit to show up and take him off to a 
  confinement facility for parahumans. Their police 
  station is reasonably secure, but it’s not up to 
  withstanding a supervillain attack.  They would 
  greatly appreciate the PCs assistance in guarding him.   
       Blitzenhammur has regained consciousness by the 
  time the PCs arrive, but true to his code he will say 
  nothing to his captors, whom he regards as being as 
  far beneath him as the center of the earth.  The 
  Strangshield and the Blitzenhammur are under lock 
  and key at the station and will be transported 
  separately.   
       V5 will almost certainly try to rescue him (unless 
  he’s wounded too badly to move, in which case they’ll 
  kill him instead), either at the police station or in 
  transit to the federal facility. Once they break him out 
  of his restraints, the team’s first priority will be to 
  retrieve his hammer and shield, which may result in 
  the comic and surreal picture of V5 breaking him out 
  of the police station and then breaking back in again to 
  get his things.   
       To complicate matters, everyone expects V5 to 
  mount some kind of rescue attempt, which means that 
  any local superhero (or supervillain) with a grudge 
  against V5 will now know where to find them and 
  may well stakeout the police station and wait.   
   
  2) Mother, I’ve Brought Friends 
       Blitzenhammur excuses himself from the rest of the 
  group, and goes home to the ruins of his family estate.   
       A group that monitors the activities of prominent 
  white supremacists notices what he is doing, takes 
  note of his probable destination, deep in the forests of 
  Eastern Germany, and suddenly they figure out who 
  he really is.   
       And if this is who they think it is, then his family 
  history is actually quite alarming.  His relations were 
  said to be the hereditary keepers of the 
  Blitzenhammur, the Strangshield and who knows what 
  other ancient, terrible secrets. The hammer and the 
  shield turned out to be only too real. Is he about to dig 
  something even worse out of the ruins?   
       The group hastily gets in touch with the Player 
  
    
  Characters and presents them with their findings.  
  Blitzenhammur is traveling by train and he’ll have to 
  walk the last few miles on foot.  The PCs could 
  probably catch up with him, and the group is willing 
  to pay their airfare to Germany if they need it.   
       Meanwhile, the Moebius Man is also wondering 
  what Blitzenhammur could be up to, and is discreetly 
  trailing him across the country.   
       In fact, while no one has noticed it before, 
  Blitzenhammur actually makes this trek once every 
  ten years, if he can.  He’s going home to pay his 
  respects to his mother on the anniversary of her death 
  and he will not be pleased to have such a private 
  moment intruded upon. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Zyclon B 
  Real Name: Gerte Dingle 
  PL: 8 
  Str: 10 (+0) Dex: 13 (+1) Con: 16 (+3) Int: 
  10 (+0) Wis: 14 (+2) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +8 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +9 Defense: 
  +19/+18 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +11 Fortitude Save: +5 
  Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower Save: +4   
  Skills: Hide +8, Move Silently +8, Spot+5, 
  Intimidate +8 
  Feats: Dodge, Evasion, Great Fortitude, Iron Will 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +8 (Cost: 1pt), 
  Energy Field +8 (Extras: Energy Blast +8, Explosive 
  Effect, Subtle; Power Stunt: Energy Blast is a 
  Penetrating Attack x2; Flaw: Only does damage to 
  living tissue; Cost 4pts), 
  Equipment: Armor +5 (Cost: 1pt), Darkvision 
  (Light-amplification Goggles), Immunity to 
  Suffocation and Poison (Gas Mask and Oxygen Tank) 
  Weaknesses: Disabled (Mute) 
  Quirk: Fanatical Bigot (finds it impossible to work or  
  cooperate with members of other ethnic groups and 
  will always attack them in preference to all other 
  available targets, even if doing so puts her at a tactical 
  disadvantage) 
  Quirk: Crazy (does irrational and pointless things, 
  frequently getting herself in trouble or putting herself 
  at a disadvantage) 
   
  "Ssssssssssssssss!" 
   
       Gerte Dingle was always a strange child, hateful 
  and withdrawn.  Molested by her father, brothers and a 
  host of uncles, she had nowhere to retreat but the 
  darkest depths of her mind.   Soon her head was full of 
  crazy, violent fantasies and she took no interest in 
  school or family life.   
       This would not do for a young lady who was 
  supposed to grow up to be a surgeon like her father or 
  a lawyer like her stepmother. They sent her to a lot of 
  therapists, until she bit one half to death.  With a 
  feeling of mingled shame and relief, her parents had 
  her commited to indefinite psychiatric care (allthough 
  it's fair to say that her uncles were genuinely sad to see 
  her go).   
       Alas, the facility they sent her to made extra money 
  by illegally testing a host of experimental drugs on its 
  patients.  After a few rounds of excruciating 
  treatments her mind gave way completely, she lost the 
  power of speech and her powers errupted.    
       The clinic staff studied her new abilities for about 
  six months.  Then she poisoned everyone on her ward 
  and walked out the door into the night.   
       She lived on the street for a while, staying at squats 
  with other kids.  Then she noticed the skinheads.  
  Their ideas were appealing, their anger inspired her 
  and she determined to become one of them.  She didn't 
  talk and they didn't know anyone in common, so she 
  just shaved her head and started hanging around them.   
       It's tough to be a skinhead and a girl, particularly if 
  you won't have sex with anyone.  She had to kill many 
  times to get her new friends' respect.  This drew a 
  certain amount of unwelcome attention from the 
  authorities, although she managed to avoid getting 
  caught.   
       In 1999 the Moebius Man learned that there was a 
  skinhead in Dusseldorf with superhuman powers and 
  sought him out as part of the original line-up of 
  Zerstoiten 5. He found a madwoman with an insane 
  lust for death.   
       He didn't need to convert her to the cause, or coax 
  her into killing a homeless person to prove that she 
  could take a life.  She was already far more radical 
  than he was himself and she was ready to kill at the 
  drop of a hat.  His real task was to restrain her from 
  getting too excited, going on a rampage and getting 
  gunned down too soon.   
       These days Zyclon B has found a kind of fragile 
  equlibrium.  Perhaps the most dedicated nazi of the 
  group, she believes in the ideology with mad lunatic 
  zeal. It's the only stable mental framework she has.   
       No horror or outrage is beyond her, she's much too 
  nuts to grasp that other people's suffering is real.  She 
  still won't speak and hates anything sexual with a 
  crazy passion, but she gets enough violence and has 
  enough friends to feel content.  Unable to really relate 
  to others, she looks totally withdrawn from the group, 
  but she does take comfort from their presence and she 
  was horrified to see Der Totenkopf kill two of them.   
       She is still terrified of Der Totenkopf, but the fact 
  that she's also in love with him helps take the edge off 
  it.   
   
  Adventures With Zyclon B:  
   
  1) Papa, Look How Big and Weird I’ve Grown! 
       Zyclon B impulsively decides to visit her father at 
  the hospital where he works.  It does not occur to her 
  that he won’t recognize her in her costume or that the 
  moment she walks through the front door everyone is 
  going to panic.  Soon this turns into a police siege, 
  with SWAT teams and sharpshooters surrounding the 
  building.   
       Zyclon B does not care if any of her “hostages” 
  walk away and pretty soon everyone who is capable of 
  leaving the hospital under their own power will have 
  drifted out the door, leaving her to sit on her terrified 
  father’s desk and stare at him in silence.   
       After a while, the Moebius Man arrives to rescue 
  her.  As he takes her away, he gently tells her that that 
  isn’t her father anymore, that her father is Germany, 
  now.  And suddenly her dad knows exactly who she is.   
       Zyclon B’s secret identity is about to become 
  public knowledge, perhaps with drastic consequences 
  for her family.    
  
    
       If you have no good way to arrange for the PCs to 
  be in Germany when this happens, then her father is 
  attending a medical conference in the US when she 
  decides to drop in on him.  Instead of a hospital, the 
  setting is a big expensive hotel, but the rest of the plot 
  remains the same.   
   
  2) Just a Little to the Left… 
       While skulking down the street one night, Zyclon B 
  spies an interracial lesbian couple, and while the sight 
  of them fills her with rage and horror, it fascinates her, 
  too.  She stalks them to an art opening, and if a Player 
  Character doesn’t find her and stop her, she follows 
  them inside.   
       The patrons at the show are alarmed when Zyclon 
  B walks in the door, but they’re also curious to see 
  how this infamous neo-nazi supervillain will react to 
  the art on display.  She doesn’t seem violent at first, 
  and is clearly engrossed by the work, drifting though 
  the gallery, staring in silence through her mask.   
       Then the screaming starts.  Zyclon B grabs people 
  at random, shoves them in front of one or another 
  work of art, poses them and then kills them.  She’s 
  interested in seeing what they look like dying in front 
  of those particular pieces—what their death agonies 
  contribute to the work.   
       This is a lot of fun.  She never really took an 
  interest in art before, and there is clearly so much to 
  learn.  Most of all she would like to see what the 
  couple she follwed in here would look like, dying in 
  front of one particular mural.  But they’re hiding 
  behind an installation.   
       If the Player Characters don’t stop her, she 
  eventually finds and kills the two girls, gets 
  disappointed by what it looks like, decides that art is 
  boring and walks out the door. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Der Shreik 
  Real Name: Klaus Schlager 
  PL: 9 
  Str: 10 (+0) Dex: 15 (+2) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 8 (-1) Wis: 8 (-1) Cha: 9 (-1) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +17/+15 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +10 Fortitude Save: +8 
  Reflexes Save: +7 Willpower Save: +1   
  Skills: Bluff+4, Hide +9, Intimidate +10, 
  Knowledge (German Skinhead Underground) +7, 
  Move Silently+9, Taunt+10 
  Feats: Iron Will, Point-Blank Shot, Rapid Healing, 
  Surprise Attack, Toughness, 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Fortitude) +6 (Extras: 
  Reflex, Damage; Cost: 3pts), Energy Control (Sonic) 
  PL 9 (Extras: Deflection, Energy Field, Explosive 
  Blast; Power Stunts: Energy Blast; Cost: 5pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Silly, stupid and has no 
  self-control. 
   
  “I shout!  I shout! Yer brains fall out!!”  
   
       A damaged kid who likes to hurt people--stupid, 
  addled, loud and cruel.  He talks a lot, but none of it 
  makes much sense. He seldom thinks beyond the 
  present moment and is always misbehaving and trying 
  to get attention.   
       Born in public housing in East Berlin, he was the 
  youngest child of a dangerous mother.  She punished 
  her offspring for whimsical reasons and regularly sent 
  them to the hospital with broken limbs or burns from 
  her electric iron.  When he was five she killed two of 
  his siblings in front of him.  He would have been next, 
  but his powers manifested for the first time and she 
  died instead.   
       He spent the next ten years in foster homes and the  
  East German state orphanage system, where he 
  learned lessons in pain, humiliation and fear that his 
  mother had never even begun to teach him.   
       And then things got worse.  After the Berlin Wall 
  came down, the state orphanage system slowly ran out 
  of money and collapsed.  By 1995 he was fifteen and 
  on the street.   
       He was a rent-boy for a while, and a doper. 
  Sometimes he would make trouble with his power, but 
  he always ran away before the authorities arrived and 
  so was never arrested for anything worse than 
  posession of drugs.  It never occurred to him to use his 
  power to steal things.   
       In 1999 the Moebius Man heard rumors that there 
  was a street kid in East Berlin who had the the power 
  to shatter windows with his voice.  It took him quite a 
  while to find Der Shriek but it was easy to win his 
  trust.  He taught the poor lout about Nazism and built 
  up his pride.  Although Der Shreik had never been a 
  white supremacist and didn't really understand the 
  ideology, beating up foreign guest workers was 
  already a way of life in the East, and he took to that 
  part with relish.   
       He is probably the Moebius Man's closest ally on 
  the team and the only one with no ambitions of being 
  leader.  No strategist, he doesn't know when to retreat 
  and easily gets distracted from the mission objective if 
  he isn't given careful guidance. Yet he's actually a 
  good team member, because he's just smart enough to 
  know that he doesn't know anything about anything, 
  and that his safest option is to do what the Moebius 
  Man says.   
   
  Adventures With Der Shreik: Night of 
  Screams and Giggles 
       Der Shreik goes out for a night on the town, 
  spreading random mayhem as he goes. The Player 
  Characters may catch up with him at any point in his 
  rampage.    
       He hasn’t told any of his teammates where he is 
  going, and they will get increasingly restless and 
  worried as time goes on.  Eventually the Moebius Man 
  and Blitzenhammur set out looking for him, and may 
  stumble over the PCs on his trail.  If der Shreik gets 
  arrested or is in immediate danger of losing his life, 
  the Moebius Man catches up with him and rescues 
  him.   
       First der Shreik will go to an underground skinhead 
  concert and pick fights with people outside. He 
  doesn’t have a ticket.   
       Then once he get bored with this he will go to a 
  house where he thinks an old friend of his lives, and 
  when he finds out that they don’t really live there, he 
  will scream the place down.   
       Then he’ll decide to go to the beach, whether there 
  is one in this town or not.  On the way to the beach he 
  stumbles across an exhausted Chinese waiter named 
  Marvin Wu, staggering home after a long and hellish 
  shift, and taunts, chases, terrorizes and eventually kills 
  him.   
       Then he gets on a bus that he thinks is headed for 
  the beach.  But he gets distracted when the bus crosses 
  a freeway overpass, and jumps off there.  Then he 
  stands on the overpass and tries to see if he can shout 
  every fifth car off the road.   
       This gives him an idea, so after a little while he 
  will go down to the train station, stand on the tracks 
  and try to shout an oncoming passenger train off the 
  rails (we didn’t say it was a good idea). If the Moebius 
  Man hasn’t already caught up with him and brought 
  him home, it happens here. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Mother Moebius 
  Real Name: Maria Moebius 
  PL: 15 
  Str: 10 (+0) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 16 (+3) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +3 Attack Bonus (Melee): +7 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +10 Defense: 
  +24/+20 Speed: 30/70 (Teleport) 
  Damage Save: +3 Fortitude Save: +3 
  Reflexes Save: +3 Willpower Save: +0   
  Skills: Profession (homemaker) +3, Performance +6 
  Feats: Dodge 
  Powers: Teleport +14 (Extras: Deflection [Deflect 
  Others, Reflection], Disintegration [Restoration], 
  Energy Blast [Explosive Effect], Extended Teleport, 
  Portal; Cost:11pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Willing to die to protect her 
  witless son.   
  Quirk: Distrusts anyone in authority, won't listen to 
  any advice, no matter how useful or important, if it 
  comes from an authority figure, defies anything any 
  authority figure tells her to do, even if this is severely 
  to her disadvantage. 
   
  “I am the screaming fist of the people, 
  Mr. Uncool Businessman!  This boy is 
  mine—you won’t feed your evil machine 
  with his blood!  By the holy names of 
  Marx and Mao, I sentence you all to 
  execution!”  
   
       Far more powerful than her son, the so-called 
  Moebius Man, she hasn’t been an active supervillain 
  since the 1970s and finds it much more satisfying to 
  sell real estate in the Stuttgart suburbs than to  
  overthrow the forces of world capitalism.   
       She will only reappear if her son is in deadly peril.  
  If Karl is about to die, and she knows about it (perhaps 
  by watching the incident on television) she will 
  teleport back into her old costume and instantly appear 
  at the scene.   
       Her leather pants are old and cracked, but the rest 
  of her is in exceedingly good shape for a woman who 
  is nearly fifty.  She clearly works out and has a good 
  plastic surgeon.   
       Her brief stint as a terrorist in the 1970s wasn’t 
  enough for anyone to form a clear impression of just 
  how powerful she is.  The Maoist group she belonged 
  to, the so-called Red Legion, didn’t manage to 
  accomplish very much before it fell apart in an 
  argument over whether or not some piece of dogma 
  had already been invalidated by Chairman Mao’s 
  more recent teachings. They were able to pull off two 
  bombings, abandon a third, and make an unsuccessful 
  attempt at a bank robbery in Munich.   
       During the course of these adventures, Maria 
  barely had a chance to use her powers at all.  If she 
  did, the police would have searched for her a lot more 
  vigorously.  The lady is a one-woman apocalypse.   
       She can teleport bullets and energy blasts out of the 
  air, hold them outside of time for as long as she likes, 
  and then make them reappear, pointing in the opposite 
  direction.  She can teleport the heart out of an 
  opponent’s chest or the top half off of a skyscraper. 
  She has been shot at and has had grenades thrown at 
  her on a number of occasions, and has stored the 
  projectiles in timeless extradimensional space, ready 
  to be let out whenever the moment is right.  
       The GM should save this effect for dramatic 
  purposes until after the PCs have seen her teleport and 
  reverse the course of a few bullets.  Once the PCs 
  understand that she can do this, have her materialize a 
  grenade that a policeman threw at her in 1978.  As you 
  describe the attack, mention how and when it 
  originated, even though the PCs would really have no 
  way of knowing this.  It will help to underscore how 
  powerful she is.   
       Her motives for coming out of retirement are more 
  complex than they seem. Maria and her husband, 
  Klaus, have long since turned their backs on their 
  wayward son. But they have kept track of him and his 
  exploits.  Every time he kills someone, they send the 
  family some money and make a donation to an 
  Anarchist group that kills skinheads.  
       Yet more and more, as she watches the Moebius 
  Man on TV or reads about him in the newspapers, 
  Maria has begun to remember her own glory days as a 
  young hell-raiser, and how brief they really were. She 
  remembers what it felt like to live on the run, staying 
  up late and plotting mayhem with friends so close you 
  thought you’d die for them.  It didn’t seem fair that it 
  all ended for her so quickly.  Karl has had more than 
  two years—Maria only had a few months.  More and 
  more she wants some of that lost glory for herself, and 
  her son’s imminent demise gives her an excuse to go 
  grab a piece of it.   
       In combat she will be as ruthless as she thinks is 
  required to save her son and herself, and may very 
  well use lethal force if it seems appropriate.  You’d 
  think that she’d just teleport them both far away and 
  end the fight, but in fact she’s also here to show off 
  and snatch some of her son’s fame for herself, so she 
  will proibably stick around for more rounds of combat 
  than are strictly necessary.   
       To complicate matters, the Moebius Man may 
  refuse to leave the scene (he’ll be mortified that his 
  mom is showing up and getting in the way of his big 
  moment with her dopey, embarrassing Marxist talk) 
  and may keep teleporting back into the battle after she 
  has already sent him home. How the whole thing ends 
  is strictly up to the GM.   
   
  Using Mother Moebius in your 
  campaign: Maria is a wild card who may never 
  turn up at all, particularly if her son gets killed in 
  
    
  secret.  She’s there to add an extra wrinkle to the plot, 
  especially if the Totenkopf is about to do something 
  crazy that will devastate a big chunk of central Europe 
  and has already beaten the PCs.  She hates the 
  Totenkopf for bullying her son and for being a Nazi, 
  and will most certainly try to kill him if she gets a 
  chance.   
       The whole thing may well end with Maria slumped 
  dying over her dying boy, trying to shield him with 
  her arms, murmuring “Ah, bubby, if your real father 
  were here, we’d have shown them the wrath of the 
  people.”   
       Or with Maria and the Totenkopf killing each other 
  in a small but spectacular thermonuclear explosion.  
  Or even with Maria and her son vanishing from sight 
  entirely, never to be seen again (perhaps to some 
  alternate dimension where no one has ever heard of 
  Mao or Hitler?) 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  The Corpus 
  Christi Good-Time 
  Boys 
   
  Membership: Cimarron Starr (a living atomic 
  weapon with a self-absorbed and grandiose 
  personality), Johnny Black (a paranoid, bullying speed 
  freak who wields a legendary enchanted pistol), The 
  Texas Twister (an impulsive killer, prone to lethal 
  temper tantrums, who can create whirlwinds with the 
  power of his mind), the Lone Star Lady (a shy, sullen 
  energy-drainer, who constantly complains about 
  everything), Mr. Fist (an aging unarmed combat 
  expert who the team hires from time to time, famous 
  and well-regarded in criminal circles), the Grease 
  Monkey (another hireling—she’s a quiet, polite 
  gadgeteer who dresses in spotless mechanics 
  coveralls), Doctor Destructor (a giant killer robot with 
  an upper-crust accent and a gentle demeanor).  
   
       The Corpus Christi Good Time Boys are a gang of 
  professional supervillains with a story as tangled and 
  outrageous as any rock band.  The team’s leader, 
  Cimarron Starr, has stolen the Lone Star Lady’s 
  boyfriend, Johnny Black.  The Lone Star Lady has by 
  way of revenge taken up with Cimarron Starr’s 
  boyfriend, the Texas Twister.  This arrangement has 
  left no one happy, and the dangerous, self-important, 
  grandiose and unstable personalities of everyone 
  involved haven’t made things any easier.  Nor has 
  Johnny Black’s problem with methamphetamines 
  (although to be fair, he’s manic and irrational even 
  when he isn’t high).    
       The team hasn’t always been this dysfunctional.  
  The Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys were founded by 
  the deathless cowboy supervillain called Jim Dandy 
  and his sidekick, Boy Howdy.  The two of them had 
  haunted the Texas gulf coast for nearly a century,  
  committing minor acts of highway robbery and 
  knocking over the occasional store for extra funds.   
       In the 1990s Jim Dandy was seized with an 
  uncharacteristic attack of ambition, and decided it was 
  time to finally make a go of his criminal career.  He 
  and Boy Howdy hired a legendary pugilist called Mr. 
  Fist and a gadgeteer who called herself the Grease 
  Monkey, and the four of them started robbing banks 
  and armored cars.   
       Things went well, but the team lacked the raw 
  power to stand up to superheroes, so after some 
  looking around they brought the beautiful Miss 
  Cimarron Starr (then calling herself Winter Steele) on 
  board. The lady was a walking talking H-Bomb, and 
  despite her obnoxious, vain personality she rounded 
  the team out well.  
       Soon her ne’er do well boyfriend, the Texas 
  Twister joined the core of the group (Mr. Fist and the 
  Grease Monkey were just muscle they hired for big 
  jobs, and didn’t spend much time with the rest of the 
  team) and they had all the raw power they could have 
  asked for.   
       Then Jim Dandy and Boy Howdy both got killed 
  sticking up a liquor store. They had done it out of 
  habit, without the rest of the team and without needing 
  the money, and finally found the bullets with their 
  names on them.  
       This left Cimarron Starr in charge, looking 
  desperately for new recruits before the money from 
  the last job ran out.  She still had Mr. Fist and the 
  Grease Monkey’s phone numbers, but she didn’t have 
  anything to pay them with.    
       Then she found a wandering superhuman duo, the 
  twitchy, paranoid Johnny Black and his whining, 
  murderous girlfriend the Lone Star Lady, fresh from 
  an unsuccessful stint in the adult film industry, raising 
  havoc up and down the gulf coast.  They were both 
  only too glad to pool their meager resources with a 
  team, and Johnny Black found himself drawn to the 
  proud, imperious Cimarron Starr.   
       For her part, she liked his forceful, angry, brooding 
  personality better than her own boyfriend (who always 
  tried much too hard to please her) so she threw over 
  the Texas Twister and stole Johnny Black away from 
  his girl.   
       The Texas Twister is more powerful than Johnny 
  Black, and has a long and troubled history of 
  murderous tantrums.  Yet he’s so devoted to Cimarron 
  Starr that he accepted her decision and determined to 
  worship her from afar.  Then the Lone Star Lady gave 
  herself to him, and the object of his obsession 
  switched completely. He now loves the Lone Star 
  Lady with his usual hopeless doglike devotion.  Alas, 
  she’s still totally in love with Johnny Black and 
  painfully eager to get his attention.  This has not done 
  the Texas Twister’s perilous mental stability much 
  good.   
       Johnny Black, in the meantime, is enraged that 
  someone else would dare touch the Lone Star Lady, 
  and if it weren’t for the fact that his new girlfriend is 
  strong enough to cause him serious harm, he would 
  have killed the Texas Twister (he sees no 
  contradiction in any of this).  Nor is Johnny’s 
  relationship with Cimarron Starr exactly blissful.  
  They yell and scream and throw things at each other 
  and make terrible accusations.  This is just force of 
  habit—neither one has ever been in a relationship that 
  wasn’t this bad.   
       Cimarron Starr briefly ran back to the Texas 
  Twister’s arms a few weeks ago (mostly to show the 
  Lone Star Lady that she could, if she wanted) and this 
  has made things even worse.  
   
  Threat Level: The Corpus Christi Good Time 
  Boys are a low to mid-level team.  They could be a lot 
  more effective if they spent less time quarreling 
  among themselves and more time planning robberies.  
  Their teamwork is weak and their dysfunctional lives 
  hamper them on the job.  They aren’t really capable of 
  thinking in terms larger than bank holdups and 
  
    
  revenge killings and have no dreams of ruling the 
  world.  Their ambitions run more along the lines of 
  being famous and having lots of money.   
   
  Base of Operations:  The team has no single 
  base or headquarters.  They stay on the move most of 
  the time, stealing cars and vans as need be.  
  Sometimes, when they’re plush on funds, they’ll get a 
  suite in a big hotel for a few weeks, spending lavish 
  amounts of money on room service and partying 
  wildly.   They have public storage units scattered 
  around east Texas, with spare equipment and supplies 
  if they need it in an emergency.   
       In the event of a really dire emergency, the team 
  owns a house in a brand-new suburban subdivision 
  way outside of Houston, where they can lay low for a 
  while.  Last year they bought a pretty good-sized 
  chunk of the housing development as an investment, 
  and they kept this one unit vacant, just in case they 
  ever needed it.  The house is completely empty and 
  unfurnished, but there’s a hidden room in the 
  basement that’s big enough for four people to sleep in.   
       The Corpus Christi Good Time Boys see 
  themselves as a wide-ranging, well-traveled team, 
  because in spite of their name they don’t spend all 
  their time on the gulf coast and have gone as far away 
  as Lubbock and even Amarillo on occasion.  West 
  Texas makes them uneasy—it’s too alien, almost like 
  a foreign country.  Yet they’re comfortable enough 
  across the border in Matamoros and Veracruz.   
       There is a country-western nightclub in Corpus 
  Christi called the Pines, where they can often be found 
  partying on the weekends (even though the Lone Star 
  Lady can’t stand the place—she doesn’t like music, 
  hates the way it stops her from thinking about herself, 
  insists on its own importance).  A lot of their heists get 
  planned in one of the booths or in the back room.   
       The club’s owner, Big Mack Briscoe, isn’t a 
  criminal himself, but he knows enough to be afraid of 
  the Good Time Boys and lets them pretty much have 
  the run of the place.  He’s thinking about retiring soon.   
   
  Organization:  Cimarron Starr is the team’s 
  leader, partly because she’s the longest standing 
  member, partly because of her forceful personality, 
  and mostly because she’s stronger than any of the 
  others.  She’s a bad leader, selfish and given to lording 
  her position over the team’s weaker members.  Johnny 
  Black feels that his status as her present boyfriend 
  gives him authority, and picks on the Texas Twister 
  and the Lone Star Lady whenever he can.   
       Yet the team pulls itself together whenever Mr. Fist 
  and the Grease Monkey show up.  They all want to 
  look like professionals around a famous supervillain 
  like Mr. Fist and they like the Grease Monkey for her 
  calm, self-effacing personality.  Even though the two 
  of them are really just hired help, they bring out the 
  best in the group’s troubled core members.   
       Cimarron Starr and Johnny Black have contacts in 
  the Mexican Mafia who can help the team liquidate 
  stolen assets, launder money and so forth, but relations 
  with them are tricky and difficult. Cimarron Starr is a 
  lousy negotiator, Johnny Black constantly antagonizes 
  people, and these things have not endeared them to the 
  mob.   The fact that neither Johnny nor Cimarron Starr 
  trusts non-whites makes things doubly awkward.  The 
  team might or might not be able to get rid of stolen 
  goods in a reasonable amount of time and every time 
  they visit their contacts there is a risk that it will end in 
  violence.   
       While the team seems to be constantly broke, they 
  do have ambitions of saving their money up and they 
  have tried to make a few investments.  Some of them 
  (most notably in real estate) have paid off well but for 
  the most part they’ve just been flinging cash at 
  harebrained schemes.   
       Their accountant is the nervous, semi-competent 
  V.J. Gupta, who operates out of a run-down strip mall 
  in Brownsville.  They rarely see him face to face, and 
  mostly deal with his personal assistant via phone. 
   
  Tactics: The Corpus Christi Good Time Boys 
  specialize in robbing banks, jewelry stores, armored 
  cars and so forth.   
       Their tactics (such as they are) work better for 
  stealing stuff than they do in big super-brawls.  The 
  Grease Monkey provides them with the technical 
  assistance they will need to bypass alarms, open vaults 
  and so forth.  Doctor Destructor subdues resistance or 
  creates a distraction, the Lone Star Lady and Johnny 
  Black pick off any particularly powerful targets at a 
  distance and Mr. Fist does his best to fend off armed 
  guards while Cimarron Starr and the Texas Twister 
  concentrate on making off with the loot.   
       In a flat out combat situation with another 
  supergroup they will send Doctor Destructor in first, 
  using his giant body for cover as they advance and 
  come to grips with the enemy.  Then each of them will 
  pick an opponent their powers seem to be suited to 
  fighting and try to face them one on one, with no 
  coordination or broader strategy.   
       They don’t even trust one another enough to lay 
  down covering fire—it’s pretty much every man and 
  woman for themselves.   
   
  Using The Corpus Christi Good-Time 
  Boys in your campaign: The Corpus Christi 
  Good Time Boys are a good recurrent nemesis for low 
  to mid level teams of player characters.  Their lack of 
  coordination and woeful group dynamics make them 
  less effective than an equally powerful but better 
  organized PC group.   
       They can be hired to perform almost any kind of 
  crime, and for enough money or a personal grudge 
  they would be more than willing to leave Texas and 
  come face the PCs on their home ground.  They hate 
  to leave their home state, but they’re not completely 
  helpless in a setting like New York City—they just 
  complain about it a lot.   
       The GM can make good use of the team’s tangled 
  internal politics, having team members show up late or 
  shout at one another as they fight. After the PCs have 
  
    
  encountered the Corpus Christi Good Time Boys more 
  than once, the GM can draw the PCs into their crazy 
  soap opera of a back story--perhaps Cimarron Starr or 
  the Lone Star Lady comes rushing into an attractive 
  male PCs arms, just to make their current boyfriend 
  even more jealous.   
       Perhaps Johnny Black gets an irrational conviction 
  that one of the PCs is seeing Cimarron Starr, and tries 
  to goad her into attacking the Player Characters to 
  prove it isn’t so.   
       Perhaps the Lone Star Lady lets the PCs capture 
  her, to prove that Johnny Black still loves her and 
  make him come running to her rescue.  Perhaps he 
  does, but not because he loves her—he wants to make 
  sure that she doesn’t give up any of his secrets. 
  Perhaps Cimarron Starr finds out where Johnny Black 
  has gone and goes off in a jealous rage to stop him.  
  Perhaps the Texas Twister follows her, eager to prove 
  that he still loves Cimarron Starr, etc., etc.  
   
  Adventures With The Corpus Christi 
  Good-Time Boys: 1) Corpus Christi 78411 
       Johnny Black and Cimarron Starr are both 
  convinced that the PCs intend to steal the name "The 
  Corpus Christi Good Time Boys" for their own. 
  Nothing will convince them that this isn’t true (this 
  works particularly well if one of the PCs has 
  previously made some ironic, sneering comment about 
  their name—something like “Gee, great name, wish 
  I’d thought of that.”)   
       The Corpus Christi Good Time Boys issue a 
  challenge to the Player Characters.  The PCs should 
  come face them in abandoned industrial park on the 
  Texas gulf coast, to battle for who gets to use the 
  name.    
       Even though the Player Characters know that this is 
  a misunderstanding, it does also represent a chance to 
  capture one of Texas’ most wanted supervillain 
  groups.  Anyway what superhero team could resist a 
  challenge like that?   
       The other Good Time Boys are skeptical of Johnny 
  Black and Cimarron Starr’s claims.  If the PCs show 
  up for the confrontation and vociferously protest that 
  they have no designs on the team’s name, the others 
  will remonstrate with Cimarron Starr.   
       When she can see that even Mr. Fist has taken the 
  other side, she’ll concede that maybe the PCs don’t 
  want to steal their name after all, maybe Johnny was 
  wrong about that, but they’re here for a fight now and 
  the honor of Texas must be answered once she has 
  been called forth.  This makes sense to the others, who 
  will reluctantly agree that they have to fight now.   
       Industrial park fights can be a lot of fun, with 
  broken down forklifts and rusty old barrels full of 
  toxic waste to throw at one another, I-beams and 
  sections of chainlink fence to beat on one another with 
  and no innocent bystanders who might hurt.  Maybe 
  there’s even a catwalk or two to for the combatants to 
  chase one another across, or dangle from.   
       If the PCs win, Cimarron Starr will insist that the 
  PCs didn’t fight fair, and her team will keep the name.   
   
  2) Nice Day for a White Wedding  
       Johnny Black calls the PCs from a pay phone in 
  Las Vegas.  If he has no way of getting their phone 
  number then he sends them a letter, or has a contact 
  meet them in person and hand them a cell phone.  He 
  wants a three day truce.   
       Johnny sounds excited and happy, bursting to tell 
  them something, and even if the PCs don’t ask him 
  why he wants a truce, he blurts it out.  He is going to 
  marry Cimarron Starr.  They decided to get married on 
  impulse, just yesterday.  They’re not in Vegas to raise 
  hell or steal anything, they just want to spend three 
  days at a “classy” hotel, get married and go home.   
       PCs who are familiar with Johnny Black may note 
  that it’s just like him to be so paranoid and self-
  absorbed that he thinks they have nothing better to do 
  than to track his movements and speculate about why 
  he's in Las Vegas.     
       Johnny adds that he fears some of his teammates 
  may have caught wind of his upcoming nuptials, and 
  that he wants no violence to mar his wedding day.   
  Can the PCs come to Vegas and run interference for 
  him?  He wants them to stop the Texas Twister or the 
  Lone Star Lady if they show up in town and do 
  something crazy.  He’d even be willing to testify 
  against them if the PCs catch them getting up to 
  anything, despite the fact that it would violate his 
  moral code to rat out a fellow crook.   
       If the PCs take Johnny up on his offer, neither the 
  Texas Twister nor the Lone Star Lady shows up.  In 
  fact neither one has even guessed what might be afoot.   
       However, as the hour of her wedding approaches, 
  the bride develops cold feet, gets drunk and runs amok 
  on the Strip in her wedding dress, smashing anything 
  she can lay her hands on. If the PCs try to stop her, 
  they will be breaking the truce, and Johnny will swear 
  revenge. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Johnny Black 
  Real Name: Thomas Tanner 
  PL: 9 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: + Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +13 Defense: 
  +19/+14 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +11 Fortitude Save: + 2 
  Reflexes Save: +13 Willpower Save: +9  
  Skills: Drive +5, Intimidate +8, Knowledge (Texas 
  Criminal Underworld) +2, Listen +5, Spot +5 
  Feats: All-Out Attack, Dodge, Evasion, 
  Equipment: Enchanted Pistol (Energy Blast +9: 
  Extras: Amazing Save [Damage, Reflexes and 
  Willpower], Deflection; Power Stunts: All-Around 
  Sight, Blind-Fight, Darkvision,  Far Shot, Multishot, 
  Penetrating Attack x2, Penetration Vision, Point-
  Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Rapid Shot, Ricochet 
  Attack, Quick-Draw, See Invisibility; Cost: 5pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Paranoid speedfreak, does 
  stupid irrational things that screw up both himself and 
  his comrades. 
   
  “I’m gone show you who you’re trifling 
  with, son.  You like pain much?  ‘Cause 
  this here would be a great time to start.”  
   
       A career criminal long before he gained his 
  superpowers, Thomas Tanner has always been 
  obsessed with the legendary gunfighters of the old 
  west, and particularly with the infamous Johnny 
  Ringo.  
       A cruel, erudite man with a taste for Plato, 
  Thucydides and meaningless slaughter, John Ringo 
  remains one of the most enigmatic and frightening 
  figures of the 1870s.  Always ready to confound 
  listeners with his carefully reasoned arguments about 
  the hopelessness and futility of the Universe, and 
  twice as ready to kill them dead, he was as adept with 
  a pistol as he was with a classical allusion.   
       His contemporaries knew that there was something 
  very wrong with the gun he carried, though they spoke 
  of it only in whispers.   We don’t know how many 
  human lives this weapon took.  He used to refer to it 
  as a living thing, which hungered for the blood of 
  men.  She would come for him someday, he said, 
  when she had drunk her fill.  And so she did.  While 
  some amateur historians contend that anyone from 
  Wyatt Earp to Buckskin Frank Leslie murdered 
  Johnny Ringo, the fact remains that he shot himself.   
       Not a lot of people saw the gun outside its holster 
  and lived to talk about it.  Those who did said that it 
  superficially appeared to be a .45 caliber revolver, but 
  was in fact is something much stranger.  Neither the 
  caliber nor the make were at all standard—Johnny 
  Ringo must have had his bullets custom-made.  The 
  Cylinder was said to hold five oddly-shaped chambers, 
  while the firing mechanism operated according to 
  what one Arizona gunsmith called “a simple, 
  ingenious but wholly unfamiliar principle.”  The 
  gunmetal was rumored to be some unfamiliar alloy, 
  with a peculiar greenish tint, covered with a complex 
  design that smacked distinctly of the occult.     
       After a decade of searching, Tom Tanner stole the 
  weapon from a private collection in Laredo.   This 
  weird enchanted gun has made him the fastest 
  gunfighter alive, given him the ability to shoot through 
  walls and around corners, (and incidentally let him 
  give up his unsuccessful career as an adult entertainer) 
  but it hasn't improved his disposition.   
       He's a paranoid, manic, overbearing bully, 
  convinced that the people around him are planning to 
  cheat him and that he can intimidate them into 
  admitting it.  A trial to be around, he constantly 
  questions, threatens and browbeats anyone in reach.  
  He has been known to kill people preemptively, before 
  they can do him wrong, or to betray them before they 
  can betray him.  If he suspects anyone of having more 
  education than he does (or worse yet, catches them 
  actually reading a book) then he singles them out for 
  special punishment.  For some reason he doesn’t apply 
  this rule to women, the Grease Monkey is relieved to 
  note.   
       Johnny Black never seems to sleep, both because of 
  his paranoid, hypomanic personality and because he 
  takes far too much speed.  He has also been known to 
  crash and collapse for days on end, going to ground in 
  some crummy motel room until he can get himself 
  together.   
       Despite his bad behavior, he can't be kicked out of 
  the Good-Time Boys.  He's Cimarron Starr's current 
  boyfriend and what she says goes.  Although she could 
  easily fry him in his snakeskin boots, he often yells at 
  her for no reason and accuses her of unfaithfulness. 
  Amazingly, he gets away with this.   
       His background is depressingly familiar.  His father 
  was a small time hood, who taught young Tom how to 
  steal and fight and kill without remorse.  Tom grew up 
  in the back of a Winnebago with a bunch of half-
  brothers and whichever unfortunate woman Pa was 
  dating at the time.  
       Pa got into a drunken knife fight with Tom on his 
  sixteenth birthday, cut him bad and drove him off.        
       After Johnny Black gained his powers, but before 
  he hooked up with the Corpus Christi Good-Time 
  Boys, he roved the Texas gulf coast with his whining 
  codependent girlfriend, the Lone Star Lady.  One look 
  at Cimarron Starr and he knew it was time to trade up.  
  He pushed out her crazy loser boyfriend, the Texas 
  Twister, and was shocked and enraged when the 
  Twister then took up with the Lone Star Lady.  He 
  seriously thought about murdering the Twister, until 
  he realized that Cimarron Starr would probably kill 
  him for it.  Nonetheless, things have been rather 
  strained of late.   
   
  
    
  Adventures With Johnny Black:  
   
  1) I Know What You Done 
       Johnny Black gets it into his speed-crazed head that 
  one of the PCs has been having an affair with 
  Cimarron Starr, and the thought torments him well 
  nigh unto madness.  He will seek the PC out and 
  challenge him to a duel.   
       When he can’t find the PC, he decides that the best 
  way to get in touch with him would be to commit a 
  crime.  Over the next 24 hours he commits eight 
  totally pointless robberies, sticking up stores and 
  stealing whatever random objects happen to catch the 
  fancy of his drug addled brain.  At each crime scene, 
  he leaves the PC’s name spray-painted on the wall, 
  along with the words “I Know What You Done.”   
       When the PC finally manages to track him down 
  and confront him, Johnny is holding the Korean 
  couple who run a minimart hostage, pointing his gun 
  at them and talking irrational nonsense.  The speed is 
  starting to wear off, and he’s crashing really badly 
  (he’s been up for five days straight).  Johnny won’t be 
  able to put up a fight and if the PC makes any effort to 
  negotiate with or talk to him he will actually lie down 
  on the floor and lapse into a deep dark sleep.   
       However, Cimarron Starr has been tracking Johnny 
  Black, convinced that he’s sneaking off to see another 
  woman.  When she sees that he has been captured, she 
  will attempt to rescue him from the PCs.  If she isn’t 
  tough enough to do it by herself, then the Lone Star 
  Lady has also been chasing Johnny, convinced that 
  Cimarron Starr intends him harm.  Perhaps the Texas 
  Twister is pursuing the Lone Star Lady, convinced 
  that she’s running off to a secret tryst with Johnny 
  Black…  
   
  2) The Unwelcome Apotheosis of Johnny Black 
       Johnny Black’s gun is shifting and unfolding itself 
  into something else—something bigger and stranger.  
  He can’t seem to put it down anymore and he’s getting 
  really scared.   
       His teammates have deserted him, except for the 
  Lone Star Lady, who he drove away.  He’s in a lot of 
  physical pain, and tormented by visions in which 
  everyone the gun has ever killed comes up and stares 
  at him.   
       In agony and terror, Johnny Black runs out into the 
  depths of the East Texas swamps, looking for a 
  legendary Native American shaman called Burning 
  Wind.  Everyone says Burning Wind, if he exists, is 
  powerful enough to shake the mountains, so perhaps 
  he’s strong enough to help Johnny Black.   
       And Johnny finds him, and he does in fact have the 
  power to help Johnny, so the gun kills him.   
       The old man’s body has come to light and Johnny 
  is now hunted through the swamps by both the law 
  and Burning Wind’s vengeful relations.  And as his 
  gun changes, it begins to erode reality, and rabid 
  extradimensional abominations start to appear in its 
  wake.   
       The PCs can get involved in this mess when news 
  reaches them of Burning Wind’s death, or when 
  slobbering obscenities from outside time and space 
  start turning up in East Texas.  Or perhaps the Lone 
  Star Lady runs weeping to a Player Character for 
  assistance, and offers to be their girlfriend for a while 
  if he helps Johnny.  
       Once the PCs catch up with Johnny, it is possible to 
  trick his gun into thinking that the time is not yet right 
  for it to assume its true form.   Any PC with the ability 
  to cast spells can do this with a roll vs. DC 20.   
       If the team has no spellcaster, then Burning Wind 
  left some notes on a yellow legal pad that explain 
  which symbols to draw on the ground and what words 
  to intone.  It requires a Will roll vs. DC 25 for a non-
  spellcaster to successfully perform the ritual.  
       However, the gun will try to shoot anyone who 
  attempts to fix the problem, and the ritual takes at least 
  3 rounds of total concentration on the part of whoever 
  is performing it.   
       If the PCs manage to save him, Johnny Black will 
  show no gratitude.  It seems to him that the PCs took 
  an awfully long time to fix things, like maybe they 
  enjoyed watching him suffer.  And they seem to know 
  an awful lot about what went wrong with his gun.  If 
  they was able to fix it so damn easy, how is he to 
  know they didn’t cause it in the first place? 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Cimarron Starr 
  Real Name: Tammy-Rae Mulford 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 20 (+5) Int: 
  10 (+0) Wis: 9 (-1) Cha: 15 (+2) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  (Attack Bonus (Ranged): +7 Defense: 
  +16/+15 Speed: 30 feet, (fly 60) 
  Damage Save: +5 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower Save: +7  
  Skills: Innuendo +4, Taunt +4 
  Feats: Aerial Combat 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Will) +8 (Source: 
  Mutation, cost 1pt), Energy Control (Radiation) +12 
  (Extras: Flight, Force Field; Power Stunts: Drain 
  Energy; Source: Mutation; Cost: 4pts), Super-Strength 
  +10 (Extras: Immunity, Protection; Source: Mutation; 
  Cost 6pts) 
   
  "Yes, I’ve robbed, I’ve killed and 
  maimed.  I’ve taken drugs, betrayed 
  friends and had improper thoughts just 
  like everybody does.  But I don’t let it 
  define who I am.  My tender womanly 
  heart, my unwavering faith in Jesus, 
  these things are more important than 
  who I slay or cripple or what I steal 
  from them.”   
   
       A walking H-Bomb with a temperament to match.  
  She's the team's de facto leader, largely because she 
  could kill any of the others without much difficulty.   
       She once used the alias "Winter Steel" but too 
  many people started calling her "Nuclear Winter", so 
  she changed it.  She'll probably change it again once 
  enough people point out how much her current name 
  sounds like a racehorse (or a stripper).  Perhaps she'll 
  be "Angel Blayze" next.  
       Self-absorbed and melodramatic, her hair is large, 
  her makeup is overdone, she wears boots with six-inch 
  heels in the middle of combat.  She likes to talk about 
  herself in the third person, as in: "Who is Cimarron 
  Starr? Woman of mystery, with a heart as wide as the 
  Texas sky and as warm as the prairie wind..." etc.   
       Cimarron Starr is a Christian, as she will smugly 
  tell anyone who cares to listen, although this doesn't 
  stop her from getting drunk, stealing someone's 
  boyfriend or robbing banks.  She can be manipulated 
  through her beliefs, although you won't ever be able to 
  convince her that she is wrong or that anything is her 
  fault.  It would, for example, be easy to convince her 
  that she shouldn't steal from a bank owned by a 
  televangelist, or that she shouldn't trust someone 
  because they haven't been "saved."  
       Saved or not, her life is dysfunctional mess. 
  Whenever the Player Characters encounter her, she is 
  screaming at some former friend on her cell phone, 
  even if she is walking into combat. Unfortunately, 
  she's radioactive and her powers interfere with cell 
  phones when she gets mad.  This does not improve her 
  mood.   
       Although she is easily the most powerful member 
  of the group, Cimarron Starr is so used to being 
  mistreated by the men in her life that she'll put up with 
  an amazing amount of emotional abuse from her 
  boyfriend, Johnny Black, without doing anything 
  worse than screaming back at him.   
       She claims to always fight fair, and that she would 
  never harm a child or an animal, but she mostly says 
  this to annoy the Lone Star Lady.  While taking 
  hostages and hitting people who are trying to 
  surrender isn’t normally her style, once the tide of 
  battle turns against her she will promptly forget her 
  principles and become capable of anything.   
       She claims that her powers are a gift from God 
  (although it’s not clear why He would want her to rob 
  banks with them) which most people assume means 
  that she’s a mutant.  She writes startlingly bad poetry, 
  and sometimes she recites it, too.   
   
  Adventures With Cimarron Starr:  
  1) This is Not a Stick-Up  
       Cimarron Starr walks into a bank.  She’s not there 
  to rob the place, she’s there to complain about some 
  extra fees that she feels shouldn’t have shown up on 
  her statement.  She claims that there’s a special 
  exception to the rules that should keep her from 
  having to pay the extra fees—the whole thing is 
  complicated and she’s not very good at explaining it.   
       Amazingly enough, she’s right.  Her bank has 
  actually cheated her out of about $12 in total.  
  However, the branch manager doesn’t like her tone 
  and recognizes her as Cimarron Starr.  So he trips the 
  silent alarm and claims that she’s robbing the place.   
       Exasperated and indignant, she insists that this is 
  not a stick-up, she’s just here for her money—but the 
  cops won’t listen.  A standoff develops, and the Player 
  Characters get called in to resolve the crisis.   
       She will attempt to explain things to them while 
  she’s fighting them, but even if they do take her 
  complaint seriously, how can they help her now?  
  She’s already taken hostages and injured police 
  officers.   And now she’s attacking them.   
       After the PC’s defeat Cimarron Starr (or get 
  defeated by her and watch her fly angrily away) the 
  smirking bank manager points out that she really was 
  right, but it was cheaper to call the cops than to pay 
  her the twelve bucks.   
   
  2) This is Not a Stick-Up Either  Oh, Wait…   
       Cimarron Starr walks back into the same bank.  
  She’s fuming mad, but she's not here to rob it this time 
  either, she just wants to close her account and give 
  them a piece of her mind.  Unfortunately, whether or 
  not she’s out on bail, the government has frozen her 
  
    
  account, and the terrified tellers can’t give her any 
  money.   
       Then the bank manager walks in and sees her.  He 
  panics and calls the cops again.   
       When she hears the sirens coming for the second 
  time Cimarron Starr has had it, and decides to rob the 
  place after all.  She only wants the money from her 
  account.  Plus twelve dollars.   
       The PCs get called in again, and find that she’s 
  desperate to explain things to them.  Whether she wins 
  or loses this fight isn’t that important to her.  What 
  she’s really afraid of is turning up on that reality show 
  about America’s stupidest criminals, for trying to rob 
  the same bank twice in one week.  Can they explain 
  things to the TV people?  She doesn’t mind jail so 
  much, but she couldn’t bear it if she turned up on that 
  show. 
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Grease Monkey 
  Real Name: Miss Phoebe Klokholm 
  PL: 8 
  Str: 8 (-1) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 10 (+0) Int: 
  18 (+4) Wis: 15 (+2) Cha: 13 (+1) 
  Initiative: +6 Attack Bonus (Melee): +4 
  (+6S, Gadgets) Attack Bonus (Ranged): +7 
  (+7S, Gadgets) Defense: +10/8 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +0/+8 (Armor) Fortitude 
  Save: +0 Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower 
  Save: +2   
  Skills: Computers +10, Craft (Mechanical Devices) 
  +10, Craft (Electronics) +9, Disable Device +9, Open 
  Lock +9, Repair +10, Science (Robotics) +10 
  Feats: Evasion, Expertise, Hero's Luck, Improved 
  Initiative, Photographic Memory, Talented (Craft, 
  Robotics), Talented (Computers, Repair), Talented 
  (Disable Device, Open Lock) 
  Equipment: Toolkit (Effect: Gadgets +8; Flaw: 
  Device; Source: Super-Science; Cost 1pt; Total 8pts), 
  Armored Coveralls (Effect: 8 points of armor; Cost 1 
  pt; Total 8pts), Small Can of Anti-Antagonist Spray 
  (Effect: Weapon, does PL 7 Stun) 
   
  “Yes, I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Starr.  
  It is difficult when people don’t 
  understand you.  Would you like to look  
  at these schematics for the new death 
  ray? Would that cheer you up a little?”   
   
       An occasional member of the Good-Time Boys, 
  she's a gadgeteer for hire and works with them 
  whenever Cimarron Starr decides that they need a 
  technical expert.  She looks a little like a female Mr. 
  Goodwrench and wears mechanics' coveralls, which 
  are always spotless and neatly pressed.   
       Nobody really knows much about the Grease 
  Monkey's background.  She works out of Dallas, New 
  York and Berlin and has no detectable accent of any 
  kind.   Professional, polite, a little reserved, the Grease 
  Monkey stays carefully aloof from the crazy soap 
  opera which is the Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys, 
  and as a result is everyone's favorite team-mate.  All 
  of the others bring their problems to her eventually, 
  pouring out all the latest developments, while she 
  makes neutral remarks and pretends to listen.   
       She’s not unattractive physically, but with her quiet 
  personality, short, sensible ponytail and complete lack 
  of makeup, she’s the very opposite of Johnny Black or 
  the Texas Twister’s “type”, so neither one has yet 
  made a pass at her.  If either one of them did, she 
  would simply ignore it, and avoid ever being alone 
  with them again.   
       No killer herself, she probably wouldn’t raise any 
  objections if her teammates killed someone in front of 
  her.  She tries to avoid the messy side of being a 
  supervillain, but she’s aware that unfortunate things 
  sometimes happen.   
       Her detachment does have limits, however.  She 
  would not participate in any plan that involves killing 
  a lot of innocent people, taking hostages or anything 
  as stupid as world domination.  While she is a pro and 
  wouldn’t betray her employer for money, if you asked 
  her to help unleash a killer virus on Houston she’d call 
  the cops.    
       Superhumanly adept at finding new uses for 
  existing technology, her genius is practical rather than 
  theoretical.  She doesn’t invent new technology 
  outright, or create blatantly impossible machines.  
       She’s more the kind of person you’d have install 
  rocket engines and flamethrowers on your wonder-car 
  than the kind who would build you a weather-control 
  device or an earthquake machine. However, if you 
  were to give her a weather control device, she’d figure 
  it out in a flash and could probably improve on its 
  design.  She could rebuild or reprogram a giant 
  combat robot (in fact she has—see Doctor Destructor 
  later in this section) but she lacks the financial 
  resources to build one from scratch.  Nor does she 
  have access to the kind of money and manpower 
  required to build giant death rays or the kind of laser 
  you’d use to write your name on the moon.  Offer her 
  that kind of money and the plans for a giant death ray, 
  and she’d certainly be intrigued.   
   
  Adventures With Grease Monkey:  
   
  1) Monkey Business 
       The Grease Monkey takes on an emergency job in 
  the Player Characters’ home city.  A gang of cheap 
  hoodlums has found a warbot lying unused in a 
  government warehouse. They have instructed it to 
  steal a huge gun safe from a store that sells firearms 
  and model trains.   
       The warbot does as they ask, walks into the store 
  with them and rips the safe out of the wall.  
  Unfortunately, when it’s carrying the safe it’s too 
  heavy for the floor to hold.  The robot takes three steps 
  and falls halfway through the floor.   
       This makes it think it’s under attack, and initiates a 
  combat sequence that the gang doesn’t have the 
  passwords to countermand.  In this mode it will shoot 
  anything that moves, so its erstwhile masters find 
  themselves pinned down, frozen in place.   
       Fortunately, one of them is facing a wall when this 
  happens, and he knows the Grease Monkey’s phone 
  number.  He carefully dials her up on his cell phone, 
  trying to move as little as possible, explains the nature 
  of the problem and offers to hire her on a short-term 
  basis to get them out of it.   
       She agrees, but she isn’t anywhere nearby and it 
  takes her nearly six hours to get there.   In the 
  meantime, the police have surrounded the building and 
  the PCs have arrived at the scene.   
       The warbot attacks anybody who gets too close to 
  
    
  the building and there is a strong risk of collateral 
  damage—there are apartments directly above the shop 
  and no one can get out of them until the warbot gets 
  deactivated.   
       As the PCs are trying to figure out what to do, the 
  Grease Monkey appears out of nowhere and politely 
  explains to the PCs that she’s here to fix the problem, 
  but she will need their help getting inside. She can 
  indeed deactivate the robot, once she gets a look at its 
  serial number, and she can even help make it light 
  enough to get out of the floor (by cracking the safe 
  and taking the guns out).  She will however need some 
  assistance getting into the building without being shot, 
  and getting out again without being arrested.   
   
  2) The Death Ray, the Monkey and the Six Dollar 
  Man 
       The Grease Monkey receives a set of plans for a 
  giant death ray from a mysterious patron who wishes 
  to remain anonymous.  She is intrigued, and although 
  she doesn’t have anything like the resources required 
  to construct a full-sized working prototype, she builds 
  a small model and finds that it does indeed work—and 
  violates a number of established principles of physics 
  in doing so.   
       Then the anonymous patron gets back in touch and 
  suggests that she talk her friends the Corpus Christi 
  Good Time Boys into stealing enough money to pay 
  for building a full-sized ray. The patron can provide 
  some manpower and some design contacts if she can 
  put up the funds, and he knows the location of a gold 
  shipment that would pay for about half of the entire 
  project.  He promises a very high return on the 
  investment.   
       The Grease Monkey is no fool and immediately 
  suspects that the patron intends use the ray to pull off 
  some major act of extortion or something even worse. 
  She tries to notify the authorities, but they won’t listen 
  to her, so she contacts the Player Characters.  
       The patron is going to rendezvous with her right 
  after the gold shipment heist to discuss further plans.  
  They can probably intercept him and take him down 
  there.   
       Things are worse than she realizes.  Her patron is 
  the loathsome cyborg assassin who calls himself the 
  Six Dollar Man (or someone equally treacherous and 
  despicable).  He stole the plans from someone much 
  bigger and scarier than himself.  Use the biggest 
  meanest evil gadgeeter or world-conquering arch-
  villain in your campaign. Or, make it the Hammer of 
  Doom (see page 48) or perhaps a cabal of doddering 
  old Nazis in South America.   
       The Six Dollar Man has no interest in using the 
  plans himself, which he’s sure would get him killed 
  once their owner finds out who took them. His real 
  target is the gold shipment.   
       He learned about the shipment from an unrelated 
  source (his most recent girlfriend worked for the Swiss 
  bank that is transporting the gold) and while it 
  sounded like a great idea to rob it, this also sounded 
  like a lot of hard work.  Much easier to get someone 
  else to steal it for him.   
       But killing off the Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys 
  also seemed like it would take too much effort, so 
  instead he has tipped off the owner of the plans, who 
  is sending a hit squad to intercept them after they 
  knock over the gold shipment at the rendezvous point 
  he picked out for them.  
       They’ll probably do each other a lot of damage, 
  and he can then finish off whoever is left and walk 
  away with the gold.  But he hasn’t counted on the PCs 
  getting involved. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Doctor Destructor, 
  aka Murder Machine 
  Real Name: Unknown 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 20 (+5) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  (+15 S Punch) Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 
  Defense: +16/+14 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +1  
  Skills: Diplomacy +5, Knowledge (Fine Wines) +3 
  Feats: Durability, Immunity (Aging, Critical Hits, 
  Disease, Poison, Pressure, Starvation, Suffocation, ) 
  Sidekick ("The Grease Monkey" PL 8, see individual 
  description below). 
  Powers: Gadgets +5 (1pt), Super-Strength +10 
  (Extras: Protection; Cost 5 pts) 
  Equipment: Vehicle (Doctor Desructor rides 
  concealed in the back of a specially modified 
  motorhome, piloted by the Grease Monkey; it has 7 
  Movement Ranks [top speed of 128 mph], a Hardness 
  of 11, and 7 points of Armor) 
  Weaknesses: Disturbing (looks like a hulking 
  great killer robot) 
   
  “Good afternoon! I’m afraid we are 
  going to have to have to smash open 
  your vault and take all the money.  I 
  hope you’ll accept my apologies in 
  advance, as well as my condolences for 
  any loss of life you may suffer during the 
  course of the robbery.  If it’s any 
  consolation to you, my meteorological 
  indicators show that it will be a lovely 
  day tomorrow.”   
   
       Doctor Destructor is the Grease Monkey's favorite 
  gadget.  A huge killer robot with a Harvard accent and 
  no memory of his past, he doesn't know if "Doctor 
  Destructor" is really his name, or if it's just what the 
  Grease Monkey calls him.  We don't know who built 
  him or where she found him, but he's definitely hers, 
  and is somehow compelled to follow her orders 
  whether he wants to or not.  She is clearly proud of her 
  favorite toy and is forever fussing over him, tinkering 
  with him and adjusting his systems.  
       Doctor Destructor is as friendly and personable as a 
  big killer robot can be, allthough his ridiculous Kelsea 
  Grammer voice does tend to set his teammates' teeth 
  on edge.  He doesn't have a lot of built-in weapon 
  systems, but he's ideal for things like tipping over 
  armored cars and throwing police cruisers at pursuing 
  superheroes.   
       He always greets his enemies politely, always says 
  "please" and "thank you".  If he hurls a tank at you he 
  will probably say "excuse me" as he does it.   
       Doctor Destructor regrets commiting acts of havoc 
  and savagery, but there doesn't seem to be much he 
  can do about it, so he attempts to maintain a cheerful 
  outlook.  He reads the New York Times and the Utne 
  Reader, and wishes he had time to learn golf.   
   
  Adventures With Doctor Destructor:  
   
  Rampaging Robot Reunion 
       The Grease Monkey gives Dr. Destructor a book on 
  crime, in hopes that he will learn more about being a 
  criminal.  He halfheartedly peruses it, and finds a 
  picture of the robot gangster known as Johnny 
  Machine, AKA the Steel Deuce. See page 105 for a 
  lengthy description of this unpleasant individual.   
       He looks weirdly familiar to Doctor Destructor, 
  who grows very interested in whether or not the Steel 
  Deuce might know something about his own origins.  
  So Doctor Destructor has himself shipped to a random 
  address in Brooklyn, the town where Johnny Machine 
  operates.   
       When the truck drops him off and he bursts out of 
  his shipping container, the addressee protests that he 
  didn’t order no giant killer robot and he ain’t paying 
  for no giant killer robot.  Doctor Destructor apologizes 
  for the inconvenience, thanks him for his time and 
  lumbers off to find Johnny Machine. The addressee 
  places a complaint with his city councilman, which 
  makes its way to the PCs and draws them into the case 
  if nothing else has.  
       When the Steel Deuce hears that a big whussy 
  robot is walking around the neighborhood showing 
  people his picture, he figures his weird brother 
  Guiseppe must somehow be back from the dead and 
  goes off to find him and put him put of his misery.   
       The Steel Deuce has correctly guessed Dr. 
  Destructor’s real identity.  Guiseppe’s central brain 
  unit survived his brother Johnny’s assault and the 
  Grease Monkey somehow acquired it, years later.  She 
  already had a chassis for a giant battle robot, but no 
  brain.  She put the two of them together and they 
  worked just dandy, apart from a little amnesia.   
       The Steel Deuce walks down the street with murder 
  in his eye.  He smashed Guiseppe into little pieces 
  once and he’ll do it again.  But when he sees how big 
  his kid brother has grown, he takes to his heels 
  instead.  
       Once Doctor Destructor chases down the Steel 
  Deuce and gets the whole story out of him, he thanks 
  him for his time and goes away.  He’s not interested in 
  revenge.  He just wanted to know. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  The Texas Twister 
  Real Name: Donnie Craven 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 13 (+1) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +5 Defense: 
  +15/14 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +3 Willpower Save: +0   
  Skills: Acrobatics +8, Balance +8, Bluff +4, Climb 
  +6, Forgery +4, Hide +4, Intimidate +4, Jump +6, 
  Knowledge (Texas criminal underground) +4, Listen 
  +4, Repair +8, Spot +8, Swim +5 
  Feats: Great Fortitude, Identity Change, Instant 
  Stand, Lightning Reflexes, Power Immunity, 
  Toughness 
  Powers: Energy Field +10 (Extras: Explosive 
  Effect [Energy Field Covers a circular area up to 50 
  feet in diameter], Variable Effect [the Twister can 
  increase the field up to a 50 foot diameter or contract 
  it to no range at all as a free action], Variable Effect 
  [the Twister can also decide whether to do Stun or 
  Lethal damage with this attack, depending on how 
  much hard and/or sharp debris his vortex has picked 
  up] Obscure [Flaw: Only Partial Obscurement], 
  Protection [Flaw: does not protect against light or 
  radiation-based attacks], Shockwave [Anyone caught 
  in the Energy Field must make a Strength or Dexterity 
  check, whichever is higher, against the power of the 
  field, or be rendered Prone], Telekinesis [Anyone 
  rendered Prone by the Shockwave is swept 10 feet in a 
  counterclockwise direction from where they were 
  standing; Flaw: only works on targets that have been  
  knocked down by the Energy Field]; Cost: 6pts), 
  Sensory Protection +10 (Cost: 1pt) 
  Equipment: Armor +4 
  Weaknesses: Berzerker 
  Quirk: Flies into a rage if anyone mocks or insults his 
  hairstyle. 
   
  “I’m a whirlwind a’ beefcake with a side 
  order a’ mean an’ hash browns a’ 
  grievous bodily harm! Yee-ha!”  
   
       Yet another bad result of the IF Foundation's 
  research into psychic enhancement drugs.  The Texas 
  Twister looked at first like one of their few real 
  successes.  A powerful telekinetic, but unable to exert 
  any fine control over his power, he couldn't lift 
  anything or manipulate objects with his mind, but he 
  was able to generate a kind of swirling destructive 
  maelstrom which surrounded the spot where he was 
  standing.   
       This was good enough for IF, which tried to sell 
  him to the Department of Defense as a superhero.  
  They didn't pick up the program, but the State of 
  Texas was just then trying to assemble a super-group 
  of its own (the "Lone Star Rangers") and bought him 
  at a discount.   
       Alas, he was much too angry and violent to be 
  useable and was kicked out almost at once. He drifted 
  into crime and got locked up for trying to rob a Piggly 
  Wiggly in Brownsville.   
       During the two years he spent in prison, he started 
  corresponding with Supervillainess known as 
  Cimarron Starr, who was also incarcerated at the time.  
  When they both got out, they struck up a relationship 
  and then a partnership in crime. They made a good 
  couple.  He's almost as childish, self-absorbed and 
  melodramatic as she is.   
       Anyone who spends much time with the Texas 
  Twister won’t be surprised to hear how he got kicked 
  out of the Rangers—the man is a blatant menace to 
  himself and everyone around him.  Prone to 
  frightening temper tantrums, he's a furious whirlwind 
  of rage and always seems to be holding back a 
  murderous outburst.  Whenever he throws a fit, 
  someone is almost sure to die.  He is not however 
  devoid of conscience and feels really bad about killing 
  people, until loses his temper and does it again.   
       He seems to be making a valiant if doomed attempt 
  to control his anger.  The crazy, dysfunctional 
  atmosphere in the Good-Time Boys does not help.          
       Cimarron Starr's former boyfriend, he's now 
  involved with the Lone Star Lady.  He’s passionate 
  about his new girlfriend, but she’s still completely 
  hung up on her ex-boyfriend, Johnny Black. This has 
  caused more than a little friction. Putting up with 
  Johnny Black's craziness hasn't been easy for him, 
  either.  Only the calming influence of Mr. Fist and the 
  fact that Cimarron Starr could easily kill the Twister 
  has kept him from doing something fatal to one or 
  another of his teammates.  
       You would think that the IF Foundation would 
  know better than to give a violent sociopath 
  superhuman powers, but the fact is that they were just 
  recruiting their test subjects from the general pool of 
  guys who turn themselves in for paid medical 
  experiments. They barely even bothered with a 
  background check.   
       If they had paid more attention, they would have 
  hastily sought another candidate. The Twister has been 
  in and out of jail on assault charges since he was 
  fifteen.   
       One word of warning about his hair.  The Twister 
  is extremely touchy and proud about his haircut.  He 
  thinks his hairstyle is called "bad-ass hair" because 
  he's never heard the term "mullet" and that it makes 
  him a rebel (instead of a guy whose life peaked in high 
  school).  He threw the tantrum which got him kicked 
  out of the Lone Star Rangers when they asked him to 
  update his haircut and he's grown more sensitive about 
  it since then.  The Twister is quite capable of killing 
  people for disrespecting his hair, although to his credit 
  he'll feel pretty sorry about it afterwards. 
  
    
  Adventures With Texas Twister:   
   
  1) Twisted! 
       The Texas Twister has had another one of his 
  temper tantrums, and killed a Houston TV reporter 
  who made a crack about his haircut.  This time the 
  Twister has finally had enough—he intends to turn 
  himself in to the Player Characters and take his 
  punishment.   
       If he doesn’t know how to get in touch with the 
  Player Characters, then he will go out into the middle 
  of a field somewhere and create the biggest twister he 
  can make, holding it in place until the authorities take 
  notice.  He tells the cops and the media, if they show 
  up before the PCs, that he will only surrender to the 
  PCs themselves.  He’s frankly a little scared of the 
  treatment the Texas state authorities might give him.  
  He intends to die for his crime, but he wants to do it in 
  a dignified, official setting, not in the back of a police 
  cruiser.  
       If the Texas Twister has never actually met the PCs 
  before then he’s heard about them, possibly seen them 
  on the news, and he thinks of them as good, fair, 
  trustworthy guys.  There should be some anxiety on 
  your players’ minds about whether or not this might 
  be some kind of a trap, but it’s not.   
       However, while the PCs are transporting him to 
  jail, it comes out that his victim didn’t actually die—
  she’s in stable condition at a Houston hospital and is 
  expected to recover. The Twister suddenly changes his 
  mind about going back to jail and will do his best to 
  break loose and lead the PCs on a cross-country chase.   
       Worse, the rest of the Corpus Christi Good Time 
  Boys may show up and accuse the PCs of having used 
  some kind of mind control on the Texas Twiuster to 
  make him turn himself in. They will want to rescue 
  their comrade, but also to make the PCs suffer for the 
  insult.   
   
  2) I Shouldn’t be Wearing White and You Can’t 
  Afford no Ring 
       The Texas Twister asks the Lone Star Lady to 
  marry him.  She agrees, hoping it will get Johnny 
  Black’s attention.  
       But for his part, the Texas Twister is eager to avoid 
  letting Johnny know anything about the wedding, for 
  fear that it might provoke the kind of lethal 
  confrontation he’s been trying to avoid.  He is 
  determined to kill no more of the people he knows 
  (not even Johnny Black) and this time he’s going to 
  stick to it.   
       In an effort to do this discreetly, he has found a tiny 
  wedding chapel down near Brownsville where nobody 
  knows them.  He wants to have a best man.  It won’t 
  feel real enough if nobody else even knows about it.  It 
  will be like his wedding never even happened.  But 
  where to find a best man who would never blab to 
  anyone on the team?   
       On impulse, the Twister asks one of the PCs—
  preferably one who hates Johnny Black. Can they 
  have a truce, he asks? Just long enough for him to get 
  married, just so somebody else was there and 
  witnessed the thing.   
       Alas, complications ensue.  On the morning of the 
  big day, the bride is banging on the door of Johnny 
  Black’s mobile home, crying and screaming and 
  begging him to come out and see her.  When she 
  doesn’t appear at the wedding chapel, the Texas 
  Twister will blame the PCs, accusing them of 
  kidnapping his bride for some nefarious purpose. This 
  happens whether or not a PC agreed to stand in as his 
  best man.  
       If the GM is feeling particularly mischievous, then 
  just as a fight is about to break out, Johnny Black 
  bursts into the room, spoiling for a piece of the Texas 
  Twister.  And then perhaps Cimarron Starr barges in, 
  furious with all parties and everyone starts hitting 
  everyone. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Mr. Fist 
  Real Name: Winton Casey Bunyard 
  PL: 11 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 20 (+5) Con: 16 (+3) 
  Int: 12 (+1) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +9 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +12 Defense: 
  +21/+21 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +3/+5 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +3 Reflexes Save: +7 Willpower 
  Save: +3  
  Skills: Acrobatics +10, Balance +10, Bluff +4, 
  Drive +9, Escape Artist +5, Hide +10, Jump +6, 
  Knowledge (Criminal Lore) +4, Listen +5, Move 
  Silently +10, Sense Motive +7, Spot +5, Taunt +8 
  Feats: Assessment, Blind-Fight, Dodge, Evasion, 
  Expertise, Improved Disarm, Improved Initiative, 
  Improved Trip, Infamy, Instant Stand, Iron Will, 
  Leadership, Lightning Reflexes, Power Attack, Rapid 
  Strike, Surprise Strike, Takedown Attack 
  Powers: Combat Sense +5 (Source: Training, Cost: 
  1pt) 
   
  “Just what I wanted for my birthday, a  
  fight!  And it ain’t even my birthday!”   
   
       An older, wiser criminal than most of the Good-
  Time Boys, Mr. Fist is a kind of surrogate father to 
  them all.   
       A legendary pugilist, he has ranged all across the 
  West for a quarter of a century, competing in illegal 
  bare-knuckle brawls.  He's the undisputed champion 
  of that world.  The Michael Jordan or Muhammed Ali 
  of dirty fighting, one of America's great unsung 
  athletes.  In between bouts, he steals, when he isn't in 
  jail. There are less fights than there used to be, 
  "Ultimate Fighting" videos are killing the market off, 
  so he supports himself more and more through robbery 
  these days.  
        Cimmarron Starr hires him for big jobs, whether 
  she strictly speaking needs an unarmed combat expert 
  or not. The Good-Time Boys think it's cool to get to 
  hang out with Mr. Fist, and he exerts a calming 
  influence on the group.  Everyone wants to look like a 
  pro around him, so they misbehave less.   
       Mr. Fist is surprisingly short, scarred up and old. 
  His hair is starting to get thin and gray, some of his 
  teeth are missing and some are made of gold. It’s been 
  years since he’s gotten any new tattoos and the old 
  ones are starting to blur and fade.  His voice sounds 
  like he smokes cigarettes with broken glass in them.  
  He affects a grizzled handlebar moustache.   
       Despite his stern voice and grim appearance he's 
  actually quite friendly with younger criminals, 
  concerned and sympathetic about people's problems, 
  eager to hold forth and explain how to be a good 
  crook.   
       A seasoned professional, he has a personal code of 
  ethics and would never abandon or betray a team-
  mate, never show up late for a job or show up drunk.  
  Mr. Fist has had to kill people on a number of 
  occasions, but he doesn't enjoy it and won't do it if he 
  can avoid it. He might take a hostage if he absolutely 
  has to, but he would never actually kill them.  He's a 
  criminal to the core, has spent half of his life in jail 
  and knows that he'll never lead a normal existence 
  now.  Yet he's determined to be as good a guy as he 
  can. Beware of taking too much of his advice--he may 
  have grown up a little by now, but he didn't get where 
  he is today by being mature and responsible.   
       Mr. Fist has no fixed abode.  He was a biker for a 
  while but the codes and rituals of that world didn't suit 
  him, so these days he rides the rails like an old-time 
  hobo.  He usually shows up by hopping off a freight 
  train, down at the Corpus Christi railyards. 
   
  Adventures With Mr. Fist:  
   
  1) What, Me Worry? 
       Mr. Fist is visiting the supermarket, browsing 
  through biker magazines and the latest issue of Mad, 
  when three thugs decide to hold the place up.  That 
  doesn’t bother Mr. Fist—maybe he’ll get to keep the 
  magazines for free.   
       But these three robbers are incompetent and 
  bloodthirsty, the heist rapidly turns into a hostage 
  situation and then starts sliding toward a bloodbath.  
  The cops besiege the store, the robbers start killing 
  hostages and Mr. Fist starts getting disgusted.   
       When the PCs arrive outside, he text-messages 
  them on a cell-phone he finds lying around, lets them 
  know he’s hiding in the magazine section and asks if 
  he can help.    
       The three thieves are Lonnie Biggs, Pennsylvania 
  Pete and his girlfriend Mountain Mama Annie.  All 
  three are killers, but the shy, quiet one called 
  Mountain Momma Annie is particularly casual about 
  taking human life and her boyfriend does whatever she 
  says.   
       Lonnie Biggs is a violent loudmouth, but he’s 
  beginning to wonder if it was really a good idea to get 
  involved with these two.  He’s not dumb enough to 
  question their actions, though.  If Lonnie sees a known 
  supervillain like Mr. Fist decimating his friends, then 
  despite his bluster he’s likely to make a run for it.  
       Once the situation is resolved, Mr. Fist will attempt 
  to slip past the Player Characters before they can 
  apprehend him.  
   
  2) Little Marvin and Her Uncle Fist 
       Mr. Fist pays a visit to some old biker friends.  We 
  purposefully won’t specify which state they live in, so 
  as to make it easier to work into your campaign.   
       Unfortunately, Mr. Fist’s old buddy Big Marvin 
  Goines has ripped off a crank lab owned by a powerful 
  gang of outlaw bikers known as Satan’s Little Helpers.  
  
    
  These guys are bad, bad news, and they aren’t just a 
  local organization, they’re a national club—a real 
  organized crime family.  Mr. Fist cautions Big Marvin 
  to make himself as scarce as possible, but he won’t 
  listen and anyway it’s too late.   
       That very night, Satan’s Little Helpers show up and 
  riddle Big Marvin’s shack with bullets.  Mr. Fist only 
  survives because of his habit of sleeping outside.  As 
  he picks through the wreckage the cops arrive, and he 
  has to run for his life with the massacre’s only other 
  survivor—an eleven month old girl.   
       Mr. Fist flees cross country, by freight train, 
  hitchhiking and by stolen motorcycle, with the baby 
  slung across his back, trying to cope with the demands 
  of unexpected fatherhood as he struggles to keep them 
  both alive and one step ahead of the law.  Will the 
  Player Characters catch him before he gets to Mexico?  
  Will Satan’s Little Helpers? 
   
   
   
  
    
  Lone Star Lady 
  Real Name: Patience Coyle 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +7 Defense: 
  +20/+18 Speed: 30/35 (Flight) 
  Damage Save: +5 Fortitude Save: +5 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +1  
  Skills: Hide +8, Knowledge (Soap Operas) +5, 
  Move Silently +8 
  Feats: Darkvision, Durability, Immunity (Cold, 
  Heat, Starvation, Suffocation) 
  Powers: Flight +7 (Cost: 2pts), Drain +10 (Extra: 
  Ranged; Power Stunt: Penetrating Attack x2; Cost 
  3pts), Protection +10 (Cost 2pts) 
   
  “Oh yeah, like you never killed no kids 
  before!”   
   
       A whiner, a complainer and a heartless killer to 
  boot, the Lone Star Lady is probably the worst 
  member of the Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys, and 
  certainly the most annoying.  Sulky, sullen and 
  underhanded, she constantly gripes about everything, 
  so lost in her own self-pity that she’s capable of 
  almost any thoughtless crime.  She holds grudges over 
  tiny things and will bring up some minor unfairness 
  that she once suffered years after the fact.  
       The Lone Star Lady dresses like a trashy Vegas 
  lounge act, but that’s just because Johnny Black 
  designed her costume—she’s actually rather shy.  
  Cimarron Star picks on her and stole her boyfriend,  
  but the Lone Star Lady is at least as angry with her for 
  taking a code-name that sounds too much like her 
  own.  She’s convinced that Cimarron Starr did it on 
  purpose, and she may even be right.  Johnny Black 
  and the Texas Twister look down on her too, and she 
  almost seems to invite their abuse.   
       Wanted for the cold-blooded execution of six 
  elementary school kids during a hostage situation in 
  Beaumont, the Lone Star Lady resents the way her 
  teammates constantly throw that dishonorable crime in 
  her face.  Like it makes them better than her.  She’s far 
  too codependent to even think of harming or leaving 
  the teammates who emotionally abuse her, although 
  she’s capable of killing just about anyone else without 
  thinking twice.  
       Her origins are murky.  Although she appears to be 
  in her early twenties, she’s actually closer to eighty-
  five. She was buried alive by her kin back in the 1930s 
  for some awful, sneaky act of treachery and in 1988 
  she rose from her grave, suddenly able to fly and to 
  draw the life force out of anyone within reach.   It’s 
  uncertain whether she’s a creature of supernatural evil, 
  or just a really odd mutation.  We do know that she 
  drifted into stripping, and then making "amateur" adult 
  movies in Galveston, where she met and fell in love 
  with Johnny Black.   
       He was already obsessed with Johnny Ringo, and 
  with finding that legendary killer’s gun.  And it just so 
  happened that she knew where it could be found.   
       Lovers and partners in crime, the two of them 
  rampaged across southeastern Texas in fine fashion 
  until they met up with the Twister and Cimarron Starr.       
  Johnny Black promptly threw his murderous, whiny 
  doormat girlfriend over for the wild and tempestuous 
  Ms. Starr.  The Lone Star Lady took up with the jilted 
  Texas Twister by way of revenge, but she’s still 
  completely obsessed with Johnny Black and desperate 
  to get his attention.   
       Barely literate, tasteless and crass, she can’t find 
  Texas on a map, doesn’t know cheese doodles from 
  filet mignon and doesn’t want to know.   
       The Lone Star Lady’s willful ignorance and 
  whining self-absorption have actually helped her adapt 
  to the present day.  She’s not really interested in the 
  world around her, so she can’t really be shocked by it.  
  She takes no pleasure from listening to music, so she 
  can’t feel alienated by how much it has changed since 
  the 1930s. She likes soap operas, but has no interest in 
  knowing how the TV is able to dispense them.   She 
  has no idea how a cell phone works, but she doesn’t 
  want to know any more than how to use one to pester 
  Johnny Black.   
       By now she has more or less completely 
  assimilated into the 21st century.  She barely 
  remembers her former life, and doesn’t really wish to.   
   
  Adventures With the Lone Star Lady:  
   
  Jilted by the Devil 
       The Lone Star Lady has a dream, in which the 
  Devil tells her he will come for her in three days.  She 
  wakes up terrified, and determined to reform her evil 
  ways.   
       She has thee days in which to put things right with 
  everyone she has wronged.  She decides to start with 
  the Player Characters, and either tracks them down or 
  creates some kind of public incident to draw their 
  attention.  If they don’t attack her on sight, she will 
  explain why she has come to see them.  However, she 
  doesn’t have any idea how to set things right with the 
  PCs—in fact she didn’t think that far ahead.  Can they 
  think of anything?   
       Whatever they suggest, she whines that it would 
  take far too long, she has so many people to make up 
  with, and only three days to do it.  She begins to list 
  all the terrible things she has done (the GM can 
  generate some black humor by making her list of 
  atrocities ridiculously long and foul) and before she’s 
  even halfway through, she realizes her mistake.  
  There’s no way she can ever make up with all those 
  people in three days.   
       Another plan occurs to her, and she abruptly flies 
  
    
  away.  Since she’s going to Hell anyway, she may as 
  well take as many people with her as she can.  And so 
  she goes off to poison the nearest city reservoir.    
       Whether or not the PCs can stop her in time, the 
  devil never shows up.  Perhaps he didn’t want her soul 
  once he got a better look at it. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Jim Dandy 
  Real Name: Does not remember, may 
  not have one. 
  PL: 10 
  Str: 14 (+2) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 13 (+1) Cha: 18 (+4) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +12 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +14 Defense: 
  +24/+20 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +4 Willpower Save: +1  
  Skills: Diplomacy +4, Handle Animal +9, Hide +5, 
  Survival +9 
  Feats: Far Shot, Immunity (Aging), Point-Blank 
  shot, Quick-Draw, Sidekick (Boy Howdy; PL 9), 
  Tracking 
  Powers: Incorporeal (Affected by Mentally-Based 
  attacks) +10 (Extra: Immune to Disease, Poison, 
  Pressure, Starvation, and Suffocation while 
  Incorporeal: Cost: 3pts) 
  Equipment: Lariat (Snare +10; Flaw: Device; 
  Cost 1pt), Pistol (Weapon +5; Extra: Variable damage 
  [fires spectral bullets that can pass through the target 
  and Stun them, or materialize and punch holes through 
  them]; Cost: 2pts) 
  Weaknesses: Naïve 
  Quirk: Foolishly loyal to associates, even when it is 
  severely contrary to his advantage. 
   
       Jim Dandy and Boy Howdy got themselves killed a 
  couple of years back, but if for some reason you need 
  their stats, here they are.   
       Jim Dandy was as laid back, fun-loving and good 
  natured as any professional criminal you’d be likely to 
  meet.  It was almost impossible to get him riled—he’d 
  laugh off insults and shrug at threats.  Boy Howdy was 
  much the same, but even more lazy and even less  
  inclined to plan ahead.   
       They used to stick up travelers on the road, and 
  occasionally knock over isolated businesses.  Friendly 
  and congenial robbers, they were always at pains to 
  put their victims at ease and to keep from upsetting 
  them too badly.   
       We don’t really know much about their origins, but 
  we do know that they lived the life of Texas outlaws 
  for a hundred and fifty years.  They ranged all up and 
  down the gulf coast, camping out in the wilderness for 
  the most part, coming into town only to buy supplies 
  or steal things as needed.  Sometimes their victims 
  would be the only people they had spoken with in 
  weeks, so they were always eager to make 
  conversation and share news.   
       Only very slowly did they realize how much the 
  world was changing.  Some time in the 1950s they 
  began robbing isolated gas stations and liquor stores as 
  well as travelers, and later the spread of all-night 
  convenience stores became a positive bonanza for the 
  two of them.  As the open country vanished, they 
  spent more time living in cheap motels, which they 
  had to admit was a lot more comfortable than camping 
  out on the range, even though it cost more.  
       In the 1990s Jim Dandy found out about 
  supervillains, realized that he was one, and suffered a 
  completely uncharacteristic attack of hubris.  It was 
  time to do the responsible thing, he decided—to grow 
  up, be a man and get serious about his criminal career.  
  For his part, Boy Howdy went along with whatever 
  Jim Dandy said.   
       They set about trying to put together a supervillain 
  team, which they understood was what one did.  Jim 
  Dandy hired an unarmed combat expert he knew 
  slightly, called Mr. Fist (they had seen Mr. Fist fight a 
  few times down at the railyards and had talked to him 
  a little).  He in turn put them in touch with the Grease 
  Monkey, who brought her giant killer robot into the 
  team with her.  The five of them became the original 
  Corpus Christi Good Time Boys, robbed a bank or two 
  and then discovered the hard way that they didn’t have 
  the raw power required to stand up to a superhero 
  team.   
       After some searching they located Cimarron Starr 
  (who still called herself “Winter Steele” in those days) 
  and she shortly brought her boyfriend, the Texas 
  Twister, into the group.  This gave them all the power 
  they needed, and then some.   
       The team got along fairly well in the early days.  
  Jim Dandy and Boy Howdy didn’t let Cimarron 
  Starr’s obnoxious temperament bother them, and they 
  were a calming influence on the tormented Texas 
  Twister.   
       The future looked bright, until the evening Jim 
  Dandy decided to knock over one last liquor store for 
  old times sake.  People say he did it out of force of 
  habit, and it is certainly true that he didn’t need the 
  money.  It may however also be the case that he didn’t 
  feel comfortable with his new life, that his new 
  ambitions didn’t wholly satisfy him and that he felt 
  nostalgic for the old days.  We’ll probably never 
  know.  We do know that Jim Dandy and Boy Howdy 
  walked into the store just after midnight, robbed the 
  place, and spent a few minutes making conversation 
  with the clerk, who then shot them both in the back as 
  they walked out the door, and killed them. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Boy Howdy 
  Real Name: Does not remember, may 
  not have one. 
  PL: 9 
  Str: 14 (+1) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 14 (+2) Int: 
  14 (+2) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +6 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +13 Defense: 
  +23/+19 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +4 Willpower Save: +1  
  Skills: Handle Animal +9, Hide +5, Performance 
  (Harmonica) +7, Survival +8 
  Feats: Far Shot, Immunity (Aging), Improved 
  Initiative, Point-Blank Shot, Quick-Draw, Tracking 
  Powers: Incorporeal (Affected by Mentally-Based 
  attacks) +9 (Extra: Ghost Touch: Cost: 3pts) 
  Equipment: Lariat (Snare +9; Flaw: Device; Cost 
  1pt), Pistol (Weapon +4; Extra: Variable damage 
  [fires spectral bullets that can pass through the target 
  and Stun them, or materialize and punch holes through 
  them]; Cost: 2pts) 
  Weaknesses: Naïve 
  Quirk: Can't do lethal damage to anyone unless they 
  have attacked him first. 
   
   
   
  
    
  The Four Deuces 
  Membership: Double Deuce (a hot tempered 
  little psychopath with the abilty to see the weak points 
  in everything), the Steel Deuce (aka Johnny Machine, 
  a robot who pursues a life of crime around the clock 
  with inhuman mechanical determination), Lady Deuce 
  (a kid-killing murderess with the ability to dampen 
  superhuman powers), Diamond Deuce (a witless, 
  wife-beating, super-strong flying thug), the Ace of 
  Wounds (one of America's greatest commandoes, now 
  fallen on hard times and forced to fall in with the likes 
  of the Four Deuces) and sometimes Bones (zoot-suit 
  wearing master criminal from the 1930s, who has been 
  blessed by the forces of death and paints his face like a 
  skull).  That's more than four, of course, but who's 
  counting?  
   
       The Four Deuces are a tight-knit professional crew 
  of super-criminals, based in Brooklyn. None of them 
  are “Made Men”, but the team is deeply intertwined 
  with the New York Mafia and they know that world 
  very well.  
       Founded by the infamous gangster supervillain 
  who calls himself “Bones”, they’ve terrorized the New 
  York City metropolitan area, in a low-key kind of 
  way, for nearly twenty years—longer than almost any 
  other supervillain team.  They owe their longevity and 
  success to careful planning, solid organizational skills 
  and to the fact that the team’s two core members 
  always kill off the new guys before they’ve had time 
  to betray them.   
       They are careful about who they recruit, everyone 
  on the team is a seasoned pro, used to working 
  smoothly as a unit.  They never take on jobs that are 
  too flashy, they keep the cops paid off, they always 
  give the Mafia its cut and they never defy the local 
  mob Capo.   
       Bones is still nominally the team’s leader and the 
  boys do still give him money and visit him in prison 
  from time to time, but these days he doesn’t really 
  have much influence over what they do.  His boy 
  sidekick, Double Deuce (now in his forties) is the only 
  original team member left.   
       The Four Deuces mostly specialize in robbery and 
  hijacking.  They like to pull a few really big jobs every 
  year, all up and down the East Coast.  In between they 
  plan, rest up, tend their individual criminal schemes 
  and sometimes run errands for the Mafia.  They do 
  assassinations for hire and they may be willing to 
  perform bodyguard work as well, especially if the 
  Mob asks them to.  If superheroes cause the Mafia too 
  much grief, this is the team they’ll send in to stop 
  them.   
   
  Threat Level: The current incarnation of the 
  Four Deuces is about the best and most effective line-
  up they’ve had.  It’s also lasted the longest, although 
  Double Deuce now plans to kill off its two newest 
  members.  
       Not a threat to world peace and security, they don’t  
   
  have any broader goals than getting rich and staying 
  that way. No individual member has the ability to 
  knock down skyscrapers or blow up Manhattan. Yet 
  they are arguably far more dangerous than a lot of 
  teams with much greater raw power, because they 
  work together so effectively and plan so well.  
  Everybody knows their own role, everybody does it 
  without question and as a result, this version of the 
  Four Deuces works like a well-oiled machine.  
       Exceedingly ruthless, they won’t hesitate to kill, to 
  take hostages or to threaten a hero’s friends and 
  family.  Their connections with organized crime make 
  them doubly dangerous.   
   
  Organization: Bones set the rules up carefully.  
  There are supposed to be only four of them, and 
  they’re supposed to name themselves after the four 
  deuces in a pack of cards.  They aren’t supposed to 
  know anything at all about one another apart from 
  their code names.   
       In the eighteen years since Bones was sent away to 
  prison, all of these rules have gotten weaker.  There 
  are now five of them, plus Bones, they know way too 
  much about one another and even their names don’t 
  really follow the convention anymore.   But these days 
  the Deuces barely even need a set of formal rules. 
  Everyone already knows that they shouldn’t blab any 
  of the team’s secrets to outsiders, show up for a caper 
  late or inebriated, do things that will draw too much 
  attention to the crew, or attack a teammate while 
  they’re on the job.  The penalty for most of these 
  mistakes is death, although none of them would ever 
  be unprofessional enough to commit them (with the 
  possible exception of Diamond Deuce, but he’s much 
  too scared of the Steel Deuce to screw up in front of 
  him).   
       Double Deuce is the ideas man—a genius at 
  conceiving a heist, paranormally gifted at seeing the 
  flaws in security systems, he plans nearly all their 
  crimes. Whenever the team finds itself in a combat 
  situation, the Ace of Wounds temporarily takes over 
  the leadership role.  He’s a superb small-unit tactician, 
  trained by some of the best minds in the US armed 
  forces and he knows exactly how to use everyone’s 
  abilities to the greatest advantage.  In all other matters, 
  the Steel Deuce has the final say.  He’s the smartest 
  and arguably the most ruthless of them, and he’s the 
  one all the others are scared of.  He owns the bar 
  where they meet, he invests their money for them and 
  he deals with the mob on their behalf.  They know not 
  to defy him and he in turn knows not to interfere with 
  them in their areas of expertise.    
       Double-Deuce frequently takes on jobs outside of 
  the crew, and the Steel Deuce constantly does—in fact 
  the team is just one of his ongoing criminal 
  enterprises.  Lady Deuce may take on the occasional 
  outside job, and certainly has some other identity 
  ready and waiting to step into the moment she leaves 
  her comrades behind.  Diamond Deuce and the Ace of 
  Wounds, on the other hand, have no professional life 
  outside the team, because the former is too stupid and 
  
    
  the latter is a pariah in the underworld.  
       Double Deuce and the Steel Deuce don’t kill their 
  own team members after every heist—that would 
  cause too much disruption and would force them to 
  constantly readjust their tactics.  An average Deuce 
  lasts about a year until they figure he knows too 
  much.   This version of the team has lasted a lot longer 
  than most.  Their newest member, the Ace of Wounds, 
  has now been with them for two years.  Double 
  Deuce’s trigger finger grows itchy…   
   
  Base of Operations:  People sometimes ask 
  Bones how he came up with the team's name.  He 
  always tells them: "The thing with the four deuces is, 
  that's a low and dirty hand that almost always wins."   
       This may be a cool answer, but it's a lie. The team 
  is actually named after the crummy waterfront bar 
  they hang around.  A friend of Bones named Red 
  Morgan owned it, but more recently the Steel Deuce 
  bought the place.   
       It used the be that the “Four Deuces Lounge” was 
  down by the water, far away from everything else, but 
  during the boom of the 1990s the area around it got 
  built up. Now you reach the bar by turning down a 
  narrow alley into a dank and sunless courtyard. It has 
  an unsavory reputation and the locals never go there at 
  certain hours of the night.   
       The bar itself is surprisingly big, although there 
  never seems to be much business.  It’s booths are done 
  up in tacky red vinyl and there is nasty scuffed red 
  carpet on the floor.  The pinball machines work 
  indifferently.  A shady looking fat Irish guy called 
  “Red Junior” tends bar during the day. His eyes don’t 
  point in the same direction and he talks too much.  At 
  night the bar is tended by a huge black dude with an 
  eyepatch and a crooked scar across one side of his 
  face.  He never gives his name, and says nothing.   
       The Steel Deuce and his crew meet in the back 
  room, surrounded by boxes of liquor and cartons of 
  cigarettes.  A small apartment above the bar 
  (reachable from the street or the back room) provides 
  living space for the Ace of Wounds and for any 
  hostages they may have kidnapped.  There is also a 
  large and cluttered basement, with a concealed tunnel 
  leading out to the water.   
       A trip to the basement tends to be a one-way deal.  
  That’s usually where they kill guys, so as not to have 
  to drag them as far to the water.  There are a lot of 
  empty barrels, and a surprising number of bags of 
  cement down there, as well as a nasty-smelling little 
  room with a steel door, which contains nothing but a 
  bathtub and a shelf with a chainsaw and some bolt 
  cutters sitting on it.  The tools are stained and crusted 
  with things you don’t want to know about.   
       Should superheroes chase the Four Deuces out of 
  their lair, they will meet in the back room of any of 
  another half dozen bars, restaurants or adult 
  bookstores that the Steel Deuce owns, either in 
  Brooklyn or in Queens.  The Deuces aren’t as 
  comfortable in Queens as they are in Brooklyn and 
  won’t go there unless the heat is really on something 
  fierce.  Should the Steel Deuce’s financial empire 
  come crashing down around his ears, leaving them 
  with no base of operations, they’ll meet at Diamond 
  Deuce’s big, tacky house up in the Long Island 
  suburbs.  Really all they need is a secluded place to 
  meet, plan and possibly to kill people.   
   
  Tactics:  The Ace of Wounds’ keen tactical sense 
  is one of the team’s greatest assets.  In a combat 
  situation they smoothly coordinate their attacks, 
  backing one another up as needed.  
       In a typical attack pattern the Diamond Deuce will 
  fling himself at the biggest, toughest opponent, 
  distracting the opposing team while everybody else 
  gets into position.   
       The Ace of Wounds will hang back and coordinate 
  the attack, hitting targets at a distance with his sniper 
  rifle.   
       The Steel Deuce will provide cover for the more 
  lightly armored team members, moving into an 
  offensive position when he can see that they’re safe.   
       Double-Deuce will try to come to grips with an 
  opponent who would be particularly vulnerable to his 
  attack—guys in powered armor are his favorites.   
       Lady Deuce will coordinate her power with one of 
  the other low-powered members of her team, shutting 
  down the parahuman defenses of a target just before 
  the Ace of Wounds puts a bullet in them or the Steel 
  Deuce gouges them up.  She tends not to coordinate 
  with Double-Deuce, since their powers have a similar 
  effect.   
       Although that’s a typical pattern, they can vary 
  their tactics completely if it’s what’s called for.   They 
  love to set ambushes, they love to hit the target by 
  surprise, they love to pull fake retreats that draw the 
  enemy into a vulnerable position.   
       They will hit opponents when they’re down, they’ll 
  shoot people who are trying to surrender, they’ll take 
  hostages if need be, they’ll endanger innocents so that 
  the Player Characters have to go rescue them rather 
  than continue the fight—they play to win.   Yet they 
  won’t hold their ground if it looks hopeless.  Nor will 
  they hang onto the loot if dropping it ensures a clean 
  getaway.  There’s always more stuff out there to steal.   
   
  Using The Four Deuces in your 
  campaign: The Four Deuces are a good recurring 
  nemesis for east coast campaigns.  They’re tough and 
  durable, ready to come back for more punishment 
  again and again.  As both thieves and mercenary 
  supervillains they can be involved in almost any kind 
  of criminal activity.   Player Characters can try to foil 
  one of their crimes, run afoul of them while breaking 
  up a mob operation or face them as the minions of a 
  master villain or a crime boss.   
       Primarily an East Coast outfit, they feel most 
  comfortable operating in the New York metropolitan 
  area, and especially in what’s left of the old Irish and 
  Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn.  Yet if Double 
  Deuce sees the opportunity for a good heist, or if the 
  Mafia sends them out to kill somebody, the crew may 
  find itself anywhere on earth.  Diamond Deuce whines 
  
    
  a lot whenever they go overseas—he finds other 
  countries incomprehensible and terrifying, but then 
  again he feels the same way about Los Angeles.  
       Once the PCs get to know the opposition a little 
  better, you can start introducing plot complications 
  based on their back-stories.  The individual characters 
  have a lot of potential plot hooks. What happens when 
  Fat Tony D’Ambrosio comes back to finish off the 
  Ace of Wounds?  Or when Double Deuce decides it’s 
  time to eliminate the two new team-members?  Or 
  when Lady Deuce finally finds her long lost cousin 
  Miranda?   
       One of the best (but most complicated) wrinkles 
  you can add is the whole question of what’s going to 
  happen once Bones gets out of prison.  We have some 
  notes on that below, under Bones' individual entry, but 
  feel free to do whatever seems best for your campaign.   
   
  Adventures With the Four Deuces: 
   
  1) A Contract With God  
       They say the Steel Deuce could corrupt God 
  himself, and he’s about to prove it.  He finds out about 
  a shipment of stuffed toys that will be passing through 
  a particular warehouse just before Christmas. These 
  particular toys, the “Power Ponies and Magical 
  Friends” are going to be this year’s top seller—by 
  Christmas eve every parent will be desperate to have 
  one and there won’t be any for sale.  The Four Deuces 
  intend to help themselves to a pocket full of Power 
  Ponies in advance, and make a killing at Christmas 
  time.   
       But what would the Christmas season be without 
  God?  They need a big distraction to make his plan 
  work, and who better than God to cause a really big 
  one?  The Steel Deuce finds the telepathic cult leader 
  who goes by that name (see his individual description, 
  elsewhere in this book) and smooth-talks poor weak-
  willed God into going along with his plan.  God will 
  appear at the Christmas Carnival across the river from 
  the warehouse, cause pandemonium, draw down 
  enough police attention that their response time will be 
  compromised enough for the Steel Deuce to get out 
  before the alarms draw them down on top of him.      
       Then God will hypnotize people into thinking they 
  saw all five Deuces at the carnival, right when the 
  robbery was taking place across the river.   It’s not a 
  bad plan, but it’s God’s first major crime and he 
  makes hideous mistakes. He shows up too late, he 
  panics at the sight of the cops and orders the 
  mesmerized crowd to attack them. The whole affair 
  turns into a bloodbath, with innocent civilians and 
  police getting killed left and right. He also forgets to 
  implant the fake memories in anyone’s mind.   
       Meanwhile, because the heist started late, the 
  warehouse robbery gets under way before the 
  distraction starts, the police show up and the Four 
  Deuces have to kill six of them.  Everyone gets away, 
  but the whole debacle turns into front page news.  God 
  will pay for this.   
       Meanwhile, God has fled back to his fortified 
  compound upstate, announced to his cultists that the 
  end of the world is nigh and prepared for the coming 
  siege.   
       The Player Characters may have gotten involved at 
  any stage in the unfolding drama, but they should 
  certainly arrive for the grand finale—the siege of 
  Heaven. Both the state and federal authorities have 
  surrounded the compound, they don’t work well 
  together and they’re making a mess of it.  The Four 
  Deuces have put a contract out on God, and who 
  knows what kind of supervillain scum may turn up to 
  collect.  God has more than one hundred brainwashed 
  faithful who will gladly act as human shields or carry 
  out suicide attacks on their besiegers.  And then just as 
  things look like they couldn’t get any worse, the Four 
  Deuces enter the fray.   
   
  2) Four Deuces Beats a Full House 
       One of America’s mightiest heroes, Captain 
  Valiant himself, has been laid low by an unknown 
  assailant.  He’s in a hospital in New York City, 
  unconscious, barely able to breathe.   
       Despite the best efforts of the NYC authorities, the 
  news has slipped out, and the consequences could be 
  disastrous—who knows who or what might show up at 
  the hospital looking for revenge?  The authorities beg 
  the Player Characters for help.  They have a squad of 
  officers ready to protect Captain Valiant’s room, but 
  they’re afraid that this might just tip off his enemies as 
  to which room he is in. Anything might be coming to 
  finish the job, and they might not stand a chance 
  against it.  Whatever it is, if it felled Captain Valiant, 
  it’s big.   
       For most PC groups this scenario should happen 
  before the players realize just what a jerk Captain 
  Valiant really is.  However, if you think your players 
  would feel conflicted about guarding somebody they 
  dislike, but would do their best to protect him anyway, 
  then by all means play that card—it will make the 
  scenario seem much richer.   
       In fact the Four Deuces have knocked Captain 
  Valiant out of action—he surprised them robbing a 
  truck full of cigarettes and Double Deuce got close 
  enough to him to blow some powdered glass up his 
  nose (“Gee, I guess his lungs wasn’t all that 
  bulletproof.”)  The Deuces left him for dead, and were 
  shocked to see him turn up on the news.   
       They hate the idea of doing such a high profile hit, 
  but what choice do they have?  He saw them.  
       Before they show up themselves, they’ll try to get a 
  patsy to do it.  God owes them a favor and although 
  God would normally be no match for Captain Valiant, 
  He might be able to get the man’s doctors to poison 
  him or something of the sort.  God will make a sincere 
  effort to kill the comatose captain, but will flee at the 
  first sign of serious trouble from the PCs.   
       Once he has failed, the Four Deuces will come 
  themselves, hitting the PCs in the dead of night with 
  as much strategic sense as possible.  A hospital is full 
  of good hostages and hideous distractions.  Perhaps 
  they call the PCs in Captain Valiant’s room and 
  threaten to unleash Diamond Deuce on an operating 
  
    
  theatre with a live patient in it—or to send Lady 
  Deuce up to the children’s ward.   
       Meanwhile, other villains may be heading to New 
  York from all across the country, eager for a slice of 
  Captain Valiant.  Use as many of them as you think 
  appropriate.  Some of them may actually be willing to 
  fight the Four Deuces, to make sure they get the first 
  swipe at Captain Valiant.   
       At a certain point in the proceedings the patient 
  may wake up, and suddenly spring to the PCs’ rescue 
  at the last second.  Or he may mistake them for 
  attackers and wreck everything at the last second.   
       Whatever happens, Captain Valiant takes the credit 
  for the whole adventure.  On the news, they say he 
  fended off a wave of superhuman assailants from his 
  hospital bed.  Even incapacitated, he was more than a 
  match for anything the forces of villainy might throw 
  at him.   
       If the PCs ask the new York authorities why that 
  was their official story, they hastily explain that it was 
  to protect the PCs.  It looks as though the attackers had 
  strong ties to organized crime.  Captain Valiant lives 
  with that kind of danger every day, but they can’t ask 
  the PCs to take a risk like that.  They’ve already done 
  enough.  Captain Valiant is unavailable for comment. 
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Double Deuce 
  Real Name: Peter "Little Pete" Scarpia 
  PL: 11 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 20 (+5) Con: 16 (+3) 
  Int: 12 (+1) Wis: 14 (+2) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +9 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +11 Defense: 
  +21/+16 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +3/+5 (Evasion) Fortitude 
  Save: +3 Reflexes Save: +7 Willpower 
  Save: +4   
  Skills: Balance +8, Bluff+6, Escape Artist +8, 
  Intimidate +8, Hide+8, Listen +5,  Move Silently +8, 
  Sense Motive +5, Taunt +8 
  Feats: Assessment, Connected, Dodge, Evasion, 
  Expertise, Improved Initiative, Iron Will, Lightning 
  Reflexes, Penetrating Attack x5 (Light-Caliber pistol),  
  Penetrating Attack x6 (Knife), Power Attack, Surprise 
  Attack, Throwing Mastery 
  Powers: Disintegration +10 (Extra: Subtle [the 
  affected object will break down and cease to function, 
  irreperably ruined, but it won't actually disappear into 
  thin air]; Flaws: Will not work on any object with the 
  "Impervious" Extra, Must actually touch the object to 
  make it disintegrate; Cost: 1pt), Drain +5 (Flaw: Only 
  works against the power "Protection"; Cost: 1pt),  
   
  Strike +5 (Cost: 2pts) 
  Equipment: Knife (+5 Lethal; Cost: 1pt), Light 
  Caliber Pistol (+5 Lethal; Cost: 1pt) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Adheres absolutely to the 
  Mafia code.  Will not under any circumstances rat out 
  a fellow criminal, call the police for assistance (no 
  matter how dire the situation) or defy the word of a 
  "Made Man." 
   
  “Say, I wonder how bulletproof your 
  eyelids are?”  
   
       A nasty, vicious little man, and one of the greatest 
  thieves alive.  He’s committed some of the biggest 
  heists on the East Coast, and he’s always on the 
  lookout for something even more spectacular.  In love 
  with his own sinister reputation, he courts the press as 
  much as he can.   
       Just to taunt the authorities, he always leaves a 2 of 
  Spades at the scene of his thefts.  He can’t always 
  leave one at the scene of every murder he commits, 
  since there are too many of them and he tends to do it 
  without any advance planning.  But he tries.   
       He would love to be seen as a dashing gentleman 
  thief, romantic, suave and debonair.  He gives money 
  to the bank tellers he robs (if they’re pretty and he 
  hasn’t killed them).  He sends roses to the cops who 
  chase him.  He sometimes throws money into the 
  crowd at Times Square on New Year’s Eve.  To a 
  certain extent the press buys this act, since it makes 
  good copy.  Yet in fact he’s anything but a gentleman.  
       Not actually from Brooklyn, he grew up in Queens, 
  in the Mob haven of Bensonhurst.  His father was a 
  bus driver who wanted to be respectable, and beat his 
  four sons savagely if he thought they were hanging 
  around with the neighborhood’s bad element.  They 
  weren’t at first, but he beat them anyway, constantly 
  accusing them of being thieves and hoodlums in their 
  hearts.  It wasn’t long before little Pete started to catch 
  and torture animals, and to start dreaming of being a 
  gangster just to spite his pop.   
       His older brother Vinnie started cutting school to 
  hang around the Mob guys at the corner drugstore.  
  Pete joined him from time to time, and the two of 
  them began running messages and minor errands for 
  the drugstore guys.  Pop caught on eventually and beat 
  both boys until they could barely walk. But as soon as 
  he could, Vinnie was back at the drugstore.    
       He asked his new friends if they would help him 
  get even with his Pop, and they found the idea hugely 
  amusing.  So, on Christmas Eve some goons picked 
  Pete and Vinnie’s dad up after work, terrorized him, 
  broke his nose and told him not to mess with Vinnie 
  again.   
       For the next three days Pop lay on the couch and 
  wouldn’t speak.  Then he marched all four of his sons 
  down under the El tracks and shot them each in the 
  head.  Ma wept and wrung her hands, but she knew 
  her man and she knew better than to interfere.   
       Little Pete lay on the ground with a bullet in his 
  brain, seeing weird new colors as he bled into the 
  snow, but he did not die.  In fact the bullet had done 
  something strange to him—hurt his brain in some 
  ways but changed it in others.  Stepping over his dead 
  brothers, the little boy stumbled through the frigid 
  streets, no longer able to smell or to see certain colors 
  (or to feel certain things like remorse) but suddenly 
  able to perceive the weak spots, the fracture points in 
  everything.  
       This was a wonderful Christmas gift his father had 
  given him, and he couldn’t wait to repay the man.  
  Later he would go down to the drugstore and show 
  Vinnie’s friends what he could do.  But first it was 
  time to make an orphan of himself.   
       Pete spent the rest of his childhood as a Mafia 
  mascot when he wasn’t in Juvenile Hall. They called 
  him “Double Deuce” (slang for a .22 caliber pistol) 
  because of his small size and explosive temper.   
       At first he just fetched and carried for the big guys, 
  but it wasn’t long before the Mob supervillain known 
  as “Bones” noticed the kid’s superhuman aptitude for 
  breaking stuff, and took him under his wing.  Double 
  Deuce’s ability also let him see the weak points in 
  things like security systems, so he became Bones’ idea 
  man as well as his hot tempered little sidekick.   
       Bones gradually put together a powerful crew of 
  superhuman toughs, who became the Four Deuces.  
  The only original member of the team left, Double 
  Deuce stuck with it longer than any of the others.   
  
    
       Unlike most members of the team, Double Deuce 
  was in fact a pure-bred Sicilian, and although his 
  family wasn’t “connected” he probably could have 
  risen as high in the Mafia hierarchy as his intellect and 
  ruthlessness would allow.  Everyone thinks he stuck 
  with the team and gave up the opportunity to be a full-
  fledged Mafioso out of loyalty to Bones, but the truth 
  is that Double Deuce doesn’t have those kinds of 
  feelings about anyone. He just likes stealing stuff and 
  has no inclination toward running things.     
       Double Deuce does indeed look on Bones as a 
  father, but that doesn’t mean the same thing to him as 
  it does to you and me (I hope).  For a while he visited 
  Bones every week in prison, but that was because they 
  had business to discuss.  
       Quick to take offense, vengeful and cruel, he veers 
  between wild affability and terrifying sudden violence. 
  He’s a lot of fun to be around—a regular party animal.  
  He tells good stories, he pays for all the drinks, he 
  leaves huge tips.  Outrageous and irresponsible, he’s 
  the kind of guy you could call up at two in the 
  morning to go play some insane prank on somebody.    
       Always laughing and telling jokes, Double Deuce 
  is prone to sudden, random acts of generosity.   But 
  he’s just as prone to impulsive acts of unspeakable 
  cruelty.  He kills people for saying he’s short, for 
  showing him disrespect, for wearing flashier clothes 
  than he has on, and often for no discernable reason at 
  all.  Anything can set him off, especially when he’s 
  been doing coke, and no one is safe from his anger.    
       On a job, he’s crazy mean.  He’d sooner kill a bank 
  teller than leave them alive.  He’d rather torture a 
  captive than not do it.  He comes up with excuses to 
  do the most blood-curdling things, and his teammates 
  sigh and shrug their shoulders.  What can they do?  
  He’s their little Double-Deuce, and everyone knows 
  that Double Deuce just does stuff like that.   
       Because of his peculiar ability to see the weak 
  spots in security systems and in other peoples’ plans, 
  Double Deuce is the team’s idea man as well as their 
  resident loose cannon.    
       A hair-trigger killer who has no honor, principles, 
  or moral scruples of any kind—he’d sooner murder his 
  teammates than pay them, because it’s cheaper.  He’s 
  the chief reason for the team’s high turnover rate, and 
  always seems to have a ready excuse to kill some new 
  ally or hireling when the job is done.   
       By now the other two long-term team members, 
  Diamond Deuce and the Steel Deuce, know that he’d 
  rather take a life than not, and they listen to him with a 
  little more skepticism.  Only the fact that they’re more 
  physically powerful than he is has kept them safe.  
  That, and the fact that he’s fallen into the habit of not 
  trying to kill them.   
       Even though he’s just a little guy, he looks like a 
  menace.  His head is shaved, the lower-right part of 
  his face is covered with disfiguring scars (a rival 
  slashed him up really bad, years ago). He has four 
  gold teeth in front, which you can see every time he 
  flashes his nasty grin. His body is covered with 
  jailhouse tattoos, some of which bleed up onto his 
  neck.  He looks like he’s had a lot of time to work 
  out—probably in a cell-block exercise yard.  A bullet 
  hole marks one side of his skull.  He dresses with 
  expensive bad taste, favoring five hundred dollar blue 
  or black silk shirts with solid red ties.  He wears a lot 
  of jewelry and has a huge gold hoop earring.    
   
  Adventures With Double Deuce:  
   
  1) That Certain Special Spot You Know so Well  
       Double Deuce has found something amazing.  
  There’s a weak spot in the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, 
  a single point no bigger than a dime that could make 
  the whole thing collapse within two hours if you 
  poked it hard enough.   
       He can’t resist the temptation and he gives the spot 
  a poke.  Then he panics, grabs some poor random guy 
  off the street, and forces him to call a Player 
  Character, tell them what’s about to happen and beg 
  them to stop it.  When he’s finished, Double Deuce 
  sticks a paper clip in the guy’s brain and leaves him 
  dead in the phone booth.   
       Always quick to seize an opportunity, he calls over 
  a couple of thugs he knows, and the three of them lie 
  in wait, ready to bushwhack the superhero once they 
  finish repairing the bridge.  He plans to get the press to 
  blame the whole incident on the dead hero.   
       If you think Double Deuce wouldn’t pose enough 
  of a threat with his pair of machine-gun-toting mooks, 
  he calls in Lady Deuce, as well.   
       By the time the PC arrives at the bridge, it’s 
  already starting to vibrate pretty badly, but the city 
  authorities haven’t yet taken any action.  It’s not quite 
  rush hour yet, but it will be by the time the bridge 
  starts to shake itself apart.   
       The PC has 80 minutes in which to act.  After that, 
  the bridge will collapse.  Anyone with spellcasting, 
  city-manipulating, cosmic, or earth-animating powers 
  can fix the bridge with two successful consecutive 
  rolls vs. DC 20.  They can try for two consecutive 
  rolls as many times as they like, but each try takes 5 
  minutes and every time they fail two rolls in a row, it 
  actually makes things worse, and speeds up the 
  bridge’s collapse by 20 minutes.  If two characters 
  with any of the appropriate powers collaborate, the 
  DC goes down to 18, but both of them have to make 
  both their rolls for the bridge to be fixed.  If three 
  characters collaborate, the DC drops to a puny 15 and 
  if four or more of them work together then success is 
  automatic within 5 minutes.   
       Anyone who used their powers to fix the bridge can 
  feel that the trouble originated at one spot underneath 
  the Brooklyn terminus.  This of course is where 
  Double Deuce is waiting for them.   
   
  2) Of Sweaters and Splavine 
       A journalist named Marika Splavine has written a 
  book on the New York Mafia, in which she talks a 
  little too much about Double Deuce.  She lives and 
  works in the Player Characters’ home town, which by 
  a coincidence is about to play host to an oil minister 
  from Bahrain and his entourage.   
  
    
       Always one to seize on an opportunity, Double 
  Deuce slips into Miss Splavine’s apartment and leaves 
  her an envelope with the ace of spades in it. As an 
  expert on major criminals, she immediately knows 
  what this means. The police pooh-pooh her concerns, 
  so (just as Double Deuce hopes) she will turn to the 
  PCs for help.   
       If the PCs don’t yet know Double Deuce, she 
  explains to them who he is and what that card means.        
       Meanwhile, Double Deuce recruits a gang of rich 
  teenage preppies who desperately want to be 
  criminals.  He dresses them in matching sweaters and 
  ties and calls them his “Sweater Gang.”  
       He has a few members of the Sweater Gang hang 
  out around her building and look ominous.  A florist 
  delivers a bunch of grave-lilies with an ace of spades 
  tucked into the card and a vaguely threatening poem. 
  Someone leaves a Polaroid photo of Marika sleeping 
  in her bed. The photo appears right in the middle of 
  her coffee table, while no one is looking.     
       Then just as the tension starts to get unbearable, the 
  manager of a swank hotel down the street plummets to 
  his death from one of the upper balconies.  By a freak 
  coincidence, Marika happens to see it. This is the first 
  real mistake Double Deuce has made. For in the 
  meantime, he and the Sweater Gang are planning to 
  rob the suite that Bahrain’s oil minister is staying in, 
  and make off with a fortune in jewels and cocaine.   
       Once the PCs were too preoccupied with protecting 
  Marika Splavine to notice, the Sweater Gang cased the 
  joint, juiced all the information they could out of the 
  hotel manager and threw him off the balcony (making 
  it look as though he slipped on a banana peel—the 
  kind of flourish Double Deuce approves of).  
       They are going to rob the place the very next night, 
  after which Double Deuce will stick around just long 
  enough to kill off all six members of his gang.  Over 
  the next few days two of them will be found burned to 
  death in their dad’s expensive car, one will found dead 
  in a dumpster with a plastic bag over his head, one of 
  them turn up asphyxiated on his parents' huge lawn, 
  with a game of croquet scattered around him and a ball 
  hammered neatly into his mouth by a single 
  inhumanly precise blow.  
       If the PCs don’t manage to foil the robbery in 
  progress, one of the two surviving members of the 
  gang comes to see them a few days later, in fear of his 
  life and eager to tell them where they can find Double 
  Deuce (he’s supposed to meet the kid on the roof of a 
  crummy bar at 11:45). This should lead to a scary 
  midnight chase across some rooftops, and finally to a 
  direct confrontation with their shadowy foe.  But the 
  PCs must be quick and careful, for if they catch 
  Double Deuce he will claim that he has already sent 
  the gang’s last member over to murder Marika 
  Splavine.  He’ll tell them how to stop the kid it time if 
  they let him go.   
       Is he telling the truth?  And has the oil minister 
  from Bahrain become annoyed enough to bring in the 
  Hammer of Doom? 
   
   
   
  
    
  Ace of Wounds 
  Real Name: Silvio Strozzi 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 17 (+3) Dex: 20 (+5) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 13 (+1) Wis: 18 (+4) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +10 Attack Bonus (Melee): 
  +12 Attack Bonus (Ranged): +12 
  Defense: +26/+15 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +6 Fortitude Save: +6 
  Reflexes Save: +10 Willpower Save: +9   
  Skills: Bluff +4, Balance +10, Climb +10, 
  Demolitions +10, Diplomacy +4, Escape Artist +10, 
  Hide +10, Intimidate +5, Knowledge (Military 
  Proceedure) +5, Listen +15, Move Silently +19, 
  Search +11, Sense Motive +6, Spot +18, Survival +5 
  Feats: Accurate Attack, Assessment, Attack 
  Finesse, Dodge, Evasion, Far Shot, Great Fortitude, 
  Iron Will, Point Blank Shot, Power Attack, Precise 
  Shot, Quick Draw, Skill Focus (Move Silently), 
  Takedown Attack, Talented (Listen and Move 
  Silently), Talented (Demolitions and Spot), 
  Toughness, Track 
  Powers: Super-Dexterity+5 (Extras: Super-Senses, 
  Super-Strength, Super-Wisdom; Flaw: Only applies to 
  skill checks; Cost: 9pts) 
  Equipment: Body Armor +8 (Cost: 1pt), Pistol 
  (+3 Lethal Damage), Specially Modified Sniper Rifle 
  (+10 Lethal Damage) 
   
  “You’re dying.  Now be quiet and do it 
  like a man.”  
   
       Silvio Strozzi was marked by his last name.   
  Growing up in his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, 
  everyone who heard that name could tell at once that 
  his father’s family came from Toscano in northern 
  Italy. Forever denied a place in the Mafia by his 
  tainted ancestry, he avoided crime altogether as there 
  was no percentage in it.  The problem was, in his 
  neighborhood there wasn’t much percentage in 
  anything else, either.   
       He avoided the youth gangs, since time wasted 
  with them was time he couldn’t spend delivering 
  newspapers or sweeping out shops or making money 
  any other way he could.  His schoolmates resented his 
  high-and-mighty attitude and soon he came to take his 
  lumps from them on a regular basis.  He had to 
  become a brawler, though he resented the amount of 
  time he had to waste on learning to box and lifting 
  weights.   
       Since he had no gang affiliation to protect him, he 
  wound up spending increasing amounts of time 
  incapacitated with injuries. By his seventeenth 
  birthday he was sure that this was a losing battle, so he 
  joined the Army and expected to leave the 
  neighborhood behind forever. It was not to be.  
       Silvio excelled as a soldier.  Tough, disciplined, 
  smart and ready to follow orders, his ambition and his 
  quiet self-control took him far.  He was an obvious 
  choice for commando school and quickly became first 
  a Ranger, and then a member of a secret, super-elite 
  shadow unit called “Team Seven”. Even on Team 
  Seven he was exceptional.  By the time he was thirty-
  five he was about as tough a guy as the Armed forces 
  had at its disposal.  
       Somewhere along the way he learned to love his 
  country and gained a sense of honor.  It embarrassed 
  him to think about his origins, not because they were 
  humble, but because it pained him to remember the 
  grasping little hustler he had been.   
       Then on a disastrous covert mission to Syria, he 
  lost an eye.  He was lucky—most of the other guys in 
  the unit got killed or crippled, but not quite lucky 
  enough.  For the Army’s rules were clear. The loss of 
  an eye constituted a disabling injury, so they had to 
  retire him.   
       A lifer with nowhere else to go, Silvio found 
  himself back in his room in his Mom’s apartment in 
  Brooklyn. He didn’t have any friends outside Team 
  Seven (and since their real names were all classified 
  there was no way to get in touch with them) or a lot of 
  skills apart from shooting people.  Worse, because so 
  much of the work he had done was classified, there 
  was a huge hole in his employment record, which 
  anyone who saw his muscles and eye-patch was going 
  to assume he had spent in prison.  But he wasn’t one 
  for self-pity, so he picked himself up and got moving.   
       He worked fast food, he worked as a security 
  guard, he pumped gas—for the next two years he 
  never seemed to have less than three crummy jobs at 
  one time.  He figured he’d live with Ma and help her 
  out until he got enough saved from his jobs and his 
  pension to make a go of things.   
       It was easier to fall back into hustling for a buck 
  than he had thought, and the ghost of his former self 
  haunted him more than a little.   
       Guys his age who have lousy jobs and live with 
  their mothers don’t get a lot of dates, but after a while 
  he hooked up with a neighborhood beauty named 
  Theresa (who was way too young for him, but what 
  the Hell) and things started to look a lot better.  The 
  two of them were about halfway to being able to buy a 
  pizza place, when fate smacked them in the head.   
       The kids who used to hassle Silvio were grown 
  men now, but some of them still gave him grief. A lot 
  of the ones who had been deep in the gangs were dead. 
  Some of the others were now made guys.   
       One of them in particular had it in for him—a guy 
  they called Fat Tony D’Ambrosio.  Fat Tony was an 
  obnoxious slob who women didn’t like, and it galled 
  him that a nothing like Silvio could have a girl like 
  Theresa.  So he raped her, and messed up her face.   
       A few days later, it occurred to Fat Tony that Silvio 
  was a big tough looking guy, and that he might want 
  revenge, so he went by the Strozzi's apartment with 
  some of the boys.  They set the building on fire and 
  shot anyone who tried to get out.  The cops and 
  
    
  firemen knew to stay away, so the incident claimed the 
  lives of six people, including Silvio’s mother, uncle 
  and little brother.   
       Silvio wasn’t home—he was spending another 
  fruitless night trying to get Theresa to talk to him.  The 
  next day he came back, stood in the ashes of his Ma’s 
  building and wondered what to do next.  It was then 
  that a guy called Double Deuce approached him, 
  expressed his sympathies and put a gun in his hand.  
       Silvio didn’t really care about revenge.  He’d seen 
  too many guys do too many stupid things over 
  Vendetta to believe in it.  But it was clear to him that 
  he was now a marked man, and that with the Mafia out 
  to kill him, there was nowhere on earth to hide. So he 
  pretended to be grateful and he asked Double Deuce 
  what he wanted in return.   
       In fact the Four Deuces had been casually keeping 
  an eye on Silvio for some time.  They had fought 
  Team Seven once and guessed the rough details of his 
  background, knew he could be an asset and were eager 
  to find a way to recruit him.  Now they had a ready-
  made opportunity.   
       Double Deuce told Silvio that the Four Deuces 
  could protect him from the wrath of the D’Ambrosios, 
  and that they’d help him get revenge just as soon as 
  they could.  In the meantime, he’d help them out in 
  return.  To take revenge against an outfit like the 
  D’Ambrosios, they were going to need money and a 
  lot of it.   
       Silvio was about ninety-five percent certain that 
  this was some kind of con, but the part about having 
  protection sounded good, so he negotiated protection 
  for Theresa and the surviving Strozzis into the deal. 
  He also wanted Double Deuce’s assurances that they 
  wouldn’t kill any innocent people.  Double Deuce 
  enthusiastically agreed, thinking to himself that no one 
  was exactly innocent.   
       On their first heist Double Deuce saved the Silvio's 
  life, gunning down an off-duty police officer who got 
  the drop on Silvio while they were robbing an armored 
  car.  On their next outing, The Ace of Wounds saw a 
  bank guard catch Double Deuce flatfooted, and he 
  owed Double Deuce his life, so despite his 
  reservations he killed the man.  And now he'd done it--
  he'd killed an innocent person--a working stiff like 
  himself who'd just been doing his job.  Killing 
  “innocent” people got easier and easier with each 
  passing crime.   
       For the past two years Double Deuce has been 
  telling Silvio that they’ll take on the D’Ambrosios just 
  as soon as they’re strong enough, and while he doesn’t 
  believe the Deuce (or want to kill any D'Ambrosios), 
  Silvio tries to look interested.  He doesn’t know that 
  Double Deuce thinks he may get wise soon, and is 
  planning to kill him before it happens. He should have 
  noticed that his name “The Ace of Wounds” sets him a 
  little apart from the permanent members of the crew, 
  reminding them not to get too attached to him.   
       Life is surprisingly good for Silvio right now.  
  Theresa still won’t talk to him, but there are other girls 
  who hang around the team and Lady Deuce is willing 
  to let him sleep with her from time to time.  He has 
  money in his pocket and for the moment he’s safe. 
  The Ace of Wounds would in fact be willing to stay 
  loyal to the team forever, despite having no illusions 
  about who they are, if Double Deuce weren’t about to 
  have him killed.  
       In person, Silvio Strozzi is quiet, confident and 
  somewhat guarded. He won’t kill anybody without a 
  good reason, but he’s not dumb enough to question 
  Double Deuce’s behavior, either. A charming guy 
  when he wants to be, he can tell a good joke or a 
  funny anecdote, but for the most part he hangs back 
  and watches the room, ready for signs of danger or of 
  something he might turn to his advantage.   
       He’s a brutally effective combatant, a superb 
  tactician who doesn't care a thing for fighting fair and 
  always gives himself every advantage in a battle. Not 
  as powerful as some of the actual superhumans he 
  fights, he wears a lot of body armor and tries to hit 
  super-opponents from a distance, taking them by 
  surprise if he can.   
       He occasionally tortured people during his stint 
  with Team Seven, but he doesn’t like doing it, and will 
  always let someone else do it if it has to be done.  God 
  knows there are enough guys in the Four Deuces who 
  enjoy it more than he does. If faced with a choice 
  between taking a hostage and losing his freedom, he 
  would pick going to jail, to his own enormous surprise 
  and relief.    
   
  Adventures With the Ace of Wounds: 
   
  1) Ace of Fools 
       Theresa vanishes.  The Ace of Wounds is 
  convinced that Fat Tony must have taken her, but he 
  doesn’t dare try to go get her back—if he picks a fight 
  with the D’Ambrosios on his own, Double Deuce is 
  sure to have him killed.  In desperation, knowing that 
  he doesn’t have much time, he gets in touch with the 
  Player Characters (possibly by setting a fire or 
  committing some other big crime that he knows will 
  get their attention).   
       When they show up, he apologizes for the 
  commotion (if he had to cause one) and offers to turn 
  himself in if the PCs will listen to him.  He tells them 
  his whole story, even though it will blow his secret 
  identity, leaving out only the parts that might expose 
  the other Deuces.  He needs the PCs to get Theresa 
  back and he’ll do anything at all if they do it for him.  
  He’ll turn states evidence, he’ll wear a wire to a Four 
  Deuces meet, he’ll do whatever they say.   
       Unfortunately, when the PCs arrive at Fat Tony’s 
  restaurant (called “Fat Tony’s) they find that the 
  D’Ambrosios are presently engaged in a nervous sit-
  down meeting with a Russian gang.   
       It’s important to remember here that Fat Tony, 
  while he is a “made guy” is not a capo.  In fact he’s 
  kind of a lowly, unpopular guy in the mob hierarchy, 
  largely because of the way he treats women.  All eight 
  of his brothers and cousins are present at the meeting, 
  heavily armed and ready to kill, but he doesn’t have 
  hordes of loyal gunsels ready to die for him.  Could a 
  
    
  guy like Silvio Strozzi wipe them out all by himself?  
  Probably, but then the mob would come kill what’s 
  left of his family and anyway he’s never seen the 
  point.   
       The Russian gang under Crazy Joe Snagarov is a 
  little bigger, and has about twelve active members 
  present.  That’s still more than enough thugs in total to 
  give the PCs a lively time when they come bursting 
  into the room.   
       Meanwhile, Theresa prepares to get on a bus at the 
  Port Authority Terminal with her new boyfriend.  His 
  name is Markie Savanelli, and he’s an auto mechanic 
  with a huge disfiguring birthmark covering one side of 
  his face.  He’s a pretty nice guy, strong, shy and quiet.   
       One of Fat Tony’s cousins knows all about this, 
  and when the PCs demand to know where Theresa is, 
  he laughingly tells them.  Silvio has found out too, and 
  he’s headed down to the Port Authority right now.  
  The PCs may well want to try and stop him, before he 
  does something crazy.  But the truth is that he really 
  just wants to see her one more time, and maybe, if he 
  has a chance and she doesn’t look too scared, to say 
  goodbye.  
       The future looks uncertain for the Ace of Wounds.  
  He’s changed his mind about turning himself in, but 
  even though the PCs didn’t actually rescue Theresa he 
  will keep his word about everything else, and will give 
  the PCs any information they may want about the Four 
  Deuces.  Unfortunately, if Fat Tony has died in the 
  fight then Double Deuce will assume that his hold 
  over Silvio is dead as well, and the Ace of Wounds 
  will soon find himself making one last trip to the 
  basement. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Lady Deuce 
  Real Name: Eliza Agani (but she 
  seldom uses it, and instead goes by a 
  huge number of aliases) 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 18 (+4) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 16 (+3) Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +14 Defense: 
  +26/+22 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +8 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +4 Willpower Save: +5   
  Skills: Bluff +6, Diplomacy +5, Forgery +5, Hide 
  +8, Intimidate +8, Pick Lock +4 
  Feats: Assessment, Attack Focus (Armed), 
  Connected, Detect Parahumans, Dodge, Expertise, 
  Iron Will, Indomitable Will, Penetrating Attack x2 
  (Knife) 
  Powers: Neutralize Power +12 (Extras: 
  Neutralizing Field, Nulification [does not require 
  concentration to maintain]; Cost: 5pts), Amazing Save 
  (Damage) +4 
  Equipment: Big Scary Knife (+5 Lethal), Big 
  Scary Gun (+5 Lethal), +2 Armor 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Sadist (Commits shocking 
  acts of cruelty, would sooner take a life than not) 
   
  “Close your eyes, honey.  I’ve got a 
  surprise for you.”   
   
       Sometimes, for one reason or another, the Four  
  Deuces will need to kill a child.  In a case like this, 
  they always give them to Lady Deuce.  Not that the 
  Steel Deuce would object to killing kids himself, but it 
  doesn’t fit his image and she enjoys it so much more.   
       And this fact sums her up pretty well.  A 
  vindictive, clear-eyed sadist, there is nothing Lady 
  Deuce isn’t capable of.  Nothing at all.  She kills, she 
  maims, she mutilates, she glories in it.  But even 
  though she’s actually more vicious than Double 
  Deuce, she’s also in much better command of herself, 
  and never lets her love of carnage and pain get in the 
  way of her objectives.  She does prefer to kill children, 
  (because they’re small and helpless and sometimes 
  trust her), but she would never stalk and murder them 
  in her spare time—that would be stupid.   
       Her age is difficult to judge, as is her nationality.  
  She could be anywhere from her mid twenties to a 
  well-preserved thirty-five (in fact she’s forty).  She 
  can pass for Turkish, Italian, Arabic, Greek or 
  Hispanic (in fact she’s of Albanian ancestry).   
       Her mother was a career criminal, who taught her 
  how to lie and steal and do people wrong, in between 
  stints in jail.  When Mom got sent away to prison 
  forever, little Eliza became a ward of the state, 
  spending the rest of her childhood in a variety of foster 
  homes, orphanages and reform schools.   
       A “problem client” she became increasingly prone 
  to acts of wild, destructive cruelty.  Other kids just 
  weren’t safe around her, and her magnetic personality 
  and talent for leadership made her even more 
  dangerous.   
       When she was nine the state authorities managed to 
  locate her father’s family in the run-down Flatbush 
  neighborhood in Brooklyn, so she went to live with a 
  distant aunt, uncle and their four children.  Within a 
  week she had killed their puppy.  Within a month she 
  killed the baby.  She managed to get both episodes 
  blamed on the family’s eldest daughter Miranda (Eliza 
  told Jane, the younger daughter, that she would kill 
  their little brother Sammy if she didn’t back up her 
  story).  Then after Miranda got sent to reform school 
  Eliza killed little Sammy anyway, and it became 
  impossible to conceal what kind of creature she was.  
  So she killed everyone else and burned the house 
  down.   
       After this, it was clear that Eliza was going to 
  spend the rest of her life on the street or in an 
  institutional setting, and even though she liked reform 
  school she chose the street.   There were a lot of street 
  kids in New York in the mid 1970s, living by begging 
  and petty crime and the occasional act of prostitution. 
  It was easy to vanish into their midst.  Arrested and 
  thrown in lockup many times for truancy, no one in 
  the judicial system seemed to figure out that she was 
  the same Eliza Agani who had vanished from the 
  burning house in Flatbush, years before.   
       By the time she was 11 she had killed six more 
  times, for both profit and fun, and had started running 
  with the teenage gangs.  Popular, pretty, charismatic 
  and well-liked, she had her own girl gang by the time 
  she was fifteen and had killed another eight people.       
  Her crew, the Screwhead Chicks, were unusual in that 
  they weren’t just a female adjunct to a male gang.  
  They were a criminal enterprise in their own right, and 
  swiftly became known for their willingness to kill at 
  the drop of a hat.  They dealt speed, they shook down 
  businesses for protection, they even robbed banks    
       In fact they caused such a ruckus in Brooklyn that 
  they attracted the attention of a superhero called Mr. 
  Groovy, who determined to put a stop to their deadly 
  hijinks.  He confronted the Screwhead Chicks in the 
  act of setting a Salvation Army warehouse on fire.  
  Protected by his force field and his bulletproof skin, 
  Mr. Groovy felt pretty confident as he presented 
  himself and demanded that they stop.  He was giving 
  them a lecture on not wasting their lives in a gang, 
  when Eliza stabbed him in the face out of sheer 
  defiance.  To her amazement, he fell down, choked on 
  his own blood and died.  It seemed that she had the 
  power to shut down other parahuman abilities at will, 
  but had never had the chance to find this out before.   
       They burned Mr. Groovy’s body in the warehouse 
  and decided to lie low for a while.  Eliza was already 
  thinking of how she could turn her newfound 
  superhuman ability to her advantage.  Pretty soon she 
  
    
  turned the Screwhead Chicks over to her second in 
  command and started hanging out with the Mafia 
  instead of the gangs.  Her ability to detect superheroes 
  was even more useful than her ability to shut their 
  powers down and the Mob always had a use for her.   
       Over the past twenty-five years her life has been 
  one constant adventure.  She has hung out with one 
  crew or another, taken on freelance criminal work in 
  Russia, Israel, Italy and Hong Kong.  She has done 
  everything from organized credit card fraud to 
  elaborate con jobs to kidnapping to dealing dope, and 
  she loved it all.  She’s also spent a lot of time in 
  prison, but she loves that too.  These days women’s 
  prisons are full of soft young drug offenders who are 
  like meat on a plate to Lady Deuce.  Brooklyn is the 
  closest thing she has to a home, and she always comes 
  back to it.   
       Three years ago she hooked up with Four Deuces 
  and life has been even better.  They’re a tight crew, 
  where everybody knows his job and nobody tries to 
  grab more than their share.   
       In person she is wild, carefree, and hideously cruel.  
  Forthright, confident, charismatic and articulate, she 
  smiles a lot and always looks whoever she is speaking 
  to straight in the eye.  Much more careful than Double 
  Deuce, she never kills or brutalizes anyone 
  impulsively, but she can think of a lot of good reasons 
  to do either one. She’s a good team player despite her 
  personal limitations, takes orders well and isn’t afraid 
  to put herself at risk.     
       Even though she’s incredibly brave and totally 
  defiant if captured, she isn’t actually willing to die for 
  anyone or anything and knows when to run.  She 
  always has a scam or two running on the side, always 
  has a backup plan and an escape route.  If it were them 
  or her, she would betray her team mates without 
  hesitation.  Otherwise, she's loyal.   
       Largely self-educated, apart from some City 
  College courses in business and computers, she wishes 
  she had more time to study and find things out about 
  the world.  Her Brooklyn accent can be anywhere 
  from really thick to totally undetectable, depending on 
  who she is talking to.  She loves dancing, sings well 
  and is always up for a good time.   
       It seems to her that Double Deuce is starting to get 
  uneasy about how long she’s been with the team and 
  how much she knows about their past crimes.  He’ll 
  probably have her killed soon, she figures, but he’ll 
  probably ask her to kill the Ace of Wounds first, so 
  that will be her cue to get out of Dodge.    
       So far no one has been able to link her to the 
  Flatbush murders, but she is acutely aware that she has 
  one surviving family member out there somewhere, 
  who may have guessed the truth.  She has searched for 
  her surviving cousin many times, but after Miranda 
  was released from reform school on her 18th birthday, 
  she changed her name and vanished.  She is in fact a 
  waitress at a truck stop in the Yukon, and has spent a 
  good part of her life looking over shoulder, getting 
  ready for the day Eliza finds her at last.   
   
  Adventures With Lady Deuce:  
   
  1) Ain’t Love Grand? 
       Lady Deuce has been hired to hit a superhero who 
  has incredible strength and the ability to fly.  If you 
  don’t have an NPC superhero like that in your 
  campaign, then use the stats for the “Original” 
  archetype from the M&M Core Book, and call him 
  Captain Justice.  
       The PCs know him a little, but not too well.  He’s 
  kind of a square, unimaginative and workaholic.  A 
  celebrity, Captain Justice takes his fame just a little 
  too seriously.  He cares a lot about his reputation and 
  keeping up appearances—maybe more than he does 
  about actually fighting crime. At least, this is the 
  impression the PCs have of him.  Great hero, not such 
  a great guy.  Does not deserve to be cruelly murdered 
  by the likes of Lady Deuce.   
       And the Lady has thought of a truly horrible way to 
  do him in.  She waits on a rooftop near one end of a 
  bridge with a light sniper rifle.  Then she calls in a 
  major supervillain alert—either someone she knows 
  Captain Justice (or whoever the target is) hates 
  personally, or a heavy hitter like the Death Angel.   
       When Captain Justice arrives, she shoots the tire 
  out of a passing vehicle, and sends it careening off the 
  bridge.  Any vehicle will do, but in fact when the 
  crucial moment occurs she spots a schoolbus full of 
  kids—fate is kind!  When Captain Justice picks up the 
  bus, she will turn off his powers and he will die, 
  crushed under the bus’ weight or drowned in the river.  
  Either way, the kids probably die too, and Captain 
  Justice looks like a real jerk.  In fact his last thought 
  will probably be “I look like a real jerk” which will 
  suit Lady Deuce just fine.   
       It’s a beautiful hit.  There’s just one complication.  
  Captain Justice’s wife hired Lady Deuce to kill him, 
  and at the last moment she gets cold feet and runs to 
  the Player Characters.  Can they stop Lady Deuce in 
  time to save one of America’s most beloved heroes?   
       Once Captain Justice finds out who hired the 
  assassin, he will decline to press charges against Lady 
  Deuce.  Not that he loves his wife, but the scandal 
  would be more than he could bear. If it ever came out, 
  America would be irreparably harmed, he explains to 
  the PCs.  Two years later he dies under suspicious 
  circumstances.   Lady Deuce has an alibi.   
   
  2) Big Fat Hairy Deal 
       Lady Deuce runs a certain number of scams on the 
  side, socking away money for the moment when she 
  finally has to go on the run.  One of the more harmless 
  ones involves selling shoddy, defective printer 
  cartridges over the internet through a shell company 
  she calls “International Productions” and then selling 
  the debt to a collection agency when the mark refuses 
  to pay for them.   
       Unfortunately for everyone, her latest mark is a guy 
  named Harry Deal. If one of the PCs works in an 
  office, then Harry is their office manager.  He’s a 
  loud, fat, obnoxious guy, red-faced and angry.  He 
  bullies people while pretending to kid them around, he 
  
    
  holds petty grudges, he ignores his wife and five year 
  old daughter.   
       When Harry gets snared by the printer cartridge 
  scam, he won’t stop complaining about it.  He 
  constantly posts warnings about International 
  Productions on the internet, he hassles and pesters the 
  police about having Lady Deuce prosecuted, he tries 
  to have her served with writs from his lawyer.    
       So she nabs his little girl, Dora, and gives him a 
  call at the office.  If Harry wants Dora back, he will 
  have to walk into the 20th Precinct at 12:15 AM, any 
  night this week, and ask to speak with officer Norton 
  Haselbeck.  When he meets Haselbeck, Harry will 
  recite a list of accusations at him, (which Lady Deuce 
  will fax right over), and then Harry will shoot him six 
  times in the head. “Otherwise, little Dora is gonna be 
  Dora the Explorer” Lady Deuce cheerfully explains.  
       If a PC works with Harry, then he is inexplicably 
  absent from work for two days while he thinks over 
  his options.  That is utterly, totally unlike the guy—
  Harry is such a workaholic that he’s even in the office 
  on Sundays.   
       Lady Deuce, meanwhile, has been doing a 
  surprisingly good job of taking care of Dora, letting 
  her stay up late and watch anything she wants, feeding 
  her ice cream and treats and sometimes just a little 
  heroin to make her go to sleep. It’s more fun playing 
  Mom than she expected.   
       She picked Officer Haselbeck more or less at 
  random. They met once at a social function.  He 
  seemed like a nice enough guy.  But he happened to 
  tell her what shift he works, and she knows when he’ll 
  be at the precinct. Frankly she doesn’t care which cop 
  Harry kills, just so long as he gets gunned down in the 
  process and discredits himself by acting like a 
  paranoid maniac.    
       She’s already sold his little girl to some Arabs, who 
  will arrive to pick her up on the night things come to a 
  head.  
       For his part Harry is no fool, he’s sure that the cops 
  will shoot him and that Lady Deuce will kill his little 
  girl anyway.  So instead of going to the Precinct 
  house, he walks into a part of town that he knows the 
  Player Character regularly patrol, and smashes every 
  store window on the street.  When the PCs show up, 
  he apologizes and explains everything to them.  Can 
  they help him get his little girl back?   
       Alas, Lady Deuce thought he might pull something 
  like this, and has been following him.  As soon as he 
  finishes telling his woeful story, she calls Harry on his 
  cell phone.  The PCs can hear her cheerful voice say: 
  “I know a little girl who’s going to be very, very 
  disappointed that her daddy did something he wasn’t 
  supposed to.” Then she switches off the meanest 
  looking Player Character’s powers and attacks.   
       She’ll actually try not to hurt Harry Deal, since she 
  still wants him to go through with shooting Officer 
  Haselbeck.  If the Players beat her, then she’ll explain 
  that the Arabs are on their way, and that if the PCs let 
  her go she’ll tell them how to get there in time.  She’s 
  as good as her word, for once.  
   
  3) A Bouquet of Bullets for the Deuce of Hearts 
       Eventually, Lady Deuce’s life is sure to fall apart.  
  If the PCs don’t bring down the Four Deuces then 
  Double Deuce will eventually decide to have her 
  killed.   
       Once she has to go on the run, she vanishes utterly 
  for a while.  Everyone assumes that she’s either 
  relaxing on a beach in Tahiti or lying on the bottom of 
  the East River in a barrel of concrete. But in fact 
  neither one is true.   
       Lady Deuce’s retirement hasn’t gone well.  She had 
  too leave New York too quickly and she wasn’t able to 
  get her hands on as much of her emergency cash as 
  she wanted.  She’s cruising aimlessly around the west 
  in a sport utility vehicle, burning through what little 
  money she has left, enjoying her freedom, marveling 
  at the beauty of the landscape.  She never had time to 
  do this before and she’s amazed that America is 
  actually such a gorgeous place.  It puts a new 
  perspective on things for her.  In fact she’s barely 
  killed anyone since she left New York.   
       A few months later word reaches the PCs of a 
  strange murder in northern British Columbia.  A 
  Canadian superhero called the Masked Mountie has 
  been found dead by the side of the Alaska Highway.  
  He was bulletproof, and yet someone shot him through 
  the face with a light caliber pistol.  Now whose modus 
  operandi does that sound like?   
       If the PCs pursue Lady Deuce up the long and 
  lonely road to Alaska, they will reach her at around 
  the time she walks into the wrong truck stop, 
  somewhere near Kluane National Park, and comes 
  face to face with her cousin, Miranda.   
       Eliza has long since forgotten what Miranda looks 
  like, but Miranda will never forget Eliza.  She will 
  drug Lady Deuce’s coffee if she gets a chance, and 
  then gently walk her out the back door.  The PCs will 
  arrive at the truck stop to find Lady Deuce’s SUV 
  parked outside, but no sign of her.  The regular 
  waitress, who everybody knows as Julie, is also 
  unaccountably absent.   
       Somewhere out in the woods nearby there is a tiny 
  cabin, where Miranda keeps certain things—sharp 
  things mostly.  She has had a long time to think about 
  what she’s going to do if she ever gets Eliza through 
  the door of that cabin, and she may finally be about to 
  get her chance to do them all. 
   
   
   
  
    
  Diamond Deuce 
  Real Name: Izzy Schwartz Jr. (usually 
  just called "Junior") 
  PL: 11 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 9 (-1) Wis: 9 (-1) Cha: 10 (+0) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +9 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +6 Defense: 
  +15/+14 Speed: 30/50 (in flight) 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +6 
  Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower Save: +1   
  Skills: Intimidate +12, Knowledge (the 
  Underworld+5), Listen +9, Repair +6, Spot +9 
  Feats: Durability, Great Fortitude, Immunity 
  (Disease, Pressure, Suffocation), Improved Grapple, 
  Power Attack 
  Powers: Energy Blast +10 (Cost 2 pts), Flight +10 
  (Cost: 2pts), Super-Strength +11 (Extras: Protection, 
  Shockwave; Cost: 6pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Will attack anyone who 
  disrepects his hair, clothing, car, girlfirend or other 
  posessions, cannot stop attacking them until they are 
  unconcious or he spends a villain point. 
   
  “Well look at this.  Your hand already 
  didn’t look so good, and now they just 
  dealt you the Deuce.”   
   
       Big, dumb, vicious and hard to kill—these traits 
  have kept the Diamond Deuce alive longer than almost 
  any member of the Four Deuces to date.   
       Double Deuce feels pretty uncomfortable with 
  letting any of his teammates live this long.  Who 
  knows what kind of stuff they might come to know 
  about him, about the Deuces and about their crimes? 
  Much safer to have them killed after a year or so. Then  
  again, killing the Diamond Deuce has always seemed 
  like a whole lot of work and it’s hard to seriously 
  accuse somebody that dumb of knowing too much 
  about anything.   Anyway he owes the Four Deuces 
  everything, and one of his few good traits is his stupid, 
  doglike loyalty.   
       Fifteen years ago he was a star of the illegal 
  underground boxing circuit.   Getting his head broken 
  for a crummy buck was all he seemed to be good 
  for—and he was starting to feel his injuries more and 
  more as he got older.  In his off hours he got high, 
  wandered the streets and picked fights with guys in 
  bars.  If he won, he went home and slept.  If he lost, he 
  found a hooker and beat her up instead.  By 1989 he 
  was headed nowhere fast, and dimly aware that he 
  wanted something more.   
       The Mob was then experimenting with ways to 
  give its soldiers superhuman powers, and he 
  volunteered as a test subject on impulse. The process 
  was cruel, but ingenious.  They were trying to implant 
  stem cells taken from captured superhumans into the 
  test subjects, who they kept under wraps at an 
  improvised clinic in a Jersey City warehouse. Alas, 
  most of the subjects died or went crazy.   
       The whole operation was about to be shut down 
  and the remaining subjects disposed of, when 
  Diamond Deuce manifested his abilities.  He ripped 
  through his restraints, smashed his way out of the 
  warehouse, and went on the run (more test subjects 
  may have escaped during the confusion, and some of 
  them may have superhuman powers of their own--it's 
  up to the GM).   
       Afraid that the Mob would still be after him, he 
  tried to commit enough robberies to get out of New 
  York, even though he’d never left the area and the 
  thought terrified him.   
       He was a miserable excuse for a supervillain, 
  brash, impulsive, murderous and sloppy. He was 
  afraid to rob banks, so he wasted his considerable 
  powers on botched and bloody supermarket heists, 
  never taking in more than a few hundred dollars at a 
  time.  Fortunately for him, the Steel Deuce found him 
  before the capes or the feds did.    
       A big, dumb, violent kid at heart, he’s as silly as a 
  child.  He never seems to learn his lesson or improve 
  his behavior.  He’ll fight against superior odds, he’ll 
  antagonize guys who he should already know are 
  tough enough to beat him.  He’ll stay too long at a 
  crime scene so that he can keep hitting people.  
  Fortunately for him, he likes Double Deuce and fears 
  the Steel Deuce enough that they can keep him in line 
  when they're on a job.    
       He loves being a supervillain, revels in his power, 
  likes his code name and likes to work it into 
  conversation (see the quote above).  Just as he did in 
  the ring, he likes to taunt and threaten his opponents 
  and would gladly fight for its own sake, even if no 
  money were at stake.   
       Vulgar and crass, he’s also extremely vain, 
  particularly about his ponytail.  He spends a lot on hair 
  care products and styling for his tail.  Insult it at your 
  peril.    
       A compulsive bully, he abuses women savagely.   
  He has a pretty blonde wife named Gwen up in the 
  Long Island suburbs, six girlfriends and ten sons by 
  one or another of them.   
       All of his boys are named Junior, after himself.  
  He’s foolishly proud of his sons, constantly showing 
  off their pictures and passing out cigars whenever a 
  new one is born.  Yet he’s a terrible dad when he’s 
  around.  People who are weaker than he is bring out 
  the bully in him, and he can no more resist beating his 
  kids than he can keep himself from beating his wife 
  and girlfriends (or hookers, when they aren’t 
  available).  He’s already killed his two oldest sons by 
  punishing them too hard.  
       Right now his oldest surviving boy is the subject of 
  his special attention.  Diamond Deuce senses that 
  Junior is turning out to be a wimp, so he has to beat 
  him up every day to make him tough.  If he dies, that 
  
    
  will be a terrible shame—it will mean that the wimp 
  part of him was stronger than the strong part.  Since 
  this has already happened twice, Diamond Deuce is 
  starting to wonder if it’s some kind of failing on his 
  part that’s causing this, if he’s not really a good 
  enough father to raise his sons strong.   
       Double Deuce is perfectly aware of how 
  grotesquely wrong this is, but he finds it very 
  amusing, and often tries to draw Diamond Deuce out 
  on the subject of his troubles, nodding earnestly as he 
  wonders aloud at how tough it is to be a good dad.   
   
  Adventures With Diamond Deuce:  
   
  Deuce of Diamonds, Knave of Hearts 
       Rebecca Katzenbaum is a pretty, fragile young 
  concert cellist whom a PC knows slightly.  Perhaps 
  she is the friend of their love interest, or a former 
  classmate at the Juliard, or even a member of a PC’s 
  family.  She lives on Long Island with her parents, and 
  has become the Diamond Deuce’s latest girlfriend.   
       Not that she ever wanted to have anything to do 
  with the man.  He took a fancy to her while he was 
  driving into the city, and saw her practicing in the 
  window of her parent’s home.  He determined to have 
  her, just to show everybody that he wasn’t no low-
  class thug.  A girl with class, that’s a mark of 
  distinction—a feather in a man’s cap.  So he began to 
  harass her and to bully her family.   
       Her middle class parents were at first indignant, but 
  they shortly came to fear the man and his visits so 
  much that they stopped interfering.  The first time they 
  tried to send their daughter away to some relatives 
  upstate, where she might be safe from his advances, he 
  had a pair of crooked cops bring her back to her 
  parent’s house and explain that the Deuce would be 
  there to see her on Friday.  Once this happened, her 
  parents broke down completely—they couldn’t even 
  go to the police, the police were on his side!   
       These days, the Katzenbaum home is full of silence 
  and despair.  Depressed by the atmosphere and by the 
  constant weeping, the Deuce has moved Rebecca out 
  to an apartment in the city, which has actually upset 
  her family even worse.   
       He took her away from her job and broke her cello 
  to make sure she didn’t have anything in her life that 
  was bigger than him.  The first set of bruises have 
  already begun to fade on her face, but they will soon 
  be replaced by many more.  He’s thinking of having 
  her long, lovely hands smashed to make sure she can’t 
  play music again, so that she can give herself to him 
  more completely.  Already she stumbles through her 
  days in a bleary haze, hoping for death.  Perhaps it 
  will get here soon—the Deuce is already beginning to 
  tire of her.   
       And this is when the PCs stumble onto the 
  situation.  They either see Rebecca in some public 
  place, looking lost and tragic with bruises on her face, 
  or they realize that it’s been a long time since they’ve 
  heard from her, or her parents run to them for help.  
  There are a dozen other ways the PCs could be drawn 
  into this situation—she could even be a total stranger 
  who comes running out of an alley and collapses at 
  their feet (and there’s always the old “you hear a 
  scream” hook). 
       The Diamond Deuce’s friends are perfectly willing 
  to back him up if the PCs start to make life difficult 
  for him. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  The Steel Deuce 
  Real Name: Gianni "Johnny Machine" 
  Gaspari 
  PL: 14 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 16 (+3) Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +18/+16 Speed: 30/60 (Leaping) 
  Damage Save: +10 Fortitude Save: +6 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +9   
  Skills: Bluff +10, Diplomacy +10, Forgery +8, 
  Intimidate+10,  Knowledge (Crime) +10, Pick Lock 
  +9, Profession (Legitmate Businessman) +3, Spot +11, 
  Sense Motive+12 
  Feats: Connected, Dodge, Durability, Great 
  Fortitude, Expertise, Headquarters (crummy bar called  
  "The Four Deuces Lounge", with a Communications 
  Center [a police radio and some illegal wiretapping 
  equipment] a Computer [a super-sophisticated desktop 
  model which the Steel Deuce stole from a gadgeteer, 
  buried in the clutter of the bar's back room], 
  Concealment [appears to be nothing more than a 
  crummy dive bar], a Dock [or at least a trapdoor in the 
  basement which leads to the river], a Fire Prevention 
  System [although the fire extinguishers haven't been 
  checked in years and the sprinkler system might not be 
  up to code], a Gym [or at least a set of weights in one 
  room of the apartment upstairs from the bar], an 
  Infirmary [there is some medical gear in the basement 
  and although it's none too sterile, a surprising number 
  of surgical proceedures have been performed in the 
  bar's back room], Holding Cells [a specially reinforced 
  room in the basement and another one in the 
  apartment upstairs, both with a Hardness of 15], 
  Living Space for 15 people [if they cram into the 
  apartment really tight--but hey, it's New York.  
  They're probably used to it], a seperate Power System 
  [an illegal tap on the Brooklyn power grid, plus a 
  gasline-powered generator in the basement], a 
  Security System [a seldom-used burgular alarm for 
  those rare hours when the bar is unoccupied], and a 
  Workshop [that same reinforced room in the basement 
  holds a lot of materials for dismembering corpses, and 
  the rest of the basement holds a number of empty 
  barrels and bags of cement, as well as less lethal tools. 
  The Steel Deuce comes down here to repair himself] 
  and a baseball bat behind the bar [Weapon, +3 Lethal 
  Damage]),, Immunity (Aging, Disease, Exhaustion, 
  Poison, Starvation, Suffocation), Iron Will, Minions 
  (in a pinch he can call on as many as 60 mooks, thugs, 
  punks and other such PL1 employees, scattered around 
  his various businesses and criminal enterprises, as well 
  as 6 PL2 goons, 3 PL3 criminals of greater experience, 
  2 big mean PL4 guys who tend bar at the Four Deuces 
  Lounge, a PL5 mob doctor who knows better than to 
  ask questions about gunshot wounds, and a PL6 
  lawyer), Power Attack, Rapid Takedown, Startle, 
  Surprise Strike, Takedown Attack 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Willpower) +4, Energy 
  Blast +12 (Flaw: Reduced Range, Cost: 1pt), Gadgets 
  +10 (Extra: Gadgets don't require separate devices and 
  are instead built into the Steel Deuce; Cost: 2pts), 
  Super-Strength +12 (Extras: Leaping, Protection; Cost 
  6 pts) 
   
  “Regrets?  Yeah, like the song says, I got 
  a few.  If there was ever a day that I 
  didn’t wreck for somebody, if I ever 
  spent a nickel I didn’t steal, if I ever 
  went a minute without hurting nobody—
  that I regret.  But you know, I don’t 
  think there was a lot of days or a lot of 
  nickels like that. Not even a lot of 
  minutes.”    
   
       Also known as Johnny the Robot (“because he’s a 
  robot, see”) Johnny Machine and Johnny Bionic.  He 
  doesn’t like that last name, and no one dares call him 
  Johnny Bionic to his face.  He’s been one of 
  Brooklyn’s most ruthless street-level criminals for 
  forty years, pursuing a life of crime with inhuman 
  mechanical efficiency.   
       There used to be four Robot Brothers, but now 
  there’s only one.  A sweet little old man named Dr. 
  Giovanni Gaspari built them.  He was one of the 
  world’s greatest pioneers in artificial intelligence, 
  decades ahead of his peers.   
       They mocked his theories and hounded him out of 
  his career at CalTech.  He found himself back in the 
  run-down neighborhood in Brooklyn where he had 
  grown up, trying to eke out an existence on Social 
  Security and an academic’s pension.   
       Although Dr. Gaspari felt no malice toward the 
  world that had scorned him, he was determined to find 
  a way to continue his researches.  He had appropriated 
  a lot of materials from his lab and crammed them into 
  his small, drafty apartment.  A tireless worker, he 
  wrote code by night and repaired people’s electrical 
  appliances by day to supplement his meager income. 
  He had never married and had no family to support, 
  which gave him all the time he needed.  
       After some years of labor he had four small 
  prototype robots scuttling around his apartment like 
  infants and felt he must be the happiest man alive.  He 
  named his metal sons Paul, Joseph, Gianni and 
  Guiseppe.  After a brief period of infancy he built 
  them reasonably lifelike human bodies and introduced 
  them to the world.  The press reported it with only 
  lackluster interest, and suggested that the four boys 
  were in fact clever remote-control mechanical dolls, 
  rather than thinking, self-aware organisms.   
       Enfeebled by age and by his disappointments, Dr. 
  Gaspari wasn’t able to look after his boys as well as he 
  would have liked, and they were soon making foolish 
  
    
  mistakes and misbehaving like any small children.  It 
  wasn’t long before all of them but Guiseppe (who 
  seemed to enjoy nothing but reading and listening to 
  old opera records) were running with the 
  neighborhood’s bad element, committing petty crimes 
  and getting into trouble.  He had built them to adapt to 
  and learn from their environment, and they did this 
  well.  Unfortunately, their environment was Brooklyn.   
       Dr. Gaspari took his three wayward steel lambs 
  aside and attempted to set down some firm rules with 
  them, but he was old and inexperienced and they ran 
  rings around him.  Soon he took to his bed, while 
  Paulie, Joey, Johnny (Gianni) and their hoodlum 
  friends ran wild in his deserted workshop.   
       Guiseppe stood guard outside his father’s door all 
  night, for he had heard talk of having something done 
  about the old man.  One morning, Dr. Gaspari found 
  that someone had smashed poor Guiseppe to bits.  The 
  old man was never really the same after that, his heart 
  was broken and he died soon thereafter.  His 
  apartment became a den of vice for the Sicilian gang 
  kids and his notes were trampled, strewn and lost.   
       Gianni, the smartest and most aggressive of the 
  surviving brothers, realized that they would need some 
  of Dr Gaspari’s tools to repair and upgrade 
  themselves, and soon found that they were also useful 
  for breaking and entering.   
       The Robot Brothers rapidly became known as 
  rising stars of the Sicilian gangs.  Because they didn’t 
  sleep or eat, they could pursue crime around the clock 
  and were more efficient predators than their flesh and 
  blood competition.  They had a wicked sense of 
  humor, dressed up as boy scouts when they mugged 
  old ladies, and killed rival gang members by jumping 
  out of windows with them.   
       The Mob took an interest in the Robot Brothers 
  early on, but decided after much grave deliberation 
  that because they had no blood, they could by 
  implication have no Sicilian blood and hence could 
  never become Made Men.  So instead they flourished 
  as mid-level criminals, robbing trucks and jewelry 
  stores and anything else they could get their greedy 
  metal hands on.   
       Gianni is the only one left now.  Paulie got broken 
  fighting a superhero back in 1978 and two years ago 
  Gianni had to have Joey dismantled for cheating him 
  on a shipment of stolen designer bathroom fixtures.        
       Johnny the Robot hooked up with the Four Deuces 
  shortly after Bones got put away, and soon became 
  their leader.  He owns the club where they meet, he 
  resolves disputes among the members of the group, he 
  hands out discipline where it’s needed.  He’s a better 
  strategist and personnel manager than any human 
  being could be, and he takes care of their money 
  better.  Plus, everyone on the team knows to be 
  deathly afraid of him—an important consideration 
  when leading a gang of sociopaths.   
       Inhumanly ruthless, inhumanly determined, as 
  implacable as any machine, this is the guy that even 
  Double Deuce fears.  He has had his body upgraded 
  many times, and he no longer resembles a child.  
  Instead he looks almost like a caricature of a robot 
  gangster. He likes the fact that this makes him look a 
  little silly—it helps to have people underestimate him.  
  Constantly changing and updating his weapon 
  systems, he always seems to have some lethal new 
  trick up his sleeve (hence all the points he has in 
  “Gadgets”).  
       He wears really expensive silk suits (Brionis are his 
  favorite) and has far better taste in clothes than Double 
  Deuce. His Brooklyn accent is thicker than any of the 
  other Deuces, although his voice sounds oddly 
  mechanical and his lips don’t move.  In person he is 
  funny, warm and very Italian.  Everybody’s best 
  friend, he wants to know how you’ve been, he wants 
  to make sure you’re having a good time, he 
  remembers everything about you, your family, your 
  friends, their birthdays, their history and what’s going 
  on with them now.  It’s impossible to tell if he 
  genuinely likes you or if he’s about to have you killed.  
  This is the secret of the terror he inspires.   
       But while he is an absolute stone cold killer, he’s 
  not a maniac like Double Deuce.  He will do whatever 
  it takes to achieve his goals, no matter how 
  treacherous or diabolical, he’ll kill people just to 
  maintain his reputation or to make sure they won’t 
  someday turn on him, but he doesn’t seek out needless 
  violence.  Nor does he kill people purely for the joy of 
  it.   
       He is a criminal to the bone (or would be if he had 
  bones) and would rather steal a dime than earn it.  
  He’s incredibly vengeful when shown disrespect.  Yet 
  even these traits are largely an act he maintains to help 
  keep up his reputation.   
       Unburdened by mental exhaustion or the need for 
  sleep, he works around the clock and never stops 
  planning, calculating or running his various 
  businesses.  He owns dress shops, a construction firm, 
  a collection agency and a number of clubs and he runs 
  them all amazingly well.  It is probably a good thing 
  for the Mafia that they never let him enter their ranks, 
  because he’s a more effective gangster than any 
  human being could be.   
   
  Adventures With The Steel Deuce:  
   
  1) Dealer Takes The Pot 
  The Steel Deuce leans on a stoolie he knows to go 
  stick up an old lady right in front of the PCs. Let him 
  give the PCs a good chase to warm things up.  Once 
  nabbed, the squealer blurts out that he knows 
  something really big—something that could hurt the 
  whole city real bad.  If the PCs let him go, he’ll tell 
  them everything.  
       If they bite, he says that there’s a shipment coming 
  in on the docks, tonight, from this Romanian freighter.  
  These Russian guys are making some kind of a heavy 
  buy down there, for a supervillain they call the 
  Hammer of Doom (or some other very heavy master 
  villain—use whichever one would be the scariest).  
  The stoolie isn’t sure, but he thinks it’s plutonium.  
  Whatever it is, it comes in a big sealed metal case.   
       There’s gonna be at least one cape watching the 
  
    
  loot, and all kinds of heavy security.  Telling the cops 
  is no good, he figured. After all, he heard about this 
  from two cops who ran him in the other night—they 
  thought he was unconscious so they were talking 
  about it in the squad car.  
       He’s got to get out of town, but he doesn’t have the 
  bread.  That’s why he robbed the old lady, even 
  though he knew it was a low and despicable thing to 
  do.  He doesn’t want anybody to get killed if this turns 
  out to be a terrorist type thing, but whose going to 
  believe a bum like himself?   
       Whether the PCs let him go or not, it hardly 
  matters.  Down at the docks, somewhere near four 
  AM, a group of Russian mobsters in indeed offloading 
  an illegal cargo from a Romanian freighter, and it is 
  indeed meant  for the Hammer of Doom, bit it’s not 
  plutonium—it’s cocaine.  He is throwing a birthday 
  party at a private island retreat off North Carolina and 
  he needs a lot of coke.  To keep things tidy, he has 
  hired Russians to transport the blow, without knowing 
  what it is or who they are delivering it to.  They will 
  hand it off to some Syrians in the middle of the night 
  at a rest stop in Virginia, without ever seeing the 
  pickup men.   
       The goons are wearing body armor and carrying 
  military weapons, but if you don’t think they’re 
  enough of a challenge for your PCs, then the Hammer 
  of Doom has hired the Snow Queen to watch over the 
  handoff at the docks.   
       The Steel Deuce has no desire to tangle with all 
  those goons with all that hardware, let alone the Snow 
  Queen, and he certainly doesn’t want an arch-uber-
  villain like the Hammer of Doom to know who ripped 
  him off.  So he’ll wait in the shadows and then take 
  the case from the PCs once they have it in hand.   
       If the stoolie has gone with the PCs to the docks, he 
  gets separated from them n the ensuing fight.  In either 
  case, once they get away with the case, they hear the 
  stoolie screaming and crying out to them for help.  
  When they go down the alley to see what’s going on, 
  they find the Steel Deuce and as many of his cohorts 
  as he deems necessary, holding a trash bag that 
  contains the sliced up remnants of the stoolie.   
     The Steel Deuce greets the PCs and says he stopped 
  by to give them their rat back (here he gives them the 
  bag, or throws it to them and the stoolie’s head rolls 
  out).  He wondered if they’d like to switch bags. Fun 
  and hijinks no doubt ensue.  
     If it seems too nasty to have NPCs flinging around 
  bags full of body parts, or if it just doesn’t work with 
  your campaign style, then the Steel Deuce steps out of 
  the darkness with the stoolie standing behind him, 
  grinning.   
       “You done good, kid” the Deuce tells him.  He 
  hands the stoolie a couple of twenties and a small bag 
  of (poisoned) junk. “Now amscray—us grownups got 
  business to talk.”   
       The stoolie runs off and the Steel Deuce asks for 
  the case.  “There’s no plutonium in there, just a bunch 
  of cocaine—and what’re ya gonna do with that?  
  Better let me take it off yer hands.”   
       When they refuse to give him the case, he says 
  “Okay.  But wait, I got a better plan.  Why don’t I just 
  kill you and take it?”  We will see how his plan works 
  out.  
   
  2) The Deuce of Nothing 
       Good news!  The feds are finally ready to arrest 
  Johnny Machine, the so-called Steel Deuce, for 
  murder. If the PCs have been trying to have him 
  arrested for murder (of the stoolie in that last scenario, 
  for example) then this is the crime he’s going down 
  for.  Otherwise, it’s a truck dispatcher named Ken 
  Scarpia, whom the Deuce executed for the crime of 
  knowing too much about a hijacking the two of them 
  collaborated on.  
       The police would very much appreciate having the 
  PCs assistance in apprehending Johnny Machine.  And 
  for once, the authorities know exactly where to find 
  him.  He’s at his victim’s funeral, consoling the man’s 
  wife and assuring her that he’ll find the guys who got 
  Ken.   
        The Steel Deuce admonishes the cops for 
  disrupting a funeral and showing the deceased such 
  disrespect—Ken was a fine, decent man who deserved 
  better, the Deuce says. 
       When the cops read out the charges against the 
  Steel Deuce, the dead man’s mother screams “I knew 
  it!” and stabs the Deuce in the chest.  She would have 
  hit his heart, if he had one.  Instead she hits an 
  emergency reset system that nobody knew about, and 
  blanks out his personality and memory.   
       Which raises all sorts of interesting questions. The 
  new Johnny is completely innocent, naïve, curious 
  about the world around him and eager to please 
  whoever he is speaking to.  Can this poor unworldly 
  creature be executed for Johnny’s awful crimes?  Is 
  Johnny only faking his condition?  Well, in fact he 
  isn’t—but how do the PCs know that for sure?  To 
  make matters worse, once news of his condition leaks 
  out his friends will be coming to rescue him and any 
  number of old enemies will try to do him harm.   
       Then, after the PCs have run themselves ragged 
  keeping Johnny alive and out of the execution 
  chamber, a backup system kicks in and his sinister old 
  personality reasserts itself. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Bones 
  Real Name: Jack Doyle 
  PL: 15 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 14 Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +3 Attack Bonus (Melee): +13 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +13 Defense: 
  +26/+23 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +6 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +3 Willpower Save: +5   
  Skills: Forgery +5, Gather Information +5, 
  Intimidate +10, Listen +10, Move Silently +10, Sense 
  Motive +7 
  Feats: Connected, Darkvision, Durability, 
  Immunity (Suffocation), Infamy, Iron Will, 
  Penetrating Vision (blocked by living tissue), True 
  Vision, Startle 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +2 (Cost: 1pt), 
  Incorporeal +10 (Affected By: Mystical Attacks; 
  Extras: Ghost Touch, Phase Attack; Cost: 4pts), Mind 
  Control +10 (Flaw: Only One Command [Be Afraid]; 
  cost: 1pt), Paralysis +10 (Cost: 2pts) 
   
  “We're all born sobbin’ and screamin’—
  we don't got no choice about how we 
  come into the world.  But a guy can 
  choose how he leaves it.”   
   
       Bones is a gangster from the 1930s—old time Irish 
  muscle, and he’s quietly plagued the superhero 
  community almost from the beginning. Masked 
  avengers fought him in the ‘30s, back when he was 
  just a mook in a pinstriped suit, the star-spangled 
  heroes of the 1940s fought him on the homefront 
  when they weren’t busy overseas. In the fifties he 
  gained his superhuman powers and battled a whole 
  new generation of costumed heroes.   He spent the 
  sixties and seventies in jail, and was really only out in 
  the world for long enough to found the Four Deuces.  
  He’s spent more than half his life in prison, all-told 
  and may no longer fully understand the outside world.  
       Bones is the living avatar of death, in a minor kind 
  of way. He spent a lot of the 1950s in Cuba, working 
  for the mob.  Cuban organized crime was intertwined 
  with the occult and after seeing some of what the 
  Cuban Brujos were capable of, Bones tried to learn all 
  he could about their arts.   
       On a fetid dank midnight he drank the bloody rum, 
  spoke the Forbidden Words and summoned up the 
  Lords of Death within himself.  The powers that they 
  gave him should only have lasted a week, but the 
  Lords of Death decided that they liked Bones.  They 
  have stayed with him ever since, and probably won’t 
  leave until he himself dies.   
       Cursed with a big agile brain, Bones was always an 
  idea man as much as he was a thug. This makes him a 
  leader, which has always made him a target for anti-
  crime crusaders.  
       Over the years the Irish gangs he ran with faded 
  away, and he could never be a “Made Guy” in the 
  Sicilian Mafia, so he formed his own crew and 
  contented himself with smaller goals than ruling the 
  underworld. As a mid-level criminal and supervillain, 
  he was quite a success.  
       Although he’s been in jail for the past twenty years, 
  he’s still the nominal leader of the Four Deuces and 
  the guys still come to him for advice.  They lend him 
  money and help him out in little ways when they can, 
  just to show their respect, but the truth is that they visit 
  him less and less.  Even Double Deuce, who used to 
  be his boy-sidekick, hasn’t seen him face to face in 
  more than a year.  
       In fact they forgot when last his parole hearing 
  was, so they’re going to be surprised when they learn 
  that he got out of prison two days ago.   
       What this will mean for the Four Deuces is difficult 
  to say.  Will they accept his leadership?  Will Double 
  Deuce see him as an ally against the Steel Deuce, or as 
  another rival?  They’ve been dealt a wild card.  
       What comes of this depends on how the GM wants 
  to play it  It may even be that Bones has no desire to 
  return to his life of crime, but they won’t take no for 
  an answer.  Or perhaps they’re willing to let him be,  
  but then he feels compelled to take up his gun again 
  when he finds out that his old crew has hired, betrayed 
  and killed some old supervillain friend of his.   
       In person Bones is grim, unhappy, ferocious and 
  old.  An emotional but untalkative man, he is wracked 
  by many regrets.  Every year, on the anniversary of the 
  day he killed his old friend Jimmy “The Red Corsair” 
  Grogan, he visits Jimmy’s grave and stands there in 
  silence.  Bones is driven by a vague desire to make 
  things right, but he doesn’t have a clear idea of what 
  that would mean or where to begin.  Events may 
  propel him any of a number of different ways, as the 
  GM sees fit.   
       While his powers have greatly slowed his aging 
  process, he really is getting old now and he feels the 
  lack of time acutely. He harbors a lot of affection for 
  Double Deuce (and mistakenly thinks the kid returns 
  it) but he knows what kind of a rotten little monster 
  his protégé is.  Sentimental, aggressive and easily 
  moved to tears, he’s prone to violence when drunk, 
  and so has vowed off the sauce.   
       He’s killed a lot of people for a lot of reasons and 
  is painfully aware that he’s become too casual about it, 
  so he has sworn to go as long as he can without killing 
  anyone.  This makes him almost comically reluctant to 
  resort to violence, even when sorely provoked. Will 
  Bones be able to hold true to his pledge?  We shall 
  see.  
   
  Adventures With Bones: 1) Rolling the 
  Bones, First Version 
       Bones walks out of jail, a free man for the first time 
  in decades.  He’s full of regrets and while he doesn’t 
  
    
  age the way the regular guys do, he is finally old now.  
  Determined not to kill anybody for as long as he can, 
  he wants to breathe fresh air and put his life into some 
  semblance of order.  He has no idea how to begin.   
       New York’s superhero community isn’t making 
  things any easier for him, either.  Bones gets 
  threatened almost as soon as he leaves prison by more 
  than one masked vigilante. They know he’s up to no 
  good (although he isn’t) and they’ve got their eye on 
  him.  In light of this fact, going to see the Four Deuces 
  doesn’t seem like the right thing to do, at least not at 
  first.   
       But when he starts asking around, Bones is amazed 
  to find out how many former members of his team are 
  dead now.  All the signs point to Double Deuce having 
  killed them, but he doesn’t want to believe that.  
  Bones starts investigating on his own.   
       Word reaches the Player Characters that Bones is 
  finally out of jail, seeing old underworld associates, 
  and that his crew is suspected of having just pulled off 
  a major job.  If they confront Bones he won’t bother 
  trying to convince them that he means no harm. Long 
  years of dealing with cops have taught him that no one 
  ever listens to a crook’s side of the story, and he will 
  instead act hostile and sarcastic, although he will be 
  careful not to pick a fight.   
       If they tail him they will find that he is visiting the 
  widows and orphans of a number of his former 
  associates, hanging around crummy bars asking 
  people questions, and generally acting suspicious.   
       If they go to see the Four Deuces, they find that the 
  Steel Deuce is more than happy to talk to them.  He’s 
  friendly, and charming, and he expresses concern 
  when he hears that Bones is out of prison. The Steel 
  Deuce may have done some bad things himself, that’s 
  just in his nature, he explains, but he’s always tried to 
  be as decent a guy as he can be.  That Bones, 
  though—he’s real different.  The Steel Deuce actually 
  feels kind of afraid of him, he confesses.   
       Once the Steel Deuce knows (either because the 
  PCs have told him or through some other source) that 
  Bones is out of the joint and that he hasn’t come to see 
  them yet, he calculates an unacceptably high 
  probability that the old man intends them some kind of 
  harm.  When he learns that Bones is asking about old 
  friends who Double Deuce has killed, this confirms it.  
  Bones has got to die.  In fact, maybe it’s time to burn 
  the whole outfit and start fresh.   
       The first time the PCs think of tailing Bones, he 
  goes to a huge cemetery in Queens to make his yearly 
  pilgrimage to Jimmy Grogan’s grave.  As he stands 
  there to pay his respects, the Ace of Wounds tries to 
  kill him.  Bones notices the sniper waiting for him and 
  says: “You don’t look like you’re afraid I’ll kill you.  
  And that’s just how it is with young guys, I know.   But 
  you oughta be.  I put you in the ground right here, and 
  you’ll never get out of Brooklyn.”   
       The Ace of Wounds laughs and points out that 
  they’re already in Queens.  Bones laughs too, and the 
  fight begins.   
       In the course of the conversation, the PCs learn 
  what’s really going on.  They also learn that the Ace 
  of Wounds feels no loyalty to the Four Deuces, that 
  they’ll probably have him killed soon himself (in fact 
  Lady Deuce is going to cut his throat in bed tonight, as 
  soon as he gets done killing Bones).   
       How the fight goes depends on the GM and on the 
  actions of the Player Characters.  Bones may take a 
  mortal wound, but he doesn’t have to die here.  
  Whatever happens, the PCs now know that Double 
  Deuce and perhaps the Steel Deuce are responsible for 
  murdering perhaps as many as eight of their former 
  associates over the years.  It looks like a big super-
  battle may be in the works very shortly. 
   
  2) Rolling the Bones, Second Version 
       Bones walks out of jail, a free man for the first time 
  in decades.  He’s full of regrets and while he doesn’t 
  age the way the regular guys do, he is finally old now.  
  Determined not to kill anybody for as long as he can, 
  he wants to breathe fresh air and put his life into some 
  semblance of order.  He has no idea how to begin.    
       And things aren’t easy on the outside.  More than 
  one superhuman vigilante hassles him (including 
  perhaps the Player Characters), his old crew hasn’t 
  come to see him in prison for months and nobody will 
  hire a guy with a skull tattooed on his face.  Maybe he 
  belongs in the joint after all.   
       After being hassled one time too many, Bones loses 
  his patience and starts to plan another heist.  This one 
  should either set him up through his retirement or put 
  him back inside forever, either one of which would be 
  okay with him.  It’s a tricky thing to plan, though, 
  since he needs to make sure that nobody gets killed.  
       Bones doesn’t go to the Four Deuces for help—
  he’s still too offended at the way they stopped coming 
  to see him.  Instead he tries to talk to other old 
  criminal associates, but most of them are dead.  Bones 
  doesn't notice that the evidence suggests Double 
  Deuce is responsible for the deaths of so many old 
  friends--he's much too preocupied with making plans.   
       But the Steel Deuce is alarmed to hear that Bones 
  is out of prison and that he’s been talking to the 
  relatives of guys the Four Deuces have killed.  It’s 
  time for Bones to die.  In fact, maybe it’s time to kill 
  Diamond Deuce, Lady Deuce and the Ace of Wounds, 
  too.   
       The first time the PCs tail Bones, he goes to a huge 
  cemetery in Queens to pay his yearly respects at 
  Jimmy Grogan’s grave.  Lady Deuce attempts to 
  bushwhack him there, and unless the PCs somehow 
  intervene he is going to kill her in self-defense.  Either 
  way, this new development angers and depresses 
  Bones.  His own crew is trying to have him killed—
  for nothing!   
       If the PCs haven’t thrown him back in jail, he 
  continues trying to put together his final caper.  It is in 
  fact a jewel heist.  Bones intends to hit a major money 
  launderer coming back from the middle east with a 
  load of diamonds to trade for American drug money.  
  It’s perfect.  No civilians get hurt, no decent people 
  lose a dime, and it’s big enough to set Bones up for 
  life.  But the attacks continue.   
       The Ace of Wounds tries to kill Bones outside a 
  
    
  bar in Brooklyn Heights and in the crossfire a six-
  year-old boy gets wounded.  This is intolerable.  
  Bones may lose his temper and start to hunt the Four 
  Deuces down one by one (complicated by the fact that 
  the Steel Deuce may be about to kill them off 
  himself).    
       Bones would be just as willing to frame the Steel 
  Deuce for the crime he is about to commit and vanish 
  with the loot forever, if the PCs are willing to help him 
  do it.  
   
  3) Rolling the Bones, Third Version 
       Bones walks out of jail, a free man for the first time 
  in decades.  He’s full of regrets and while he doesn’t 
  age the way the regular guys do, he is finally old now.  
  Determined not to kill anybody for as long as he can, 
  he wants to breathe fresh air and put his life into some 
  semblance of order.  He has no idea how to begin.    
       Despite his earnest desire to somehow put things 
  right, the world seems determined to thwart him.  His 
  crew has deserted him, he can’t get a job, and 
  everybody looks at him like some kind of a monster.  
  He’s trying to keep it together, trying to keep himself 
  from doing anything stupid, but then things take a 
  sudden turn for the worse that sends him off the rails 
  completely.   
       A superhuman vigilante roughs Bones up, telling 
  him to stay out of trouble.  Bones gets sarcastic and 
  defiant with the guy (perhaps it’s even a Player 
  Character) and gets beaten savagely.  The very next 
  day, another superhero does the very same thing to 
  him.  
       Meanwhile, the Steel Deuce hears that Bones is out 
  of prison and that he’s been talking to superheroes.  
  He calculates an unacceptable probability that the old 
  man has gone straight in his final days and that he’s 
  trying to make up for his past misdeeds by telling the 
  authorities everything he knows.  It’s time for Bones 
  to sleep in the ground—in fact maybe it’s time to burn 
  the whole crew and start fresh.   
       The Steel Deuce sends Double Deuce to assassinate 
  his old mentor.  Instead Bones reluctantly kills him.  
  And it now seems to him that the entire city is rotten 
  to the core.  Neither  the cops nor the crooks deserve 
  to live—humanity is a cancer on the face of the world.  
  He goes to visit some old criminal associates over the 
  next few days, and although most of them are dead, he 
  manages to get the information he needs.   
       It should be obvious to the PCs by now that Bones 
  is up to something.  If nothing else, the sudden 
  discovery of his old sidekick’s body should let them 
  know that something is up.  The first time the PCs trail 
  him, he goes to a huge cemetery in Queens.  There, in 
  front of his old pal Jimmy Grogan’s grave, he meets 
  Khalid al Warhadi--the man they call the Hammer of 
  Doom.   
       Khalid has problems of his own that have also 
  driven him to desperation.  See his character 
  description for the details.   
       As the two men talk, hidden PCs can learn the 
  whole back-story.   
       Khalid has brought a “dirty bomb” full of 
  plutonium, with him, and the two of them are going to 
  set it off on top of the Empire State Building, purging 
  this vicious, twisted abomination of a city from the 
  world forever.  They will both die (or almost—
  Khalid’s nerve fails him and he flees at the last 
  minute) but they’ll take the Big Rotten Apple with 
  them.  Unless of course somebody stops them. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
   
  Executive Solutions 
   
  Membership: Executive Solution M (a.k.a. 
  Major Maximum, disgraced all-American superhero 
  and commie fighter), Executive Solution Z (a.k.a. the 
  Gray Golem, giant hammer-wielding man of stone, the 
  team’s resident troublemaker), Executive Solution X 
  (deathless and unspeakably cruel superhuman soldier 
  who has fought on at least two sides of every major 
  war in the past three hundred years), Executive 
  Solution R (a.k.a. Dan Dauntless, Rocket Ranger, 
  weary, shell-shocked Bosnian rocket-man, utterly 
  fearless, beyond caring if he lives or dies), Executive 
  Solution D (sadistic Serbian psychic, Dan Dauntless’ 
  former arch enemy) Executive Solution Q, (a.k.a. "The 
  Obscenity," shambling sentient heap of quagmire, who 
  could lose his mind at any second), Jack Flint (the 
  former “Agent Twelve” who fought America’s secret 
  wars throughout the mid 20th century, now old and 
  confined to a wheelchair, he leads and owns Executive 
  Solutions), Mr. Smith (Jim Flint’s mysterious right 
  hand man, powers unknown) .   
   
       A small private security firm based in Charleston, 
  South Carolina, Executive Solutions supplies 
  parahuman talent for whatever purpose its clients 
  require.  Over the past twenty years Executive 
  Solutions personnel have quietly fought to protect the 
  interests of governments and multinational 
  corporations in low-level conflicts around the world.  
  Their mercenary super-humans have battled local 
  insurgents, third world armies, and sometimes other 
  corporate mercenary teams on every continent except 
  Antarctica.   
       Executive Solutions keeps a very low profile 
  outside of military and intelligence circles, but then 
  again so do most other mercenary outfits.  The general 
  public is largely unaware of how many of these 
  companies there are in this country, or how great their 
  reach is. Private firms presently supply elite 
  mercenaries to guard America’s nuclear power plants, 
  Air Force bases, the facility at Groom Lake (Area 51) 
  and of course the homes of the very rich. If the CIA 
  needs a sniper for some black book operation 
  overseas, they don’t send one of their own staff out 
  into the field with a rifle—they pick up the phone and 
  call a vendor.  If they need a superhuman assassin, 
  they call Executive Solutions.   
       Founded by legendary secret agent Jim Flint, 
  Executive Solutions claims to be pro-American and to 
  be dedicated to eradicating communism and terrorism 
  from the world. Yet the truth is that they have no 
  broader agenda than making money—you can hire 
  them for any task, no matter how unsavory it might be. 
  There is a saying at the CIA’s Operations Directorate: 
  “If you want a dirty job done fast, call Executive 
  Solutions.”   
   
   
  Base of Operations: Executive Solutions’ 
  main headquarters is located in the Charlottesville  
  suburbs. They have a large, well-protected compound 
  off in the woods, with living facilities for any 
  superhuman Resources who want them, an airstrip, a 
  helicopter landing pad, a firing range, workshops to 
  repair super-equipment, an infirmary, exercise rooms 
  and an obstacle course for the Resources to keep 
  themselves in training.  
       The Charlottesville facility has its own security and 
  medical staff, and has an understanding with the local 
  authorities—they can take care of their own problems. 
  No local police or paramedics will attempt to set foot 
  in the facility without an invitation, and they have 
  never yet received one.   
       There is another, much smaller facility on an island 
  off the western coast of Ireland, outside the reach of 
  American law enforcement.  This second facility 
  serves mostly as a place where a superhuman might 
  lay low until the heat is off.  It's just a drafty, 
  crumbling stone cottage, and its resources are pretty 
  minimal, although it does have a small infirmary and a 
  lot of food stored in the basement.  
       Only one full-time staff member serves the Ireland 
  facility—a grouchy caretaker named Fergus, who is 
  himself on the run from the law and asks no awkward 
  questions.   
       The company’s business offices are located in the 
  Virginia suburbs of Washington DC, midway up a 
  shiny new skyscraper in a remote office park. The 
  office has a staff of about six people, all of them 
  purely administrative, watched over by a stern, weary, 
  hugely overweight office manager named Morgan 
  Colglazier. Few members of the ever-changing office 
  staff have any clear idea as to what Executive 
  Solutions actually does, and even Mr. Colglazier 
  doesn’t know any of the firm’s real secrets.  
       The only one who knows where the bodies are 
  buried apart from Mr. Flint is his lawyer, B. Coleman 
  Black, of the unthinkably powerful and ancient 
  Chicago law firm Corvus, Corvus, Corwin and Black 
  Associates.   
       Mr. Flint almost never visits the Virginia site, 
  despite having a palatial private office on the 
  premises.  He spends most of his time out of the 
  country and almost always attends business meetings 
  via teleconference.   
       Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for his 
  ferocious personal assistant, Miss Zelma Zimmer, who 
  often puts in unexpected appearances and throws the 
  whole office into an uproar.  She is said to be the one 
  person Morgan Colglazier fears.    
       Few clients ever see the facility in South Carolina, 
  unless Mr. Flint wants to impress them. Virtually all 
  of the organization’s business is transacted through the 
  Virginia office. Whenever superhumans or scary 
  looking clients have to come tramping through the 
  place Colglazier sends the regular office workers 
  home, so that they won’t see or hear anything 
  
    
  untoward.   
   
  Threat Level: Executive Solutions is neither as 
  big nor as responsible as they present themselves to 
  be. They have about eight superhumans on staff 
  presently.  All are experienced combat veterans, all of 
  them are superbly dangerous, just as he claims.  Yet 
  they are also an odd collection of personalities, with 
  quirks and petty rivalries that can and do undermine 
  their effectiveness as a team.   
       Their powers and capabilities are pretty widely 
  varied, but that’s a far cry from being able to “provide 
  the exact superhuman talent your job requires” like 
  their promotional literature claims.  
       Even though they aren’t as potent a force as they 
  say, they’re still one of the most powerful, determined, 
  ruthless, well-trained group of supervillains a Player 
  Character group is ever likely to encounter.   
       If the PCs send a team member to jail, Mr. Flint 
  might or might not be able to get them out, depending 
  on the nature of the crime.  Certainly Corvus, Corvus, 
  Corwin and Black will do their best on the imprisoned 
  villain’s behalf, and that’s quite a bit.  If it looks 
  hopeless, Flint will just abandon them and deny all 
  knowledge of their actions.    
   
  Organization:  The Resources follow a quasi-
  military set of rules, but they don’t have ranks, don’t 
  salute and don’t call anybody “sir” but the old man 
  himself.   If the company sends more than one of them 
  on a job, Mr. Flint will appoint a team member to 
  serve as the Field Commander.   
       Team members can be punished for 
  insubordination, causing too much collateral damage, 
  drawing the wrong kind of attention to Executive 
  Solutions, blabbing secret information, endangering 
  teammates, brawling on the job, getting drunk on the 
  job, showing up late or for failing to achieve the 
  mission objective.  Punishment usually takes the form 
  of docking the offender’s pay.  There have been one or 
  two field executions when Resources have gone 
  insane or tried to murder a teammate, but by and large 
  parahumans are too rare and expensive to kill, no 
  matter how badly they behave.  Mr. Flint will certainly 
  yell at misbehaving Resources, and threaten to fire 
  them if they screw up again.  Yet no one has ever 
  actually been fired.   
       The Resources are all known by one-letter code 
  names; “Executive Solution D”, “Executive Solution 
  R”, “Executive Solution X” and so forth.  Officially 
  none of them are ever supposed to know anything 
  about one another but their code names, but this has 
  proved difficult to enforce.  Executive Solution Y was 
  famous before she joined the team, so everyone knows 
  who she is.  Executive Solution R and Executive 
  Solution D knew eachother in their previous careers, 
  while Executive Solutions M and Z have actually 
  become a couple.  Because there’s not much he can do 
  about these breaches in protocol, Mr. Flint pretends 
  not to notice.   
       All of the Resources are officially independent 
  contractors, paid strictly on a per-mission basis. They 
  have no benefits (and the office staff in Virginia 
  barely have any—Mr. Colglazier likes to hire long-
  term temps rather than salaried employees)  
       Resources can live at the Charlottesville facility if 
  they like, but they have to pay rent.  They can buy 
  medical services and insurance from the company, but 
  it comes out of their pay, as do legal fees, weapons, 
  ammunition and repairs. There is no retirement plan, 
  no 401K.  Since they get paid seven figures for each 
  job, this isn’t as onerous as it sounds.    
   
  Tactics: Depending on the nature of the job, they 
  might send one Resource or they might send a bunch 
  of them.  All of them are skilled tacticians and cagey 
  fighters, with the possible exception of Executive 
  Solution D.   If they are on an assault mission, they’ll 
  hit hard and fast, using the element of surprise as 
  much as possible. They strike to kill unless they are 
  under specific orders not to—and then sometimes they 
  do it anyway.  The team won’t hesitate to leave a 
  wounded man behind if it means reaching the mission 
  objective. Frankly there’s little camaraderie in the unit 
  and most of them don’t really like one another that 
  much.  They won’t risk their lives to save one another 
  (except for Major Maximum and the Gray Golem—
  more on them below) but they’ll gladly do it to 
  achieve the mission objective.  
   
  Using Executive Solutions in your 
  campaign: Executive Solutions makes a 
  particularly good nemesis if the PCs are themselves 
  mercenaries.  In this case Jim Flint’s merry lads are 
  the Other Guys, the competition, the bad, amoral team 
  that takes on dirty assignments, roughs up civilians 
  and fights without honor. If you get sent to topple a 
  brutal dictator, these are the guys the brutal dictator 
  hires.  Otherwise, this is the team that an evil 
  corporation or sinister government agency will call in 
  if you trifle with them one too many times.   
       It’s rare to encounter the team inside the borders of 
  the US, since they’re not supposed to undertake 
  operations (apart from bodyguard work) on American 
  soil.  But if they get riled enough or if they’re tracking 
  down someone they believe to be a traitor or a 
  terrorist, they might well be willing to ignore that rule.  
  Depending on how much collateral damage they 
  inflict the authorities might or might not be willing to 
  turn a blind eye.   
       Sometimes individual team members take on 
  outside jobs—the Six Dollar Man is particularly prone 
  to this.  If one of them commits a crime and gets 
  arrested, the others might bust him out just to keep 
  him from talking, even though Mr. Flint is sure to yell 
  at them for it.   
   
   
   
  
    
  Adventures With Executive Solutions: 
   
  1) Showdown at Lumbaga 
  Executive Solutions has been retained to defend the 
  Lumbaga oil fields, deep in the interior of a west 
  African country (use a fictional large, corrupt military 
  dictatorship with huge oil reserves and a squalid 
  capital city—or just use Nigeria).  All signs indicate 
  that the oil fields may soon come under attack from 
  rebel forces that are now in the region.   
       The PCs have been sent to the region to see if they 
  can provide humanitarian assistance for the famine 
  that the war has brought to the interior, or perhaps to 
  help fight the rebels.  As they get into the vicinity of 
  the oilfields, they either witness or hear about a 
  shocking double murder that a member of the oilfield 
  security staff has committed (perhaps it’s Executive 
  Solution D, or perhaps it’s just some security goon—
  whoever he is, he hates women and has killed both his 
  local girlfriend and her father, who tried to protect 
  her).   
       The local constabulary accompany the PCs to the 
  oilfields, where the killer has fled, but the security 
  staff insult them, threaten them and won’t let them 
  enter.  Executive Solutions simply won’t give the man 
  up.  They need him for the coming battle, and in any 
  case they don’t trust the local courts.   
       The only way for the PCs to bring this man to 
  justice is to retrieve him by force, and they’ll have to 
  fight their way through Executive Solutions to do it.   
       How many superhuman Resources have been 
  committed to this assignment depends on the strength 
  of the PCs.  The whole team might be here, or it might 
  just be one or two of them, with a bunch of hired 
  mercenaries and local army goons, depending on how 
  many Player Characters face them.  The GM shouldn’t 
  make beating them an impossible task, but this one 
  should be no cakewalk.   
       To complicate matters, the rebels actually show up 
  during the course of the fight, and they have brought a 
  superhuman resource of their own—the living 
  incarnation of Ogun, the Iron God (use the 
  “Powerhouse” archetype from the basic rulebook for 
  Ogun.  His powers are “Mystical” in their origins).   
   
  2) The Colonel’s Very Private Matter 
       An old Venezuelan colonel has a beautiful, 
  rebellious granddaughter.  She is his favorite, and has 
  been since she was a little girl.  Alas, she has run off 
  with her hippie boyfriend and joined a group of 
  Marxist insurgents up in the mountains.  The old man 
  is filled with dismay, and gets in touch with his friend 
  Jack Flint.  He wants the whole hippie gang of them 
  tracked down and killed—especially his 
  granddaughter.  There is a piece of jewelry he gave 
  her for her twelfth birthday, a phenomenally valuable 
  diamond brooch, which he wants returned as well.   
       Jim thinks he knows just the man for the job—it 
  seems tailor made for Executive Solution X.  After X 
  is already on his way, the old man suddenly suffers an 
  attack of regret and calls in the PCs to stop the 
  assassin.  But then once the PCs are on their way, he 
  suffers another attack of regret and tells Jim Flint what 
  he has done.   
       Flint sends more resources down to the South 
  American jungles to stop them. How many guys Flint 
  sends depends on the size and strength of the PC’s 
  party.  Executive Solution D is likely to be one of 
  them, as is Y.  M and Z could be as well.  He’s less 
  likely to send Dan Dauntless or the horrible Executive 
  Solution Q, but the Six Dollar Man might also show 
  up if he isn’t lying drunk on a bender somewhere.   
       For an added twist, the colonel’s granddaughter 
  didn’t go off to join the rebels at all.  In fact her 
  psychic powers were just beginning to manifest and 
  the thoughts of all the millions of people in Caracas 
  were crashing in on her, driving her insane.  Her 
  boyfriend wanted to get her as far away from other 
  people as possible while she learns how to control her 
  new mental abilities.  He brought her up to a little 
  organic farm that some friends of his own off in the 
  mountains, and together the two of them have been 
  slowly exploring her newfound mental abilities.  She’s 
  very powerful—use the stats for the standard psychic 
  hero archetype in the basic rulebook.  Executive 
  Solutions is in for a surprise.   
   
  3) Operation Apocalypse 
       A tiny African republic has just managed to 
  weather a coup attempt (either invent a country, or use 
  a real one that seems appropriate—Gambia would be 
  ideal).  Democracy has been restored and the kindly 
  old president who has run things for twenty years is 
  back in power.  The state is damaged, its one 
  university has been destroyed and it’s precious water 
  treatment plant will take a lot of foreign investment to 
  repair, yet with a little help and a little luck, they’re 
  going to survive.    
       This is good news for Africa.  That tiny state was 
  one of its best run democracies and a real stabilizing 
  force in the region.   
       Unfortunately, the CIA doesn’t want the region 
  stable.  Chaotic and corrupt countries are much easier 
  to influence than stable and democratic ones.  In any 
  case, they backed the leaders of the coup, and will not 
  be deprived of their prize.  To show the world what 
  happens when you oppose them, they have hired 
  Executive Solutions to do a complete “Carpet Job” on 
  the republic, ruining it so utterly that its people will 
  live in misery for decades.   
       In a single predawn raid, they will smash its power 
  plant, wreck its telecommunications infrastructure, 
  tear up its roads, destroy its storehouses of food, fuel 
  and medical supplies, destroy its only hospital, 
  annihilate its army, murder all its leaders and kill as 
  many random innocent people as possible.  They will 
  do their very best over the next day or so to leave this 
  place with nothing.   
       The first thing they will try to is to wreck the 
  country’s communications infrastructure, cutting it off 
  from the rest of the world.   
       The PCs are with a UN fact-finding mission in a 
  neighboring country, perhaps tracking the 
  
    
  whereabouts of some major arch-villain or cleaning up 
  after a natural disaster, when everything over the 
  border goes silent.  The lights have all gone out up 
  there, too.   
       Perhaps someone manages to get a final desperate 
  message to the outside world, perhaps someone 
  stumbles over the border, wounded, bleeding and 
  desperate or perhaps the PCs go up there to investigate 
  on their own.   
       Executive Solutions has brought the whole team for 
  this job, although if that makes them too powerful for 
  the PCs to beat the GM may decide that they have 
  split up into little groups of two or three, each squad 
  focusing on a different atrocity. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution D 
  Real Name: Dr. Vlade Andric, Phd 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 20 (+5) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +9 Defense: 
  +18/+17 Speed: 30/50 (Flight) 
  Damage Save: + 2/+8 (Evasion) Fortitude  
  Save: +2 Reflexes Save: +7 Willpower 
  Save: +11   
  Skills: Bluff +8, Concentration +8, Intimidate +10, 
  Listen +8, Profession (Child Psychologist) +5, Sense 
  Motive +8, Spot +8 
  Feats: Evasion, Indomitable Will, See Invisible 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Reflexes) +6 (Extra: 
  Willpower; Cost: 2pts), Telepathy +10 (Extra: Mind 
  Control; Cost 4pts), Telekinesis +10 (Extras: Energy 
  Blast, Flight, Force Field; Cost 5pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Sadist.  Would sooner 
  torture or kill a target than not. Must spend a villain 
  point to resist staying too long at the scene of a battle 
  to inflict more anguish on the target. 
   
  “Hey wait!  We almost forgot the part 
  where we stab you in the face--and that's 
  the best part!”   
   
       Vlade Andric grew up with his aunt in Mostar, in 
  what was then the dismal little socialist republic of 
  Yugoslavia.  Auntie beat him for looking like a Turk.  
  She might have slowly killed him over time, but 
  fortunately the Andrics had rich cousins in Chicago, 
  who agreed to sponsor young Vlade through his high 
  school and college years.   
       He went to Northwestern University and eventually 
  pursed an advanced degree in child psychology.   By 
  the time he was thirty Dr. Andric had settled into 
  practice in New York City and wrote the occasional 
  children’s book.  
       He drank too much, he wallowed in pointless self-
  pity, he used his psychic powers to abuse his young  
  clients and put psychological time bombs in their 
  brains.  Why should they be allowed to have happy, 
  well-adjusted childhoods when he felt so miserable all 
  the time?  It wasn’t fair.    
       Then in 1992 his country went up in flames.  
  Yugoslavia came apart at the seams and people started 
  killing one another.  Once the new nation of Bosnia 
  imploded and Bosnian Serbs like himself were 
  massacring every Turkish looking person they could 
  lay their hands on, he felt the noble Serbian blood in 
  his veins roused to action.  In Manhattan you had to 
  live by rules and law and society’s tenets—to drive the 
  right car and attend the right parties and wear the right 
  shirts.  But in this grand new Bosnia a man could do 
  anything, be anything he chose!  He could even kill 
  women and kids if he wanted, and who wouldn’t want 
  to do that?  He was getting excited just thinking of it.   
       So he left his practice, sub-let his apartment and set 
  out for wonderland.  He was not disappointed.   
       For the next two years a lot of old people, women 
  and children seemed to die wherever he went.  Life 
  was good.  His psychic powers became stronger every 
  time he used them to kill, and his reputation grew until 
  he came to the personal attention of General Ratko 
  Mladic, field commander of the Bosnian Serb forces.   
       In his headquarters at Pale, in the old compound 
  left from the Winter Olympics, they were trying to 
  create super-soldiers.  The process wasn’t safe by any 
  means (it had been developed in Uganda by the Idi 
  Amin regime), but General Mladic assured Vlade that 
  if his heart was strong and the Serbian blood in his 
  veins was pure, he would emerge from the treatment 
  like a living god.   
       Vlade was petrified—this was certain death, but 
  then again guys who defied General Mladic didn’t 
  tend to live so long, either.  He moved into the dirty 
  little improvised clinic in Pale and submitted to a 
  painful course of injections and the agonizing 
  hallucinations that followed.   
       But despite the months of suffering and terror, his 
  powers did in fact grow tremendously.  He could fly 
  with his telekinesis, he could use the power of his 
  mind to enhance his physical strength, burn off his 
  beer belly, grow a set of huge rippling muscles.  And 
  he did.  General Mladic was greatly pleased, and 
  assigned him to the siege of Sarajevo.   
       They gave him a costume, which made him feel 
  even more powerful, although he didn’t like the way it 
  failed to conceal his face.  For the next three years he 
  fought the embattled Sarajevo militias, coming to 
  blows with the city’s flying superhero “Dan 
  Dauntless” on many occasions.  He never bothered to 
  take a superhero code name himself—it was too hard 
  to think of one that sounded scary enough.   
       Unfortunately for Vlade, he was still fighting at 
  Sarajevo when the giant massacre at Srebrinica took 
  place.  One of the war’s worst atrocities, nearly 8,000 
  civilians lost their lives up there, inside a UN safe 
  zone.  Vlade was beside himself with envy and 
  frustration.  To this day, having missed the fun at 
  Srebrinica remains one of his great regrets.  That and 
  never getting to kill Dan Dauntless.   
       After the mid 1990s things started to fall apart.  
  NATO moved in to keep the peace, the siege of 
  Sarajevo ended, General Mladic had to go into hiding 
  and things looked bleak.  Vlade heard that some of the 
  guys were trying their luck in the Congo War, fighting 
  for Laurent Kabila’s rebels, and even though black 
  people made him uneasy it seemed like the best 
  available option.   
       He both loved and hated the time he spent in 
  Central Africa. The food, the people, the living 
  conditions, all of these things he loathed.  But the war 
  itself was paradise.  In the Congo he was free to give 
  up all pretense.  He wasn’t fighting this war for the 
  
    
  Serbian people or to prove he didn’t have Turk blood. 
  Here you could fight for the love of fighting, kill for 
  the love of death.  And kill he did, so well that the 
  CIA got in touch and asked him to do a few things 
  over the border in Rwanda.   
       He soon gained a reputation with the CIA as a 
  reliable man, in the sense that he would do absolutely 
  anything the Agency paid him to do.   
       When Kabila’s army finally won the conflict, 
  Vlade grew desperate and scared.  He was running out 
  of war—the rebels in Columbia and Sierra Leone 
  wouldn't let outsiders join up, and the rest of the civil 
  wars then in progress were all in Islamic countries 
  where a Serb Nationalist would no doubt be shot on 
  sight.  So he begged the CIA to take him on full time.  
  They declined, but were happy to give him the number 
  for Executive Solutions.   
       He has never gotten along with the rest of the team, 
  largely because of his personality.  Boastful and 
  aggressive, desperate to make an impression, he is 
  hypersensitive to criticism and takes himself far too 
  seriously.  He throws murderous temper tantrums and 
  only the fact that he’s afraid of other parahumans has 
  kept him from killing a teammate.  A bigot, he makes 
  disparaging remarks about other peoples’ ancestry 
  (note to the GM: keep this mild if you think your 
  players would be too upset and offended by it), but 
  anyone who says anything about Serbs in his presence 
  is in deep trouble (unless he’s afraid of them).  
       Vlade complains a lot on missions, but it’s not like 
  the way the Gray Golem gripes.  Rather than carping 
  about little things, he whines that they’re not being 
  paid enough for this type of assignment, that the 
  operational plan is going to get them killed, and so 
  forth.  He’s also weirdly desperate for affection and 
  respect.  A published author, he writes bad, pseudo-
  experimental short stories and poems and frequently 
  tires to get his teammates to read them.   
       Vlade is shocked to find himself fighting alongside 
  his old nemesis, Dan Dauntless, and has been making 
  an unsuccessful effort to befriend him.   
   
  Adventures With Executive Solution D: 
  The Great Guatemala Bauxite Caper 
       A financial planner from a giant accounting firm 
  nervously approaches the PCs.  His name is Seymour 
  Durwood, and he has found some things that make 
  him very anxious.   
       He’s been doing an internal audit for a firm called 
  C2M Hill, and he thinks it’s a dummy—a shell 
  corporation slapped together by some big New York 
  investors.  Officially, C2M Hill is a mineral 
  consortium, and they own a central American mining 
  company called Stroessner-Reinhold Ltd. Everyone 
  knows there’s no bauxite in Guatemala, and yet 
  Stroessner-Reinhold has purchased a failed bauxite 
  mine in the Guatemalan highlands, an unstable region 
  that still has pockets of guerilla activity.  They hired 
  some vendor to take some samples at the mine, and 
  they’re shipping the cores back to be tested at the 
  University of Colorado’s geology lab in Denver.   
       To everyone’s surprise, the Guatemalan 
  government has insisted on transporting the samples 
  themselves, under police escort, to ensure that no one 
  tampers with them.  And now C2M Hill has retained 
  the services of a shadowy organization called 
  Executive Solutions.  They bought one airline ticket 
  for Executive Solutions, headed for Guatemala City. 
  Why would they only need one ticket, Durwood 
  wonders?   
       In light of the fact that everyone at Durwood’s firm 
  whispers that Executive Solutions is a supervillain-for-
  hire outfit, this looks really ominous.  The fix is surely 
  in, or at least it looks that way to Durwood.  A 
  supervillain is going to intercept the police convoy, 
  substitute some samples that have been seeded with 
  bauxite, and blame the attack on the guerillas.   
       The moment everyone thinks that there’s bauxite in 
  Guatemala, investors are going to be beating a path to 
  C2M Hill’s door.  The stock will shoot up in value, 
  and the investors will sell the moment before the mine 
  goes bust.  Durwood’s firm can’t take another Enron 
  fiasco, and he knows that as the assistant chief auditor 
  for the C2M Hill account he’s going to get thrown to 
  the wolves once everything comes out.   
       He’s right, but things are actually even worse than 
  they appear.  The entire scheme is the brainchild of C. 
  Graydon Kingsland, the coke-sniffing ne’er do well 
  son of one of America’s most powerful families.  Mr. 
  Kingsland has raised the ire of a certain Colonel 
  Santos, late of Guatemala’s death squads, who senses 
  that a scam is in the works and resents not having been 
  offered a cut.  Colonel Santos’ influence has resulted 
  in the heightened security in Guatemala, and forced 
  Mr. Kingsland to retain the services of Executive 
  Solutions.   
       Sensing that this is a delicate matter, Jim Flint has 
  sent Executive Solution D, in hopes that he can use his 
  telepathic powers to nab the samples without anyone 
  being the wiser.  But that’s just not D’s style.  He will 
  hit the convoy on a narrow mountain road with a cliff 
  on one side, and he’ll try to kill as many people as he 
  can get away with.   
       When the PCs go to Guatemala to stop him, they 
  will find it to be a frightening place.  Death squads 
  were still operating here ten years ago, and there are 
  ugly secrets everywhere.  In fact the army may still be 
  quietly trying to exterminate the country’s Indian 
  population up in the mountains, and the PCs may or 
  may not stumble onto evidence of this.   
       Colonel Santos will not be pleased to have them 
  operating on his turf, but he won’t interfere with them.   
       If they manage to capture D and bring him back to 
  the US, everything comes out over the next few 
  weeks, there is another round of financial scandals, C. 
  Graydon Kingsland’s associates get dragged out of 
  their offices in handcuffs (although he himself remains 
  untouchable) and Guatemalan hit teams will attempt to 
  assassinate everyone with any connection to the 
  matter, including Seymour Durwood, C. Graydon 
  Kingsland and the PCs.   
       Executive Solution D gets extradited back to 
  Yugoslavia, to stand trial for war crimes, and the 
  sympathetic Serb authorities allow him to escape 
  
    
  within a day.  As an added twist, Colonel Santos 
  knows Jim Flint, has worked with him before and 
  complains to him about his involvement in the affair.  
  Mr. Flint apologizes, and then assigns Executive 
  Solution D to work with the hit-squad that’s after the 
  PCs.   
   
  2) Blood Orgy on Zombie Island  
       There are ominous rumblings from the tumbledown 
  megalopolis of Djakarta, capital of Indonesia.  
  Someone has been collapsing abandoned buildings in 
  the city’s dying industrial zone, somehow imploding 
  them without the use of explosives.  What can this 
  mean?   
       There is a big and potentially violent election 
  coming up and the Indonesian authorities are getting 
  spooked.  They’re not sure they can handle this 
  themselves, and they’re willing to accept outside aid—
  by which they mean they might turn a blind eye if 
  foreign superheroes were to turn up and quietly 
  resolve the matter.  They would prefer a team with no 
  official ties to any national government.  The PCs 
  would be ideal.   
       To spur the players along, someone at Executive 
  Solutions thinks the PCs are getting involved and that 
  they know way more about this situation than they 
  actually do, so they foolishly try to scare them off.  A 
  PC encounters a ringing payphone outdoors in some 
  public place.  When they pick up the phone, an 
  electronically distorted voice snarls “Stay the 
  @#$%*& away from Chang-Gura!”   
       It just so happens that Chang-Gura is the name of a 
  small jungle island in the isolated Banda province of 
  the Northeast archipelago, a wild and primitive region 
  still occupied by Neolithic tribes.  Chang-Gura is 
  officially uninhabited, except for a small hospital and 
  recuperation center run by a philanthropic 
  organization called Helping Hands International.   
       A Dutch non-profit, the charity seems to have no 
  existence on paper apart from the Chang-Gura clinic.  
  It’s only major donor is a giant multinational drug 
  firm called ProVox Unlimited.   
       Which brings us to what is really going on here.  
  ProVox has a secret research facility on Chang-Gura 
  island, masquerading as a hospital on paper.  They’ve 
  been performing all kinds of ethically dubious tests 
  out there, and one of them has been a real 
  breakthrough. Professor Dreyfus Graven (now 
  deceased) has perfected a psionic enhancement drug 
  that may be able to give ordinary people temporary 
  superhuman powers.  Unfortunately, it also has a way 
  of turning them into mindless ravening zombies with a 
  taste for human flesh.   
       One of ProVox Unlimited’s rivals, a smaller, less 
  ethical company called Human Dynamics, sent a 
  mercenary squad out to Chang-Gura to seize the drug, 
  but things did not go as expected and the facility was 
  shortly overrun by slobbering cannibalistic psi-
  zombies.   
       Unbeknownst to either party a third drug firm, 
  Lippinor-Zarin, has also hired a team to retrieve the 
  drug.  While they are a big multinational firm, they 
  don’t have anything like the resources available to 
  Human Dynamics, let alone a giant like ProVox 
  Unlimited.  Lippinor-Zarin wouldn’t survive a 
  protracted battle in the courts with either one of them.  
  Therefore, they have elected to conceal their 
  involvement by killing everyone in the complex, and 
  collapsing it on top of their bodies.  A supervillain 
  attack would be the ideal way to do this, so they 
  contacted Executive Solutions, which had the very 
  man for the job.   
       Executive Solution D isn’t sure how to use his 
  powers to collapse a really large building, so before he 
  goes out to the island he’s been practicing in Djakarta.   
       He needn’t have bothered.  Most of the complex is 
  underground.   
       Neither Executive Solutions nor Lippinor-Zarin 
  knows that the tunnels are crawling with psychic man-
  eating zombies, or that the Human Dynamics team is 
  still alive down there, besieged but willing to kill 
  anyone who tries to take the drug away from them.  
  Hasn’t it been too long since your players enjoyed a 
  really good dungeon crawl?  
   
  3) Masks of Desperation 
       The tiny central African nation of Zangara is in 
  grave trouble.  They broke away from Equitorial 
  Guinea last year, after decades of suffering from the 
  central government’s mismanagement and ethnic 
  discrimination.  The UN is on the verge of recognizing 
  them, if they can just make it through this year.  
  Otherwise Equitorial Guinea is sure to invade, 
  possibly with the help of the notorious army from the 
  People’s Republic of the Congo and they are going to 
  be merciless.   
       Zangara is landlocked, desperately poor and largely 
  covered by rain forest.  They want to preserve their 
  forest from logging and start up a tourism industry, but 
  to do this they first have to get some capital and right 
  now they’re struggling just to prevent a famine.  This 
  year’s crop has failed, their armed forces are getting 
  restless, and if they can’t buy enough food to get 
  through the next planting season things are going to 
  get really bad really quick.   
       But where to find the money?  They actually have 
  some diamond mines, but they’re fearful about 
  developing them.  The big South African diamond 
  consortiums are unbelievably powerful and incredibly 
  ruthless toward competitors.  They crush little nations 
  who get in their way.   
       Fortunately, Zangara’s hand-carved wooden masks 
  are internationally famous and although they aren’t as 
  lucrative as diamonds, a big load of them should still 
  fetch a high enough price at auction to let the country 
  squeak through the next harvest. The masks take 
  decades to create, and they are sacred to the people of 
  Zangara, but what choice do they have?   
       Unfortunately, the big South African diamond 
  firms believe in taking no chances.  Even though 
  Zangara hasn’t yet opened its diamond mines and 
  started competing with them, they’re going to crush 
  the little country anyway, just to be sure.  They hire 
  Executive Solutions, which sends Executive Solution 
  
    
  D.    
       He burns the warehouse where most of the masks 
  are stored, but the Zangarans are able to scrape 
  together one last load of them from other places.  The 
  warehouse fire looks very suspicious, and has all the 
  hallmarks of a supervillain attack, so Zangara 
  complains to the UN, which asks the PCs for 
  assistance.  Their task is to safely get the load of 
  ceremonial wooden masks to auction in New York 
  City, with Executive Solution D dogging their heels at 
  every stage.   
       In case the PCs misdirect D and take an alternate 
  route out of the country, through the dangerous upper 
  reaches of the Congo river basin, D has tipped off an 
  infamous rebel warlord (“Colonel” Gonagara) just 
  over the border, who will hunt the PCs once they enter 
  his domain. He thinks they’re carrying a load of 
  diamonds, and will be displeased to find nothing but 
  useless wooden masks.   
       Colonel Gongara is something of a bloodthirsty 
  fiend, although he is also a jovial fellow who laughs a 
  great deal.  He’s a giant of a man, physically the equal 
  of many superheroes who derive their powers from 
  “training” and he relishes fighting opponents man to 
  man.  Use the stats for the “Martial Artist” archetype 
  from the M&M Core book if the PCs come to grips 
  with Colonel Gongara.  He’s PL 10. 
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution M, 
  aka "Major Maximum" 
  Real Name: Major Buck Stone 
  PL: 13 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 16 (+3) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 10 (+0) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +9 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +7 Defense: 
  +19/+16 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +4 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +6   
  Skills: Intimidate +8, Jump +5, Knowledge 
  (Military Proceedure) +7, Spot +5, Survival +5, Taunt 
  +5 
  Feats: All-Out Attack, Choke-Hold, Dodge, 
  Durability, Improved Grapple, Iron Will, Power 
  Attack, Rapid Strike, Surprise Strike, Takedown 
  Attack 
  Powers: Energy Blast +13 (Flaw: Reduced Range, 
  Cost: 1pt), Super-Strength +10 (Extras: Protection, 
  Thunderclap; Total Cost: 6 pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Insanely Gung-Ho (Can't 
  willingly work with anyone who seems to be less than 
  100% patriotic or who looks "weird" or somehow 
  subversive. He will attack "unpatriotic" or foreign 
  targets first, even if doing so puts him at a tactical 
  disadvantage) 
   
  “Stand down or die squealing.  You 
  pick.” 
   
       Buck Stone was an American hero.  Beloved by 
  millions, the crowning glory of the US Parasoldier 
  program, he battled Marxist insurgents in El Salvador 
  and Granada, the Bhopal disaster in India and villains 
  like Dr. Frightful on the streets of New York City. The 
  Army's superhuman program had a lot of expensive 
  failures over the years, but Major Stone (aka Major  
   
  Maximum) was a shining success.  
       Then he killed a prostitute. To this day he's unable 
  to account for why. It wasn't like she had called him 
  gay. He had beaten up hookers before if they 
  questioned his manhood (he had some intermittent 
  difficulty performing with professionals, which he 
  attributed to stage fright ) but he had never actually 
  killed one. Not even if they called him gay. So what 
  was it about this particular girl that made him go 
  berserk?  When it turned out that he was too tired to 
  party, she was actually pretty nice about it and she 
  certainly didn't insult him.  Yet it felt incredibly 
  satisfying to rip her in half.     
       He truly hated being called gay.  Not because he 
  feared that name but because it wasn't fair.  He 
  enjoyed his infrequent explorations with men better 
  than anything he had ever done with a woman, but that 
  was because it was secret and forbidden, not because 
  he was gay.  Of this, he was sure.   
       When the investigation began to point toward 
  Major Maximum, the Pentagon knew it had a serious 
  problem.  His image was clean, but it wasn't exactly 
  wholesome. Major Maximum never claimed to be a 
  nice guy, just a hard man who wouldn't let America 
  take crap from anybody. He was gung ho, not gee 
  whiz.  Hardly the boy next door, the public wasn't 
  going to just assume he was innocent.  There were 
  barely even any pictures of him smiling.    
       Under the circumstances, even though he seemed 
  likely to beat the rap (and he did) it would be better for 
  him to retire.  They farmed him out to private 
  enterprise, where he shortly found that the work was 
  easier and the pay was better.  
       After freelancing for a few years he found a place 
  at Executive Solutions that suited him perfectly and he 
  met the love of his life--the eight-hundred pound stone 
  giant called the Gray Golem.  Life has been good for 
  the past decade or so.  Buck doesn't even have to 
  worry about the gay thing anymore.  His partner isn't 
  technically human which means the fact that the guy is 
  officially male doesn't count. So long as he sticks with 
  the Golem, Buck isn't gay.  The Gray Golem himself 
  is pretty skeptical of this line of reasoning, but Buck 
  doesn't care.  
       Despite how well things worked out, the former 
  Major Maximum still misses the glory of his public 
  career.  The Army has done a good job of erasing his 
  memory from the public consciousness. No one ever 
  makes reference to him in any official materials about 
  superheroes, his name is never spoken on the news 
  and after 15 years he's as forgotten as Spandau Ballet 
  or the Thompson Twins. That really hurts Buck and he 
  still bears a grudge.  He often jokes that he wishes the 
  girl he killed was still alive so that he could kill her all 
  over again for what she did to him.  
       Neither Buck's powers nor his personality are 
  subtle, but he's very tough and an extremely 
  competent soldier, so Executive Solutions sends him 
  on missions where overwhelming force is needed.  
  They generally send the Gray Golem with him, since 
  otherwise the two of them worry about each other. 
  They do bodyguard work as well, since they're both 
  great at looming and looking scary. It doesn't appeal to 
  them nearly as much as throwing some third world 
  army's tanks around.   
   
  Adventures With Executive Solution M:  
   
  A Kingdom by the Sea   
       A tiny kingdom in the Caucasus is about to slide 
  into chaos and war.  Once a Soviet Republic, when the 
  Eastern Bloc collapsed in the 1990s they brought back 
  the descendant of their traditional royal family, King 
  Ottar IX.  He had been living quietly in Paris, getting 
  his PhD in Political Science, and had no idea that he 
  might one day actually have to ascend to the 
  Tourmaline Throne.  
  
    
       Things haven’t been easy since his return.  He’s a 
  thoughtful, humane, and capable leader who has no 
  intention of running his country like a dictatorship. 
  However, he is scared to death of his huge, bullying 
  right-wing uncle Zogor, who has an important position 
  in the country’s army and treats the peasants like 
  cattle. Every time he tries to give the press more 
  freedom or to rectify some inequity in his country’s 
  social system, Uncle Zogor is there to bully him out of 
  it.   
       Now a giant multinational oil company wants to 
  build a pipeline across his country, and even though 
  the king knows that it could wreak environmental 
  havoc on his country if it isn’t built carefully enough, 
  they are so desperately poor that he has reluctantly 
  agreed.  
       Then he discovers that the oil company is going to 
  bring in outside labor and intends to give his 
  government only a pittance for the use of its land.  If 
  there are jobs for the locals, they will be in supplying 
  alcohol and vice to the pipeline workers.  King Ottar 
  finds this intolerable, but doesn’t quite know what to 
  do about it.   
       The executives who are building the pipeline sense 
  that he feels tentative and conflicted about the project.  
  So they go to his uncle and offer to back him in a 
  coup.  Zogor is glad to be rid of his weakling nephew 
  and happily agrees to take the crown.   
       They have king Ottar shot, and by the time his 
  eleven year old daughter leaves her school in England 
  to come assume the throne, half the army is in open 
  rebellion and tanks are rumbling toward the capitol.  
  Her honor guard will no doubt fight bravely on her 
  behalf, but she’s only a child, her generals have no 
  confidence in her and the rest of her army is melting 
  away.   
       A sad, wistful, unsmiling little girl, when she sits 
  on her throne her feet don’t reach the floor.  Little 
  does the enemy suspect that while she is only eleven, 
  Queen Yzalda has a measured IQ of 185 and is more 
  than capable of running the nation herself.  In fact she 
  was in the middle of her sophomore year at Oxford 
  when she was pulled away from her studies.   
       Even though she feels overwhelmed with grief at 
  her father’s demise, she begins pulling the remaining 
  defenders together with remarkable efficiency.  But 
  just to make sure that things go to plan, the oil 
  company has engaged the services of Executive 
  Solutions, and Executive Solutions M and Z march at 
  the head of the advancing tanks. Her forces will fight 
  fiercely, but they can’t stand against Major Maximum 
  and the Gray Golem.   
       There is a media blackout in effect and the oil 
  company has been circulating the rumor that the child-
  queen is being held prisoner in her own castle by crazy 
  Marxist elements of the former government and that 
  they support the rebels’ efforts to rescue her.  She 
  surely won’t survive the rescue attempt—at least with 
  her brain intact.  Who can save this little kingdom by 
  the sea? 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution Z 
  aka "The Gray Golem" 
  Real Name: Unknown (may not even 
  have one) 
  PL: 13 
  Str: 20 (+5) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 9 (-1) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +16/+14 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +4 (+17 with Super-Constitution) 
  Fortitude Save: +4 (+17 with Super-
  Constitution) Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower 
  Save: +4   
  Skills: Intimidate+12, Knowledge (Mercenary 
  Underworld) +5, Search +6, Sense Motive +10, Taunt 
  +11 
  Feats: Durability, Expertise, Immunity (Aging, 
  Critical Hits, Disease, Poison, Starvation, 
  Suffocation), Indomitable Will, Power Attack, Rapid 
  Healing 
  Powers: Super-Strength +13 (Extras: Protection, 
  Super-Constitution; Power Stunt: Lethal Damage; 
  Cost 5 pts), Weapon (Big Hammer) +10 (Cost: 1pt) 
  Equipment:  
  Weaknesses: Disturbing (looks like a huge stone 
  statue with a nasty sneer on its face.  Can't pass in 
  normal society, suffers a –5 to all Bluff and 
  Diplomacy checks.) 
   
  “I know it’s none of my business, but are 
  you trying to lose this fight?  You one of 
  those guys who likes to get beat on?”  
   
       At the end of World War 2, the hunt was on for 
  Germany’s secret weapons, scientists and supermen.  
  The Americans and the Soviets grabbed everything 
  they could, sometimes with little regard for the ethical 
  implications.   
       An advance team of US army rangers found the 
  strange creature they called the Grey Golem inside a 
  warehouse in Prague.  A giant made of stone with an 
  enormous stone hammer by his side, he appeared to  
  have been recently killed (or rendered inert at any 
  rate—he bore no visible wounds).  Six dead SS 
  officers lay around the giant in bloodied occult robes, 
  smashed and broken like roaches on the floor.  Clearly 
  some terrible battle had taken place here, and both 
  sides had lost.   
       The rangers retrieved the fallen stone titan and sent 
  him back to the US for study.  No one could figure out 
  how he had been killed or for that matter how he ever 
  could have been alive in the first place.  After many 
  rounds of failed tests, the creature was left in storage 
  at an Air Force base in the Nevada desert.   
       In the mid 1970s the Mossad requested permission 
  from the Americans to study the stone giant.  The Air 
  Force agreed, and Mossad sent their kabalistic sorcerer 
  "Doctor Solomon" to the hanger in Nevada.   
       Dr. Solomon immediately identified the creature as 
  a thing out of Yiddish legend, the Golem.  Presumably 
  some forgotten cabalist had built this artificial man to 
  protect Prague’s Jewish community from the nazis.   
  Considering what had become of the Jews of Prague, 
  the Golem hadn’t been finished in time to do much 
  good.  Someone had inactivated the creature by 
  blotting out one of the magic letters written on the top 
  of its head, but this was easy enough to fix.   
       Curious about the golem’s origins, Dr. Solomon 
  drew the missing letter back into place and brought the 
  creature to life.  It acted surprisingly human, in that it 
  was a sneering, sarcastic and thoroughly disagreeable 
  being, who refused to answer any of Doctor 
  Solomon’s questions out of sheer obstinacy.  It did 
  however accept his offer to come work for the 
  Mossad.   
       The Israelis wanted to put the Golem through Basic 
  Training and a set of courses in military intelligence, 
  but it refused to cooperate, so they just dumped it 
  directly into a secret parahuman unit called “the 
  Forgotten Men” and started giving him covert 
  assignments.   
       Over the next fifteen years the Grey Golem fought 
  the Egyptian Secret Service, the PLO and various 
  armed factions in Lebanon, clashing with other 
  superhumans many times.  He never got along with 
  the rest of his unit, partly because his super-abilities 
  were badly matched with theirs (most of the Forgotten 
  Men had stealthy, subtle powers) but also because of 
  his personality.   
       He remained as cynical, sarcastic and truculent as 
  when Dr. Solomon first revived him. Impossible to get 
  along with, he would constantly snipe and jeer at the 
  other members of the team, undercutting their 
  confidence and provoking mischief for no reason. He 
  used excessive force, he defied orders for the heck of 
  it.   
       In the late 1980s the Forgotten Men got wiped out 
  on a mission to Iraq.  Only the Grey Golem survived, 
  and that was because he had missed his flight.  It made 
  him think.  Why was he busting his hump for a little 
  money and the joy of fighting?  He could fight guys 
  and get rich.   
       After a few bungled attempts at supercrimes in 
  Europe, he got wise and hired himself out to Executive 
  Solutions.  There he met the love of his life, the 
  disgraced American superhero who used to be known 
  as Major Maximum.  Their relationship is pretty 
  tempestuous, but despite his rotten disposition the 
  Golem really tries to keep it together.  He tells himself 
  that he’s only doing this because its so difficult to find 
  anyone he can get physically intimate with (at least 
  without killing them) but he’s lying to himself.  The 
  truth is that he’s finally found the one thing in his life 
  that he doesn’t want to crush.   
  
    
       Love has mellowed the Grey Golem quite a bit, but 
  he’s still impossible.  Contrary, sarcastic, stubborn and 
  petty, he constantly sneers and makes cutting remarks.  
  He’s selfish and defiant, and will oppose other people 
  even when it’s to his advantage to go along with them.   
       Even though he doesn’t need to eat and can barely 
  feel anything through his stone skin, he loves his little 
  creature comforts and will cause all kinds of havoc if 
  someone else gets in the way of them.   He wants the 
  best seat on the airplane, he wants the biggest 
  sandwich on the plate, he wants the best chair in the 
  briefing room and he'll cause trouble if he doesn't get 
  it. He’s the kind of guy who will smash the pie and 
  throw it out the window if he sees that you have a 
  bigger slice.   
       Smarter than most people think, he’s good at 
  manipulating others and loves to provoke fights.  He 
  claims to have never believed in anything, but if you 
  see the way he looks at Major Maximum you’ll know 
  that’s a lie.   
       Not a subtle opponent, the Grey Golem’s powers 
  aren’t suited for stealth. But years of fighting other 
  superbeings have made a tactician out of him.  He 
  wants to win, and he’ll calmly do what it takes.  If he 
  has a chance, he’ll spend a moment sizing his 
  opponent up, figuring out how their powers work and 
  whether he can find a weak spot while his teammates 
  soak up some damage.  He’ll usually attack the target 
  who looks most vulnerable to physical attack, and will 
  only come to grips with other super-strong bruisers if 
  he has to (or if that’s clearly what would make the 
  most sense).   
       He constantly talks trash and jeers at his opponents.  
  Not only does this make them mad (a goal in and of 
  itself, as far as he’s concerned) it also makes them 
  think he’s a prancing buffoon and underestimate him.   
       He will kill if it’s a part of the mission or if it 
  seems like the most expedient way to solve a problem, 
  but he won’t do it casually or in an impulsive rage.  
  His anger burns cold, instead of hot.   
       While he loves combat, he never gets completely 
  swept away by the joy of battle.  He knows when to 
  withdraw and he has no intention of dying for anyone 
  or anything. He tells himself that this includes Major 
  Maximum, but deep down he knows that isn’t true.   
   
  Adventures With Executive Solution Z:  
   
  Prince of Skulls 
       Cabot Collier-Dunbarton III, alias Skullbone, is the 
  wayward, homicidal son of one of America’s 
  wealthiest families. He wants to be a gansta and has 
  been trying to ingratiate himself with an inner city 
  gang. They treat him with amused contempt, but they 
  are intrigued by the amount of money he has to throw 
  around.   
       In order to impress them, he has murdered the 
  girlfriend of a rival gang member.  The cops have 
  taken an interest, his new friends have sold him out 
  and the press has gotten wind of the whole sordid 
  affair.   
       Skullbone isn’t from a segment of American 
  society that normally has to worry about things like 
  prosecution, but a young and idealistic assistant DA 
  has actually gotten a warrant for his arrest. The press 
  has descended on the Collier-Dunbarton compound 
  upstate and the police have arrived to serve the 
  warrant.  They have a search warrant as well, but the 
  Collier-Dunbartons are refusing to acknowledge its 
  authenticity, and their security people won’t let the 
  police inside.  
       Only a few hours remain before the Collier-
  Dunbarton attorneys get a superior court to nullify the 
  warrants and put young Cabot on a private plane to 
  Switzerland, where he can spend the rest of his life 
  skiing and boasting about how easy it is to get away 
  with murder.  In desperation the Assistant DA turns to 
  the PCs.  Can they help her serve the warrant?   
       There is, alas, one small complication.  The 
  Collier-Dunbartons have also retained the services of 
  Executive Solutions, who have sent over Executive 
  Solutions M and Z—Major Maximum and the Gray 
  Golem.  They won’t give Skullbone up without a 
  fight, even though they find his strutting faux hip-hop 
  mannerisms thoroughly annoying. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution X 
  Real Name: He always signed his 
  recruitment papers with an "X."  If he 
  had a name before that, he neither knows 
  nor cares. 
  PL: 18 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 20 (+5) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 16 (+3) Wis: 20 (+5) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +21 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +21 Defense: 
  +35/+24 Speed: 35 
  Damage Save: +6 Fortitude Save: +4 
  Reflexes Save: +5 (+12 with super-Dexterity) 
  Willpower Save: +5   
  Skills: Climb +5, Hide +10, Intimidate +8, Move 
  Silently +10, Profession (Soldier) +5, Spot +10, 
  Survival +10, Swim +5 
  Feats: Darkvision, Far Shot, Headquarters 
  (Equipped with a Dock [adjacent to the lagoon, hidden 
  from the air], Concealed [the villa is hidden beneath 
  the trees on a seemingly deserted island that is not 
  marked on any of the standard nautical charts], an 
  infestation of biting flies that carry the debilitating 
  disease known as the Bleeding Fever [4 levels of 
  Drain; Extras: Delayed Effect and 2 levels of Slow 
  Recovery; Flaw: Only Drains Constitution] which X 
  happens to be immune to, an ancient howitzer hidden 
  behind the house just in case X suddenly has a need to 
  shoot down any incoming aircraft [+8 Lethal Damage 
  Energy Blast], a Gym, a seldom-used aircraft Hanger 
  and concealed airstrip some distance away from the 
  villa, a small but well-stocked Infirmary in one room 
  of the villa, a set of reinforced Holding Cells [concrete  
  lined pits full of sludge] for unruly guests, an Isolated 
  Location [on a jungle island somewhere in Indonesia], 
  a jumbled and disorganized Library full of wierd 
  tomes and trashy adventure novels that X has 
  accumulated over the years, Living Quarters for 
  roughly 17 people, a Pool [or at least ready access to a 
  sheltered lagoon, suitable for an improvised submarine 
  pen], a seperate Power System, a Security System 
  [consisting of a number of tame monkeys and parrots 
  who wander the grounds and shriek at the first sign of 
  a stranger's presence on the island], its own Staff [if 
  you can really call them that--about thirty tame PL1 
  pit-vipers, 3 PL2 cobras, a PL 3 Leopard and a big 
  mean PL 4 shark rove at will around the island.  All of 
  them somehow know not to attack X], two levels of 
  Time Control [time flows weirdly on the island--either 
  two days or half a day passes for each day in the 
  outside world, slowing down or speeding up 
  seemingly at random], and a Workshop where X 
  tinkers with, cleans and repairs his weapons), 
  Immunity (Aging), Improved Critical, Improved 
  Disarm, Point-Blank Shot, Power Attack, Rapid 
  Takedown, Scent, Startle, Takedown Attack, Tracking 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +2, Running +1 
  (Cost: 2pts), Super-Strength +8 (Extras: Leaping, 
  Super-Dexterity, Super-Senses; Cost 7 pts) 
  Equipment: Sword (+4 Lethal Damage; Power 
  Stunt: Penetrating Attack +6; Cost 1pt), Rifle, (+4 
  Lethal Damage), Weird Green Gem (Telepathy +4; 
  Extras: ESP, Mental Protection; Flaws: Device, Only 
  Allows Communication; Cost: 2pts) 
  Weaknesses: Berzerker 
  Vulnerable: Dazzle attacks. 
   
  “The look on a dead child’s face is its 
  own reward and its own justification.  It 
  makes you feel like you’re in love.  ‘This 
  child is dead’ you say ‘but me, I live’ 
  and your twisted heart rejoices.  You can 
  admit these things to me. I know how it 
  is.”  
   
       He doesn’t know how old he is. The past two 
  centuries are fairly clear in his mind, the century 
  before that he can only recall dimly, and before about 
  1650 it’s all a blur, lit by occasional flashes of 
  violence. He’s always appeared to be about thirty five, 
  or maybe just a little older. He has always been a 
  soldier—of that he is somehow sure. They call him 
  "X" because that was always the way he signed his 
  enlistment papers.   
       War is his heart, his soul, the center of his being.  
  He has sampled every bloody conflict Europe has had 
  to offer, and it all was sweet to him. Whatever mercy 
  or sympathy he might have once possessed are long, 
  long gone.  He revels in carnage and grue and he loves 
  to talk about it. Treacherous and savage, cruel and 
  cunning, his eyes glint with sadistic mirth.  He looks 
  confident and relaxed in situations that most of us 
  would run screaming from and he never loses his 
  brutal sense of humor.   
       It’s not strictly true that he’d kill noncombatants 
  without a second thought—in fact he relishes it, will 
  go out of his way to harm innocents (if it doesn’t 
  jeopardize the mission) and boast about it afterwards. 
  He likes to claim to follow the 19th century officer’s 
  code, and to conduct himself as a gentleman, but he 
  can always find some sneering excuse to violate it.  
  (“Honor, for a dirty peasant who hasn’t yet killed his 
  first man?  Surely you’re joking! Honor is for real 
  men.”)  
       He’s as hard a man as you’re ever likely to 
  encounter.  But he is not without his secret fears. 
  Everything dies, he has found.  People, nations, 
  alliances, ideologies, ways of seeing the world.  
       As the last three centuries rolled past he found that 
  even the things which are supposed to be eternal 
  cosmic absolutes die.  The Divine Right of kings, the 
  earth’s fixed position at the center of the cosmos, the 
  innate superiority of the Noble Class, the position of 
  Woman as Man’s loyal servant and helpmate—these 
  
    
  things can’t die, they’re laws of the universe, older 
  than the world.  And yet these things die, too.  
       For a long time he gloated over the idea that only 
  war was eternal, that the sound of the cannon’s roar 
  and the thunder of the cavalry’s hooves was the only 
  lasting truth.  Then World War One came along and 
  even the nature of armed conflict changed completely.  
  Time devours and obliterates all things, it seems.  
  Except for him.   
       And he is well-equipped to survive. Stronger, 
  swifter, fiercer and more durable than any human 
  being, he can quickly recover from almost any injury 
  and he has the senses of a wild beast.  None of these 
  things would save him on a modern battlefield, of 
  course.   
       He only just barely survived both world wars, 
  which left him baffled and afraid.  He fought on both 
  sides in World War Two, first for the Latvians against 
  the Russian invaders, then with the right-wing Polish 
  nationalists against both the Soviets and the Nazis, 
  then with the Germans against everybody else.   
       The twentieth century was not a good time for 
  mercenaries, on the whole—it was an age of huge 
  conscript armies, where everyone wanted to check 
  your identity papers when you tried to sign up.  The 
  French Foreign Legion seemed like the last place in 
  Europe where soldiers without a past might be 
  welcome, so after the war he signed up, along with a 
  great many former Wehrmacht and SS men, and was 
  promptly shipped off to the killing fields of French 
  Indochina.  
       He fought in le Legion’s parhuman unit, alongside 
  such former Nazi ubermenchen as Blitzenhammer 
  (later of Vernichtung 5).  As the French slowly lost 
  Vietnam the Legion was badly devastated, and the 
  parahumans were hit particularly hard. Yet even 
  though they were losing, he loved this war more than 
  he had any conflict for a long time.   
       When the French pulled out, he stayed on and kept 
  fighting for the South Vietnamese.  When the 
  Americans took the whole show over he was referred 
  to the CIA as a man who could get things done.  He 
  undertook some covert missions for them in Laos and 
  Cambodia, but to tell the truth they were always afraid 
  of him, and used him less and less as time went on.   
       He withdrew for some years to a small island he 
  had purchased off the coast of Borneo, and 
  occasionally hunted men for sport on his jungle estate. 
  While he tried to interest himself in a few sordid little 
  conflicts in places like Africa and Yugoslavia, he 
  feared that he was finally beginning to succumb to 
  ennui.  
       Executive Solutions heard about him through their 
  old CIA contacts, and while they were shocked to 
  learn that he was more than just a legend, they were 
  eager to have him on board.  For his part, he feels 
  renewed and rejuvenated in his new job.  Death and 
  blood taste good to him again.   
       When using Executive Solution X, it is important 
  to remember that although he feels out of place in the 
  modern world, he knows how to function in it.  He can 
  operate a cell phone, he knows how to use a fax 
  machine and although he doesn’t have a license, he 
  can drive a car.   
       He can be used as an independent master villain, 
  particularly if the Player Characters are unlucky 
  enough to find themselves on his island, but he works 
  better as a hired gun. He won’t try to take over the 
  world, but he might well attempt to provoke a major 
  war if he saw an opportunity to do so.   
   
  Adventures With Executive Solution X:  
   
  The Most Violent Man in the World Contest 
       X has become bored, and has done a silly thing.  
  He has used his contacts to obtain some normally 
  inaccessible documents—proof of American 
  citizenship and a signed pardon from the President of 
  Indonesia.  He then offers them as a prize in a no-
  holds barred fighting competition, which will take 
  place on his private island. Killers, pirates, gunfighters 
  and other assorted scum from across the Indian Ocean 
  flock to the contest, eager for a chance at a new life in 
  America.   
       Perhaps the Player Characters get wind of the 
  contest and decide to join.  Perhaps someone sends 
  them to infiltrate it.  Perhaps X kidnaps them and 
  forces them to participate.   
       Conditions on the island are primitive and 
  sanitation is poor.  The only house is X’s villa, which 
  he lets no one approach (the skulls and corpses on 
  sticks outside his door serve as a reminder to stay 
  away).  There’s not enough fresh water and not 
  enough food.  But most of the contestants are 
  desperate men in any case, used to hardship of every 
  kind.  
       The rules of the contest are fairly lax.  Contestants 
  pick who they will fight by mutual agreement.  Fights 
  may or may not be to the death—that’s up to the 
  combatants, as is the choice of weapons.  If they want 
  to blast away at eachother with firearms, X has no 
  objection.  If an unarmed man wants to fight a fencing 
  expert armed with a chainsaw, that’s his own concern.  
  They can fight on the beach, among the rocks, in the 
  jungle or even in the water (despite the problem with 
  man-eating sharks)—anywhere that X can get a good 
  view of the fight.  
       There will be quite a few PL 5-7 fighters in 
  attendance, as well as a few actual supervillains and 
  one or two PL 10 assassins.  At least one of the 
  combatants is secretly here to settle an old grudge with 
  X.  At least one is an infiltrator from some 
  international law-enforcement organization.  Some 
  will try to cheat, some will try to eliminate their rivals 
  before the contest begins.  On an island full of 
  seasoned killers without enough food or water, fights 
  unrelated to the contest are sure to break out, some of 
  them lethal.  And midway through the contest, X 
  enters the competition himself. 
   
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution R 
  aka Dan Dauntless, 
  Rocket Ranger 
  Real Name: Zoran Draskovik 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 12 (+1) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 14 (+2) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +6 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +6 Defense: 
  +15/+14 Speed: 30/50 (in flight) 
  Damage Save: +3/13 (with Armor) 
  Fortitude Save: +1 Reflexes Save: +8 
  Willpower Save: +8   
  Skills: Intimidate +12, Knowledge (Bosnia) +6, 
  Performance +5, Repair +6, Search +10, Spot +11, 
  Survival +5 
  Feats: Aerial Combat, All-Out Attack, Attack 
  Focus (Energy Blast), Dodge, Evasion, Far Shot, Iron 
  Will, Lightning Reflexes, Move-By Attack, Point-
  Blank Shot, Power Attack, Talented (Performance and 
  Intimidate), Toughness 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Willpower) +10 (Cost: 
  1pt) 
  Equipment: Armor +12 (Extras: Energy Blast,  
  Explosive Effect, Flight; Power Stunts: Blind-Fight, 
  Blindsight, Darkvision, Radio Broadcast, Radio 
  Hearing, Super-Flight; Flaws: Device; Cost 4pts), 
  Oxygen Supply, (Grants Immunity to Suffocation and 
  Pressure; Flaw: Device; Cost 2pts) 
   
  “Ah, don’t take it so hard.  I’ll get mine 
  eventually.  Everybody dies all twisted 
  up and scared and alone.  I will, too.  
  You just get to do it first.”  
   
       He used to be Dan Dauntless, Rocket Ranger.  Now 
  he’s no one and nothing—just another faceless black 
  ops killer who can barely remember his own name.  
  This should make him bitter, he thinks, but in fact it 
  gets harder and harder to feel anything at all.   
       When Bosnia slid into bloody chaos, and the Serbs 
  were closing in on Sarajevo with murder in their eyes, 
  a ragtag assemblage of gangsters and super-criminals 
  came to the city’s defense.   
       Zoran Draskovik was neither—just a coffeehouse 
  folk singer who didn’t want to see his city burn.  He 
  fell in with an informal militia under a guy they called 
  “Yuko”, a crazy, angry, funny street criminal who 
  didn’t seem to care whether he lived or died.  
  Draskovik was a Serb himself, but he had nothing 
  against the Bosnian Muslims and he felt that his first 
  loyalty was to Sarajevo.  And he was enough of an 
  asset to Yuko’s group that they didn’t even grumble 
  much about his Serbian ancestry, at least to his face.   
       Zoran had done his stint in the Yugoslav army, 
  back when there was such a place as Yugoslavia, and 
  had qualified as a divisional marksmanship champion.  
  He had even been trained as a helicopter pilot, which 
  might come in handy if the gang ever managed to lay 
  its hands on a helicopter.   
       Instead they found something much better.  
  Breaking into an old military warehouse, looking for 
  ammunition, Yuko’s gang discovered a prototype 
  flying suit, with a jet pack attached.  Apparently the 
  old Yugoslavian regime had abandoned the project 
  because of its expense and put their only completed 
  suit in storage.   
       It was relatively easy to use, and only killed the 
  first two men who put it on.  A former Air Force 
  Lieutenant named Danil Zvornik was the third, and he 
  was a good enough pilot to use the suit effectively.   
       As the best marksman in the unit, Zoran Draskovik 
  was made Danil’s spotter, and the two of them 
  wreaked bloody havoc on the advancing Serb militias.  
  Danil Zvornik was utterly fearless, willing to take 
  insane risks.  People started calling him “Dan 
  Dauntless” after an old comic book character.  It’s 
  arguable how much he actually accomplished, since 
  the rocket-pack’s range was never great enough for 
  him to flush the Serbs out of their positions around the 
  city, but people loved him anyway.  He gave them 
  hope, at a time when the desperately needed it.   
       He wasn’t much of a hero on the ground, being 
  prone to drink and harassing women and explosive fits 
  of violence.  But in the air he was exactly the man 
  they needed.   
       As the war ground onward, Bosnia grew better 
  organized and the wild and disorderly Sarajevo 
  militias became a liability.  They looted, they 
  appropriated good apartments and gave them to their 
  friends, they abducted civilians and made them dig 
  trenches.  And there were darker hints as well.  While 
  Yuko didn’t particulalry hate Serbs, it was said that 
  some of the other militia leaders were quietly 
  exterminating Sarajevo’s Serbian population, bit by 
  bit.   
       When the President attempted to integrate the 
  irregular units into the new Bosnian Army’s command 
  structure, they refused to obey orders or to let the 
  government investigate their actions.  Zoran 
  Draskovik thought this might be a good time to leave.   
       A friend of his had recently lost a thumb in a 
  firefight and it made Zoran think hard about his own 
  future, and about what that kind of wound would mean 
  to someone who played the guitar for a living.  If he 
  were to get crippled that way, he could never go back 
  to being a musician, war would be all he’d ever be 
  good for, and he was already sick to death of war.  He 
  didn’t want to be like Yuko.   
       Not that Zoran had any idea what he’d do if he 
  gave this life up.  He lived in his grandmother’s 
  apartment, he had no money and as a Serb things 
  wouldn’t be safe for him once he left the unit.  
  Nonetheless he had to try.   
  
    
       He resigned his post and tried to get out of town.  
  Yuko appointed Dan Dauntless a new ground 
  observer, who wasn’t as good and who promptly got 
  him killed.  And then the Serbs launched a murderous 
  new winter offensive, raining rockets and sniper fire 
  down on the hapless citizens of Sarajevo, staining the 
  snow-choked streets with blood.  There was no way 
  out now.  Someone had to put on the suit and 
  Draskovik was the only one with any knowledge of 
  how it worked.   
       Yuko was about to try it on himself (despite this 
  being almost certain death) when Zoran returned.  
  Some guys in the unit grumbled about him being a 
  traitor and a Serb, but Yuko let him fly anyway.   
       Zoran lost three fingers on his first mission.  But 
  that was all right.  His grandmother was dead, his 
  guitar was broken and his city was in flames.  It was 
  time to die.   
       But instead something else happened.  The Serb 
  marauders were pushed back, more UN peacekeepers 
  arrived and the course of the war finally began to turn 
  toward the Bosnians.  No one outside Yuko’s group 
  seemed to know that he wasn’t the original Dan 
  Dauntless, but that was okay, too.  He was a better 
  symbol this way.   
       The CIA got in touch shortly thereafter.  It seems 
  they had regularly been asking Danil Zvornik to come 
  and work for them as an independent contractor.  
  Zoran told them to get stuffed.  He was too busy trying 
  to die.  But then the Bosnian government finally 
  cracked down on the independent militias.   
       Yuko’s unit was declared rogue, and left town.  He 
  set himself up as a warlord in the mountains north of 
  the airport, extorting money and supplies from anyone 
  who passed through his domain.  Zoran had no desire 
  to follow Yuko up into the mountains—that looked 
  like a dead end.  He did visit Yuko briefly to try to 
  reason with the man, but was cruelly rebuffed.   
       None of the other militia leaders seemed likely to 
  want to talk to anybody named Zoran (that’s a Serb 
  name), except maybe for the superhuman gangster 
  they called the Masked Marauder.  Alas, just as Zoran 
  prepared to approach him, the crackdown began in 
  earnest.  The Masked Marauder was the government’s 
  first target, killed by the Bosnian Army in a running 
  battle that lasted for three days and took about thirty 
  lives.   
       Zoran had no desire to die fighting against his own 
  side, so he took the CIA up on their standing offer 
  (they had no idea that he wasn't the original Dan 
  Dauntless), and they turned him over to Executive 
  Solutions.  For years he has fought in whatever ugly 
  little conflict they assign him to, spending his off 
  hours practicing his marksmanship or fine-tuning his 
  equipment. It amuses him that his old enemy, the 
  Serbian supervillain named Vlade Andric, is in the 
  same unit.   Dr. Andric seems determined to make 
  friends with him, but Zoran is past being friends with 
  anyone now. 
       Last year he heard that someone shot Yuko to death 
  at a rest stop in Belgium.  Something about this news 
  made him want to go home again, so he took some 
  time off and went back to Sarajevo.  The city was at 
  peace, the cafes were full of vacationing American 
  students and all of his old friends were dead.  No one 
  spoke of the past, no sign of the war remained.  
  Sarajevo kept its secrets to itself, these days.   
       He doesn’t think he’ll ever go back.  His war didn’t 
  end here on these blood-spattered streets, but it will 
  end somewhere like it, someday.  Soon.   
       In person, Dan Dauntless is cold, formidable and 
  exhausted.  Absolutely unfazable, he knows no fear 
  and nothing surprises him.  His years surrounded by 
  hostile comrades in the field forced him to learn how 
  to be a bully, but he takes no pleasure in it. He is 
  forever trying to intimidate people and he will never 
  back down or let up on someone who has insulted him 
  or shown weakness in front of him. Even in combat he 
  constantly seeks the psychological edge over his 
  opponent, taunting and belittling them.  Yet he does it 
  coldly, calmly, without passion.  For it’s all just a 
  matter of habit to him.   
       He hates killing and has bad dreams about 
  everyone he’s ever put in the ground, but he’ll do it 
  anyway, if the mission requires it.  If he corners a 
  defeated Player Character and no on else is watching, 
  he’ll let them go, rather than execute them, whispering 
  urgently that they had better not tell anyone he let 
  them escape.   
       In combat, Dan Dauntless shows an unusual, 
  unhealthy lack of fear. He has no objection to fighting 
  against vastly superior odds, nor will he attempt to 
  withdraw if he is wounded.  He’ll leave the field when 
  he is ordered to, but not before.  Yet he won’t just hurl 
  himself at the opposition like a kamikaze, either.  A 
  shrewd and canny fighter, he’ll stay airborne and pick 
  targets off from a distance if he can, but he doesn’t 
  mind getting close up and physical.  
   
  Adventures With Executive Solution R:  
   
  1) Dan Dauntless and the Billion Dollar Box 
       Mr. Flint sends Dan Dauntless to intercept a light 
  aircraft that will be carrying a box of laundered Euros 
  from Juarez to a hidden airstrip somewhere south of 
  Yuma.  He’s more than fast and maneuverable enough 
  to catch it in the air, but it leaves ahead of schedule, 
  and he isn’t in position in time.  He winds up having 
  to pursue the plane deep into American airspace,  
  which is both illegal and against the rules that 
  Executive Solutions operates under.   
       The PCs presumably get drawn into the matter 
  when they hear that a small, fast-moving object has 
  breached American airspace over the Arizona desert, 
  near the old Barry Goldwater Air Force Gunnery 
  Range. This looks pretty ominous and most PCs will 
  want to have a look.   
       Dan Dauntless won’t explain anything about his 
  mission and he is totally dogged in his pursuit of the 
  target.  Unless they ground him with a serious injury, 
  the best the PCs will be able to do is to drive him 
  away for a little while.   
       If they manage to keep him from hitting the plane 
  before it touches down at the airstrip, the box with the 
  
    
  money inside will be transferred to a professional 
  getaway driver named Heck Corliss, who drives a 
  battered-looking, heavily customized Barracuda that’s 
  capable of  speeds in excess of two hundred miles per 
  hour on the straightaway. But of course Dan Dauntless 
  is faster, and he’s coming.   
       A quiet, guarded kind of guy, Heck neither knows 
  nor cares what’s in the box.  He’s just the driver.  
  However, he is almost as determined as Dan 
  Dauntless, and will use every trick he knows to get the 
  box to its destination.   
       In California’s Imperial valley, at the mean and 
  skanky end of the Salton Sea, there is a dismal, dusty 
  little town called Nyland, where Heck Corliss will 
  hand the box off to a second driver—a French woman 
  of Vietnamese extraction named Henrietta Ong.   
       Miss Ong drives a souped-up Mercedes sports car 
  and is looking forward to testing it on America’s 
  legendary wide-open highways against an opponent 
  like Dan Dauntless.  Her car isn’t quite as fast as Heck 
  Corliss’ Barracuda, but it's a lot more maneuverable.        
       If Dan Dauntless or the Player Characters don’t 
  stop her, Henrietta Ong  will park her car on the street 
  in downtown San Diego, pull the box out of the trunk 
  and carry it to an outdoor public plaza, within sight of 
  the harbor.   
       There, under the palm trees, she will hand the box 
  to a dignified, white-bearded diplomatic courtier from 
  Oman.  The courier, Wahid Azimi, handcuffs the box 
  to his wrist and rides off in the back an armored Rolls-
  Royce limousine. He is headed for the airport, where 
  he will wave his diplomatic passport, get on an 
  international flight and vanish into the Middle East.  
  The money will then find its way into the coffers of 
  the Palestinian radical group Hamas.   
       If the PCs haven’t put Dan Dauntless out of action 
  by the time the Azimi walks through airport security, 
  he will actually attempt to break his way into the 
  airliner in mid-flight and nab the box.  He’ll be careful 
  not to let it reach the altitude where it would cause 
  explosive decompression to break into the cabin.  
  Determined though he is, he genuinely does not want 
  to hurt any civilians.   
       He also doesn’t care what happens to the money in 
  the box, so long as it doesn’t reach Hamas.  His 
  mission was to keep the box from reaching its 
  destination and it doesn’t matter to him if the PCs burn 
  the money, blow it up or even keep it for themselves.  
  Of course Hamas might feel differently about that.   
   
  2) Dan Dauntless and the Eight-Year-Old Enemy 
  of America 
       Mr. Flint sends Dan Dauntless into the 
  mountainous northernmost reaches of Pakistan, up by 
  the edge of the Himalayas.  The international 
  boundaries are loose and poorly charted up there, with  
  autonomous tribal groups on both sides of the official 
  borders.  
       Dan Dauntless is supposed to hit the mountain 
  encampment of a clan that is giving shelter and aid to 
  the Taliban—and possibly Al Quaida as well.  
  Technically the target is inside the borders of the 
  People’s Republic of China, which makes the mission 
  extremely sensitive.   
       Unfortunately, the intelligence is faulty and he 
  winds up annihilating a whole mountain clan that had 
  nothing to do with the Taliban , let alone Al Quaida.  
  A Chinese doctor was with them, participating in a 
  study on high altitude medicine.  So was a 
  documentary film crew.  Everyone is dead, and this is 
  going to cause a lot of important people a lot of 
  embarrassment when and if it gets out.  
       Fortunately, the only two surviving witnesses are 
  Dan Dauntless himself and an eight year old girl.  The 
  home office instructs Dan Dauntless to hunt the girl 
  down, hide her body with the others and return to his 
  drop-off point.  Instead he takes her under his 
  protection and flees deeper into the mountains, unsure 
  where to go or what to do once his fuel runs out.   
       As an added complication, one of the generals 
  overseeing the mission hates Executive Solutions.  He 
  has ties to another, similar firm called International 
  Consultations and is enraged that the Intelligence 
  officers on this mission managed to get their favorite 
  vendor on board instead of his own.  He intends to 
  retire soon to a comfortable Vice Presidency at 
  International Consultations and doesn’t want anything 
  rocking the boat.   
       Out of spite, he arranges to have a bunch of 
  complete outsiders brought in to hunt down Dan 
  Dauntless—the Player Characters.  They are told that 
  he’s a fanatical Bosnian Muslim, who has slaughtered 
  a bunch of moderates and kidnapped a little girl as part 
  of some crazy attempt to foment a war with China. 
  The General hopes they’ll bring the whole truth to 
  light and cause Executive Solutions a lot of public 
  embarrassment, which may actually make the folks at 
  International Consultations grateful that he didn’t win 
  them the contract.    
       But Jim Flint is not so easily circumvented as that, 
  and he has a backup plan already in play.  He has sent 
  Executive Solution X up into the mountains to finish 
  the job if the PCs fail to kill Dan Dauntless. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution Q 
  aka "The Obscenity" 
  Real Name: Bruce Hollander 
  PL: 15 
  Str: 20 (+5) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 20 (+5) 
  Int: 12 (+1) Wis: 10 (+0) Cha: 14 (+2) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +16/+14 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +4 (+17 with Super-Constitution) 
  Fortitude Save: +6 (+21 with Super-
  Constitution) Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower 
  Save: +1   
  Skills: Intimidate+12, Listen +5, Move Silently+8, 
  Repair +2, Spot +5 
  Feats: Darkvision, Durability, Great Fortitude, 
  Heroic Surge, Immunity (Aging, Critical Hits, 
  Disease, Poison, Starvation, Suffocation), Improved 
  Grapple, Improved Pin, Power Attack, Rapid Healing, 
  Startle, Surprise Strike 
  Powers: Regeneration +15 (Extras: Back From the 
  Brink, Regrowth; Cost: 4), Super-Strength +15 
  (Extras: Protection, Super-Constitution; Power Stunt: 
  Lethal Damage; Cost 5 pts) 
  Equipment: A small pointy stick that he can use 
  to press the buttons on his laptop. 
  Weaknesses: Disabled (Mute) 
   Disturbing (looks like a supperating mass of sludge, 
  suffers a –5 on all Bluff and Diplomacy checks) 
   
  "..."  
   
       A hideous, shambling, squelching pile of proto-
  matter, vaguely shaped like a man.   His eyes are 
  awful and empty, like the eyes of a dead fish.  They 
  only send out Executive Solution Q on jobs that 
  require the Resource to be extremely scary.   
       He actually volunteered for the treatment which 
  turned him from a human being into something far, far 
  less.  Like many of Executive Solutions' Resources, he 
  was a soldier in an elite military unit (the US Delta  
  Force, in his case).  He showed so much promise that 
  one of the Defense Department's private security 
  contractors hired him before his tour of duty was even 
  up.  He worked as hired muscle for one or another of 
  the big security firms for a few years, guarding nuclear 
  power plants and secret aerospace design labs until he 
  was offered the chance to volunteer for an 
  experimental man-amplification program.   
       Most of his body tissues were replaced with Plast-
  o-Flesh, turning him into a sentient shambling heap.  
  This wasn't what the firm who designed him had 
  intended, so they didn't renew his contract and he 
  found himself both out of work and unemployable. 
  Executive Solutions offered him the best available 
  deal, and now he works for them.   
       He has always been a careful, quiet, methodical 
  soldier, although in the Delta Force he had a 
  reputation for being wound a little too tight.  
  Underneath his calm exterior he is a boiling cauldron 
  of repressed rage, which is now creeping closer and 
  closer to the surface. He will never have a normal life, 
  people he trusted betrayed him and turned into a 
  loathsome freak, Executive Solutions probably isn't 
  working on the cure they have promised him for his 
  condition--the stress that all this generates is 
  intolerable. Even someone who isn't so brittle and 
  repressed wouldn't be able to cope with his situation 
  indefinitely.   
       So far he has reacted by growing even quieter and 
  more withdrawn, but it's only a matter of time before 
  he snaps and runs amok.  They already know this at 
  Executive Solutions, and have made arrangements to 
  kill him when it happens.  
   
  Adventures With the Obscenity:  
   
  1) Happy Birthday to Nobody 
       A retired KGB general has taken up residence in 
  the Cayman Islands, where he may or may not be 
  selling his expertise to private clients.  Jim Flint has a 
  personal grudge against the old scoundrel and has 
  determined to kill him in front of his grandchildren.  
  He wants the general to die as horribly as possible, so 
  he has carefully waited until the General’s youngest 
  grandson comes to the island for his fifth birthday 
  party, and has sent and unexpected guest to attend the 
  festivities—Executive Solution Q.   
       However, Q has been spotted multiple times since 
  setting his squelching foot on the island and the 
  general has gotten wind of his presence.  No fool, the 
  wily old dog at once guesses that Flint has sent a 
  Resource to kill him, and calls in the PCs for 
  protection.  The general foolishly thinks Flint is an 
  honorable opponent and is sure that Q will wait until 
  his grandson’s birthday party is over before he acts.   
       In person the general is warm and funny, fond of 
  dirty jokes and wry observations about life.  He’s 
  confined to a wheelchair these days, just like his old 
  enemy Jim Flint, and feels that it may be long past his 
  time to die.  Yet he would prefer not to do it in front of 
  his grandchildren with a birthday hat on his head.  
   
  2) The Strange Case of the Obscenity and the Non-
  Dairy Whipped Topping 
       Executive Solutions decides to have the Obscenity 
  killed.  They send him out on a very rare kind of 
  assignment—an assassination on American soil.  His 
  target is Doctor Winston Wong, the inventor of Plast-
  O-Flesh (and of a famous non-dairy whipped topping, 
  which he talks about constantly and brews up in his 
  bathtub by the gallons for special and extremely 
  private parties).   
       Executive Solutions then anonymously tips off the 
  Player Characters.  They claim that Q has gone 
  
    
  berserk, and intends to kill the mad doctor responsible 
  for his creation.   
       To their credit, Dr. Wong really is fairly strange—
  he’s a forty year-old punk rocker and an incurable 
  party animal, with a graying New Wave haircut and a 
  taste for heavily pierced guys half his age.  He’s 
  hardly insane, but he’s also not likely to listen the PCs 
  warnings.  He will however flirt shamelessly with 
  rough-looking male PCs.  
       Meanwhile, when Q sees that he’s being sent to kill 
  one of the men responsible for his creation, he knows 
  they must be about to dispose of him, and sets a plan 
  of his own in motion.  He writes the PCs a clumsy, 
  poorly typed e-mail message (his fingers don't type 
  very well anymore), in which he invites them to go to 
  the deserted office of a huge junkyard at midnight, and 
  instant-message him on the office computer.   
       If the PCs do this, he will break into a nearby 
  public library, hunch down over a computer terminal, 
  and IM them back, punching the keys with a pencil.  
  He will laboriously explain to the Player Characters 
  that this assignment is a set-up, that someone is going 
  to try to get them to assassinate Dr. Wong’s assassin.  
  He’ll tell them anything they want to know about 
  Executive Solutions, although it’s often hard to 
  understand his typing. He is however shy about 
  revealing exactly who he is.   
       When the PCs arrive at Winston Wong’s big 
  cluttered loft, the Obscenity will be nervously lurking 
  in the shadows outside, and if they figure out that he 
  was the one instant messaging them, they may be able 
  to strike up some kind of alliance with him.   
       Q does not know that Executive Solutions already 
  has a backup plan in motion.  There is a huge bomb in 
  Dr. Wong’s building and if Q doesn’t kill Wong or get 
  smashed to bits by the PCs before a certain amount of 
  time elapses, the bomb goes off and kills everybody.  
   
  3) Rampant Obscenity 
       Executive Solution Q finally snaps.  He breaks his 
  restraints and goes on a rampage, smashing his way 
  out of the Charlottesville facility and killing two 
  people in the process.  Executive Solutions moves at 
  once to cover up the incident and hunt down their 
  wayward employee.   
       Q is not just running around smashing stuff at 
  random.  He intends to make his way north to 
  Executive Solutions’ business offices in Virginia and 
  kill Jim Flint.  He doesn’t know that Flint is almost 
  never there and he will be very disappointed when he 
  finds out.   
       Any Player Characters who join the hunt for Q get 
  a stern warning to back off from the Resources who 
  are already on his trail.  This will almost certainly 
  make them try harder to interfere.   
       Major Maximum and the Gray Golem are likely to 
  get assigned to this mission, as are X and Dan 
  Dauntless.  Jim Flint is less likely to send someone as 
  unstable as Solution D or as untrustworthy as the Six 
  Dollar Man, but feel free to use as many of the 
  Resources as you need to give your players a 
  challenge.   
       The first time the PCs catch up with Q he tries to 
  escape, rather than attacking them.  The second time 
  he attempts to explain his situation.  Q can be 
  reasoned with, and he is willing to come in from the 
  cold and tell the world his story, rather than making a 
  doomed and futile attempt to kill Jim Flint.   
       However, taking Q in and protecting him is going 
  to be an extremely dangerous thing to do.  Not only 
  will Jim Flint try his best to have him killed, but there 
  are numerous men in the intelligence community who 
  fear what might come to light if Agent 12 ever gets 
  put on trial, and who are willing to dedicate 
  considerable resources to wiping out the Player 
  Characters.  But if they survive, this could be the 
  scandal that brings Executive Solutions down at last. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution F 
  aka the Six Dollar Man 
  Real Name: Ronald Jerome Houston 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 18 (+4) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 14 (+2) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 16 (+3) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +8 Defense: 
  +20/+18 Speed: 35 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +1   
  Skills: Bluff +13, Diplomacy +8, Hide +8, Listen 
  +5, Move Silently +8, Sense Motive +7,Taunt +10 
  Feats: Chokehold, Connected, Darkvision,  
  Immunity (Suffocation), Improved Grapple, Radio 
  Reception 
  Powers: Running +1 (Cost: 2pts), Sensory 
  Protection +4 (Cost 1pt), Super-Strength +10 (Extra: 
  Protection; Cost 5 pts) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Compulsive Liar (must 
  make a Willpower Saving Throw vs. DC 20 to tell the 
  truth) 
   
  “I’m gonna hurt you so bad, you’ll feel 
  like me on one of my good days. Heh.  
  I'm just a rotten useless scumbag, aren't 
  I?”  
   
       A failure as a combat cyborg but an even bigger 
  failure as a man, he knows he’s a worthless piece of 
  crap and he’s determined to prove it to the rest of us.  
  The Six Dollar Man constantly has a sheepish, 
  hangdog smile on the part of his face that isn’t made 
  of steel.  That smile sums him up perfectly.  
       He’s a loner and an outsider, sick alienated, self- 
  absorbed and self-loathing—he has a lot of bad traits, 
  but no one can say that he doesn’t have a sense of 
  humor about himself.  He tells mordant, self 
  deprecating jokes almost constantly, which makes him 
  seem less dangerous than he is.   
       For he is truly despicable, and richly deserves 
  every bit of the shame he feels. Completely devoid of 
  honor, he’s capable of any outrage, either to save his 
  worthless skin or on a vindictive impulse.  He feels 
  really bad about the harm he does, for what little that's 
  worth.  He almost always keeps smiling his loser’s 
  craven smile, no matter how angry he feels or how 
  badly things are going for him.   
       His personal history is sad, shabby and sordid, as 
  one might expect.  A perpetual college student and 
  heavy drug user, by the time he was twenty six he was 
  running out of money, excuses and healthy veins.  
  After a long and tangled series of misadventures in 
  Europe, he found himself in a Byelorussian prison 
  with rotting gangrenous infections in all four limbs 
  and collapsed veins all over his torso.    
       When the authorities gave him a chance to get out 
  of this jam, in exchange for undergoing a set of 
  dangerous surgical procedures, he figured he didn’t 
  have a lot to lose.  He was wrong, of course, but of 
  course hindsight is 20-20.   
       The Byelorussians were contracting out their semi-
  legal medical facilities to a super-secret British 
  military program—Project Abbadon.  The kind of 
  surgical experiments they needed to perform were 
  illegal everywhere in Britain, so the actual operations 
  had to be performed on foreign soil, on non-citizens 
  who were already multiple amputees.   
       After they chopped off his limbs, took out most of 
  his innards and covered half his face with stainless 
  steel, they told him that he would have to work for 
  British Intelligence for the rest of his life to pay for the 
  expense of the surgery.  Unless of course he would 
  rather get shoed out the door right now, with no arms 
  and legs.  He agreed to the terms, they replaced his 
  missing limbs and organs with stronger and more 
  durable artificial ones, and then shipped him off to 
  commando school.  He toughed it out for a little while 
  and then deserted the first time they sent him to 
  America.   
       Not exactly a career criminal, he consults with a 
  private firm called Executive Solutions, which rents 
  him out to various intelligence agencies for black ops 
  and muscle work. In between these infrequent jobs he 
  takes on work for the Mafia and for any other such 
  criminal conspiracy that might care to get in touch.  
  The Player Characters will probably encounter him in 
  this capacity, although if someone came to him with 
  an attractive plan for a major crime, he would 
  certainly consider it.   
       The Six Dollar Man neither fits in nor feels 
  comfortable anywhere, although he’s too laid back to 
  look nervous in social situations.  It would be a real 
  mistake to team up with him, but other villains have 
  tried.  He will warn people that he’s not a team player, 
  but if someone is fool enough to recruit him anyway, 
  he figures that’s their tough luck.   
       He is terrible to have on your side.  Treacherous, 
  given to cowardly backstabbing, he tells a lot of 
  malicious lies. In fact one of the most unnerving 
  things about fighting him is the way he constantly 
  makes insinuations about the people you trust.   In any 
  encounter with the Six Dollar Man, whether the 
  players characters engage him in combat or not, he 
  should tell them at least one mean-spirited falsehood, 
  designed to undermine their faith in a teammate, a 
  loved one, their country or an organization they 
  belong to.  
       For some reason certain women find him 
  irresistible, even though he’s careful to explain that 
  he’s no good. He always seems to have some 
  unfortunate young woman to live off of, although the 
  turnover rate is high. He devotes himself to draining 
  their resources and making their lives hell when he 
  isn’t on a job.   
       Hideous on the outside, worse on the inside, if 
  
    
  someone points out that he’s a disgusting wretch he 
  will heartily agree.   
   
  Adventures With the Six Dollar Man:  
   
  Tower of Lies  
       The Six Dollar Man has been assigned to capture a 
  rogue combot that has taken over the upper floors of 
  an office building. This sounds like a lot of work, so 
  he’s come up with a way to make it easier.  He will 
  lure prospective heroes into the building to run down 
  the combot’s batteries and use up its ammunition.  He 
  has already sent a pair of Federal Marshals to their 
  doom, as well as a minor superhero called the Golden 
  Ghost.   
       At around this time his girlfriend, Polly Pratchett, 
  started to get on his nerves, so he told her that he was 
  a spy and that as a test of loyalty to her country she 
  would have to go up there and try to disarm the 
  combot.  If she didn’t do it, he said, the secret 
  government agency he worked for would kill Polly’s 
  dad.   
       This didn’t as insane or as improbable to Polly as 
  you might think.  She has an advanced degree in 
  computer science and might conceivably be able to 
  come up with some sort of way to disable the robot.  
  She’s also active in the anti World-Bank movement, 
  and paranoid enough about the US government to 
  believe almost anything about it.  And her father is a 
  notorious old radical from the sixties who made a lot 
  of enemies in federal law enforcement.  The fact that 
  she loved and feared the Six Dollar Man helped too, as 
  did her self-destructive, fantasy-prone personality.  
       The Six Dollar Man suspects that she’s still alive 
  up there somewhere, so when he tries to send the 
  Player Characters to their doom on the thirtieth floor, 
  he tells them a carefully crafted set of lies about her.  
  He gets in touch with the PCs and asks them to meet 
  him in the parking lot of the infested office building.   
       It may take a little while for them to get there.  The 
  building stands by itself, way out in the most distant 
  suburbs, surrounded by trees and cornfields (or the 
  desert, if your game is set in the Southwest). Once 
  they arrive he tells them that he represents a secret 
  branch of the defense department, which has been 
  testing killer robots for combat in Iraq.   
       Doctor Polly Pratchett, the head of the design team, 
  went a little nuts and has started testing her robots in 
  urban settings—dropping them into shopping malls 
  and office parks and counting the numbers of civilians 
  they kill.  It’s his job to clean up messes like this when 
  they happen, and he’s sick of it.  He’s willing to testify 
  against his superiors and tell the world the whole 
  story.  The evidence is upstairs on the thirtieth floor.  
       The combot is still rampaging around up there, but 
  if they feed it the following sequence: RJATIMOR113 
  they will activate its secret override function and shut 
  it down.  He would go up to help them, but the thing is 
  equipped with an EM p deice built in that would fry 
  his cybernetics and kill him in a second.   
       The PCs should be extra careful—Doctor Pratchett 
  is up there too, wounded but alive.  She’s a very 
  dangerous woman.  Believe nothing she says. 
  Remember, this person is responsible for the deaths of 
  countless people most of them American citizens 
  killed on American soil.   
       Before the Player Characters even enter the 
  building, they start to see signs that they have been 
  lied to.  A pair of Federal Marshals lie dead outside 
  the front door.  Why didn’t he mention this?   
       The building seems to have been evacuated for a 
  fire.  A lot of it is new, and a lot of it is still 
  unoccupied, but the thirtieth floor is occupied by an 
  electronics form called BioSim Unlimited.  They seem 
  to have some kind of research facility up there. When 
  they find the body of the Golden Phantom they may 
  have more questions—what’s a dead superhero doing 
  in here?   
       As soon as they reach the thirtieth floor Polly 
  Pratchett comes on the intercom and warns them to 
  duck.  A shot goes past over their head.  The combot 
  then scuttles off and hides as they take cover, without 
  them getting a good look at it.   
       Polly is injured, but she’s lying in a sheltered spot 
  on the floor below them, in a security station.  She can 
  see them on the building security cameras and she can 
  talk to them through the intercom.  She has figured out 
  most of what is really going on, although she doesn’t 
  know about Executive Solutions, and will desperately 
  try to explain things to the PCs.   
       Her boyfriend is a liar and the destruct sequence 
  he’s given them is a sham.  He’s been hired to 
  deactivate the combot and he’s sending people up here 
  to run its batteries down. She has no idea what he’s 
  told them about her, but she’d be happy to tell them 
  the truth.   
       If the Combot gets the better of the PCs, it will 
  suddenly run out of power just as it’s about to finish 
  them off.  Then they hear the elevator doors open.  
  The Six Dollar Man is here to mop up the loose ends.  
  Including Polly and including the PCs.   
       If on the other hand they have broken the robot he 
  shows up and flies into a rage.  “You broke it!  The 
  Ukrainians won’t pay for a broken robot!”  He yells. 
  He’ll try to kill them here too, out of spite. If 
  confronted about his lies, he grins and says “Yeah. I 
  just suck, don’t I? 
   
   
   
  
    
  Executive Solution Y 
  aka the Burning Woman 
  Real Name: Myra Savage 
  PL: 15 
  Str: 10 (+0) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 13 (+1) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +2 Attack Bonus (Melee): +13 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +15 Defense: 
  +17/+15 Speed: 30/50 (Flight) 
  Damage Save: +2/+17 (Force Field) 
  Fortitude Save: +7 Reflexes Save: +7 
  Willpower Save: +6   
  Skills: Acrobatics +9, Bluff +8, Concentration +8, 
  Diplomacy +4, Disguise +6, Knowledge (Northern 
  Ireland's bloody secrets) +5, Spot +8 
  Feats: Accurate Attack, Aerial Combat, Expertise, 
  Identity Change, Immunity (Cold, Heat, Suffocation), 
  Point-Blank Shot, Power Attack, Power Immunity, 
  Precise Shot, Rapid Shot, Surprise Strike 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Fortitude) +5 (Extras: 
  Reflexes, Willpower; Cost 3pts), Energy Control 
  (Fire) +15 (Extras: Flight, Energy Field, Explosive 
  Effect, Force Field) 
  Weaknesses: Vulnerable: Water attacks. 
   
  “Have you ever wondered why people 
  are so afraid of being burned alive? 
  Would you like to know more?”   
   
       Jim Flint is usually suspicious of letting women in 
  the armed forces and doesn’t want them on his team.  
  But when he heard that Myra Savage, the Burning 
  Woman might be available, he hastily decided to make 
  an exception.   
       The Burning Woman has been a legend in Northern 
  Ireland for a decade. An Ulster Unionist from 
  Londonderry, she was already fighting the IRA when 
  she was fifteen.  While nobody is sure where her 
  powers came from (she’s either a mutant or the living 
  incarnation of Northern Ireland’s burning rage, 
  whichever the GM prefers) she always seems to have 
  been able to set things on fire.   
       When she was twenty her adoptive family was 
  wiped out in a power struggle between two factions of 
  the Royalists and she became persona non grata in 
  Protestant circles.  So she had herself baptized as a 
  Catholic and joined the IRA.  This felt wrong to her, 
  but all her Protestant friends were either dead or out to 
  kill her and she didn’t know how to do anything but 
  fight, so it seemed like her only option.  
       Afraid that she would get killed too quickly if they 
  kept her in Ireland, the IRA sent her to London, gave 
  her a cover identity and told her to “make some 
  noise.”  Always an obedient and unquestioning 
  soldier, she carried a number of terrorist attacks on 
  British landmarks, killing civilians and getting 
  declared one of the UK’s most wanted foes.   
       And she learned a funny thing.  They told her she 
  was hard as stone, cold as ice and that human life 
  meant nothing to her.  In fact the people she loved and 
  trusted had been telling her this since her early teens.  
  And yet it wasn’t true.  Every time innocent people 
  died by her hand, it hurt worse and worse.  Pretty soon 
  her head was full of nightmares and she slunk around 
  feeling guilty and tormented all day.   
       Then things got worse. The long war in Northern 
  Ireland finally seemed to be coming to a close.  There 
  were peace talks, lasting agreements, ancient grudges 
  settled.  People were laying down their arms for good.   
       The IRA leadership was almost sure to give her up 
  as part of the deal—she was so widely feared and 
  hated by the British that she would make an incredibly 
  good bargaining chip.  Plus she was a Protestant by 
  birth, and had no family to object if the IRA sold her 
  out.  Even someone as loyal as Myra could see how 
  expendable she was.   
       Nor would it make sense to switch sides again, or 
  to join one of the radical splinter factions. The 
  remaining shreds of the Royalist Militias and the 
  Provisional IRA were degenerating into criminal 
  gangs, and they only had the craziest, most 
  bloodthirsty or most cynical people left on board.  
  There was no future in Ireland for Myra, and certainly 
  none in England.   
       God alone knows how or why she had the CIA’s 
  number, but she knew exactly who to contact in order 
  to sell her talents to the Americans.   The CIA gave 
  her a mission in Belarus, she handled it well, so they 
  put Jim Flint in touch.    
       Serious, stoic and professional on the outside, on 
  the inside Myra is lonely, tormented, anxious and 
  eager for approval.  She is keenly aware that she’s an 
  outsider and is getting desperate to prove herself to her 
  comrades.  She never complains about anything, 
  always takes the most dangerous, thankless 
  assignments, always gives 120% and never shows any 
  trace of hesitation or pity despite her moral qualms 
  and the nightmares she always has when she kills 
  somebody.   
       Nor does she ever respond to the abuse her 
  teammates give her over being a girl.  For the lads 
  haven’t exactly been making her feel welcome.  Major 
  Maximum and Executive Solution D openly hate 
  having a woman on the team.  They feel it weakens 
  them and is sure to lead to trouble and neither one 
  minds telling her this to her face.   
       Executive Solution X doesn’t like it either, but 
  holds D in such contempt that he seldom expresses his 
  distaste in front of the man.   
       The Gray Golem doesn’t care, but contradicts 
  anything D says out of habit, while Dan Dauntless 
  actually feels some faint sympathy for Myra and 
  would try to help her if he had any idea how.   Alas, 
  he’s only good at bullying people and breaking stuff.   
       The Obscenity has barely noticed—he’s much too 
  busy worrying about whether he will remain a 
  
    
  loathsome freak forever.   
       They’ve all hit on her except for Dan Dauntless and 
  the Obscenity (yes, even Major Maximum has tried) 
  and while she would be willing to sleep with any of 
  them if it made them accept her, she somehow senses 
  that in this case it would just make things worse.   
   
  Adventures With Executive Solution Y:  
   
  1) Bloody Opals and Burning Snow 
       An Irish gangster named Gravis O’Grady is ready 
  to turn states evidence on his former colleagues.  He 
  was a high-ranking guy in Ireland’s mob, and his 
  testimony will be extremely damaging to a lot of 
  powerful people.  Because he doesn’t trust the 
  authorities to keep him alive until his trial, he wants to 
  surrender to independent superheroes—to the Player 
  Characters, in fact.  
       Gravis lives in Australia, these days, but he gets 
  word to the PCs that he is staying under assumed 
  name at a ski chalet in Switzerland and that they can 
  pick him up there.  He’s grown a little paranoid, and 
  he wants to stay in a place where he can see trouble 
  coming from a long ways away.   
       After the PCs arrive a snowstorm blows up, and 
  while they wait out the storm Gravis tells them why 
  he’s finally going to turn himself in.  He was one of 
  the few lucky souls who made a lot of money from his 
  years in the IRA, and when he went into semi-
  retirement in Australia a few years back, he used his 
  funds to buy an opal mine.  The mine performed quite 
  well and made him a much richer man.  He used his 
  opal money to finance this or that criminal enterprise, 
  as much out of boredom as from any need for capital.   
       Last year he put up the funds for the wildest caper 
  he ever heard of, and the whole thing exploded in his 
  face.  It was the biggest gamble of his life, and the 
  only one he lost.   
       There’s a rebel group in Nigeria that came up with 
  a scheme to grab a major oil pipeline and hold it for 
  three billion dollars in ransom.  Gravis bought them 
  the guns and explosives they needed for the job and he 
  was going to handle the ransom negotiations for them.  
  But the oil company that owns the pipeline somehow 
  got wind of the plot and things fell apart.   
       Gravis’ business partner in Oslo, Norbert 
  Yamaguchi, has vanished without a trace and his 
  house has burned to the ground. Gravis thinks they 
  may have hired a supervillain firm he’s heard whispers 
  about, for the MO used on poor old Norbert’s house 
  sounds exactly like an Irish supervillain he used to 
  know—a horrible, heartless killer they called the 
  Burning Woman.   
       Gravis is right.  In fact the Burning Woman is on 
  her way up to the chalet right now.  She will lurk in 
  the snow until she sees a good chance to attack, and 
  then will burn her way inside.   
       And here comes the big surprise.  She’s not here to 
  kill Gravis.  She just wants his suitcase, which 
  contains all the opals he has left—the sum total of his 
  remaining wealth. 
   
  2) The Secret Torture Dungeon of Hitler’s Doctor 
  Satan 
       The ruined lair of a forgotten arch-villain from the 
  Nazi epoch comes to light (use one from your own 
  campaign, or if your campaign doesn’t yet have any 
  guys like that, call him Dr. Reinhold Strunk, aka 
  Doctor Satan, who conducted unspeakable cybernetic 
  experiments on live human subjects and was one of 
  the few supervillains from that period who vanished 
  completely after the war, never to be heard from 
  again).  Located in the frigid and desolate Bransfield 
  Archipelago, off the coast of Antarctica, it seems to 
  have been undisturbed since the 1940s.  Who knows 
  what secrets it might yet hold?   
       Unfortunately for the Player Characters, a group of 
  ancient, doddering ex-Nazis is wondering exactly the 
  same thing.  What terrible secrets might be revealed 
  about them and their network once the base is 
  unearthed?  
       Here too, if you already have some organization of 
  former national socialists plotting lethal mischief 
  down in South America, use them.  Otherwise, this is 
  a group of about five very old men (there used to be 
  seventy of them) scattered around the world, who call 
  themselves Der Spinner (the Spider). They live in 
  places as far flung as Australia, Portugal, Montevideo 
  and Baltimore.  All of them are rich and paranoid, 
  more focused on preserving their wealth and 
  prolonging their own wretched existence than they are 
  on anything as unlikely as taking over the world.   
       The PCs are sent or hired to investigate the ruins, 
  or perhaps they just decide to do it on their own.  Der 
  Spinner hires Executive Solutions to stop them.  Jim 
  Flint sends the Burning Woman, and as many of the 
  others as the GM thinks would be required.   
       The leaky old underground bunker is not without 
  its own dangers.  A lot of the complex is under the 
  ocean, and at a certain point in the festivities someone 
  is almost sure to knock a hole in a wall and sent 
  countless tons of frigid seawater flooding through the 
  tunnels.   
       And could Doctor Satan still be alive down there in 
  the darkness somewhere?  
   
  3) Belfast Welcomes Careful Travelers 
       An Irish journalist in Africa catches footage of the 
  Burning Woman on tape, and recognizes her as the 
  infamous terrorist who caused so much havoc in 
  London, a few years ago. After a little more research, 
  he has enough data to blow her identity wide open, 
  and he’s figured out who she works for. She’s got to 
  kill him, before he publishes the story and Jim Flint 
  has her killed.   
       Although the Burning Woman hates going back to 
  Ireland, where she’s wanted by cops and criminals 
  alike, she has little choice. She actually still has some 
  contacts on both the Loyalist and the IRA side who are 
  willing to help her kill the journalist, or who fear her 
  enough to do whatever she says.  
       In the meantime Jim Flint has figured out what 
  happened in Africa (though he has no idea just how 
  much the journalist knows).  Mr. Flint has decided to 
  
    
  give the Burning Woman a chance to put things right, 
  and has sent Executive Solution D to kill her if she 
  fails.   
       The journalist runs to the Player Characters for 
  help and protection.  Hounded by the Burning 
  Woman, beset by attacks from both Loyalist and IRA 
  forces, can they get him and his footage to safety?  
       To complicate matters further, the Burning Woman 
  is willing to back off if the PCs give her the footage 
  and help her defeat Executive Solution D. She may 
  also be willing to negotiate if the PCs offer her a 
  chance to disappear altogether. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Jim Flint, Agent 12 
  Real Name: Has used so many alises 
  that no one is sure. "James Flint" is the 
  one he has settled on for the past forty 
  years or so. 
  PL: 14 
  Str: 8 (-1) Dex: 10 (+0) Con: 10 (+0)Int: 
  14 (+2) Wis: 18 (+4) Cha: 18 (+4) 
  Initiative: +4 Attack Bonus (Melee): +8 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +10 Defense: 
  +15/+15 Speed: 10 (in wheelchair) 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +0 
  Reflexes Save: +0 Willpower Save: +9   
  Skills: Bluff +10, Diplomacy +10, Intimidate +11, 
  Knowledge (Espionage) +10,  Sense Motive +7 
  Feats: Chokehold, Connected, Headquarters 
  (Complex in South Carolina; Features: Combat 
  Simulator, Communications Center, Computer, Fire 
  Prevention System, Garage, Gym, Hanger, Infirmary, 
  Living Space, Pool, Power System, Security System, 
  Staff [15 PL1 Security flunkies and a PL2 Unit 
  Commander, supplemented by additional Executive 
  Solutions personnel as needed], Workshop), Improved 
  Grapple, Improved Initiative, Indomitable Will, 
  Inspire, Iron Will, Leadership, Minions (135 PL1 
  security goons and other employees, 13 PL2 officers 
  and managers, 7 PL3 elite troops, 4 PL4 bodyguards, 1 
  PL 5 yacht captain, 1 PL5 lawyer, 1 PL6 personal 
  assistant) 
  Powers: Amazing Save (Damage) +2, Telepathy 
  +14 (Extras: Memory Alteration, Mental Blast, Mind 
  Control; Cost: 5pts) 
  Equipment: Wheelchair (Running 10 ft; Flaw: 
  Device; Cost 1pt), Pistol (+3 Lethal Damage), Vehicle 
  (Yacht) 30pts (Size: Huge; Movement: 6; Hardness: 
  13; Armor Bonus: 10; Features: Communications 
  Center, Computer, Gym, Living Space, Infirmary, 
  Isolated Location, Power System) 
  Weaknesses: Disabled (Unable to walk, makes 
  all Dexterity-related skill checks at a -5) 
  Quirk: Can never admit that he's wrong, no matter 
  what kind of a disadvantage this puts him at) 
  Quirk: Refuses to use his psi powers unless his back 
  is absolutely to the wall and all other options have 
  already been exhausted. 
   
  "Deny everything, admit nothing, make 
  counter-accusations. That's still true 
  today, son, and it still makes get all hot 
  and bothered just saying it aloud.  It's 
  my Viagra."   
   
       Jim Flint has lived in the shadows since World War 
  Two.  One of the most promising young men in the 
  OSS, after the war he was recruited on an unofficial 
  basis to use his talents for murder and subversion 
  against the Reds.  They called him by a simple code 
  name—Twelve.   
       Over the next two decades Agent Twelve worked 
  for the OSI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the CIA 
  and many other “Black Book” agencies that the 
  general public has never even heard of.  Yet he was 
  never officially employed by any of them.  He fought 
  America’s invisible wars on all its secret fronts, but he 
  never got a medal for it.  Not that he ever 
  complained—finding out people’s secrets and 
  betraying them was always its own reward, as far as 
  he was concerned.        
       Yet the years eventually took their toll.   He nearly 
  died in Vietnam, he lost an eye in the jungles of 
  Central America and by the 1980s he was getting so 
  old that he could barely kill a man with his bare hands 
  anymore.  In any case CIA Director William Casey 
  hated him and wouldn’t use him if he could help it.   
       A lot of the guys Jim knew were getting rich in 
  private industry.  This or that famous spy would retire 
  from public service, set up a private security firm, 
  provide muscle and corporate espionage for the big 
  multinationals or take on dirty work that the CIA 
  didn’t want to handle.  He’d always resisted the urge 
  to go that route because he knew he’d miss the smell 
  of blood in his nostrils, but after he got cut out of the 
  Iran-Contra deal altogether, he figured it was time to 
  take the hint.  
       In the 80s the field was crowded and he didn’t have 
  the funds to set up more than a small operation, so he 
  decided to supply the one commodity most private 
  merc firms couldn’t handle—superhuman talent.  He 
  knew Major Maximum and he had a good idea how to 
  find the man called X.  The others came to him, over 
  time.   
       Once Director Casey was dead, Twelve’s old 
  contacts at the Agency were happy to send him more 
  work than he could handle, and of course the big 
  multinationals always need help in the Third World.   
       A lifelong smoker, Flint has lost a lung and his 
  voice box to cancer, and has recently been confined to 
  an electric wheelchair.  He’s still an arresting presence 
  with his thick mane of white hair, his craggy, battle-
  scarred face and his eyepatch.  He talks a lot about 
  politics, but for someone who knows as much about 
  the secret history of the world as he does, his opinions 
  are odd and inconsistent.   
       He claims to hate big government and to feel that 
  only private industry can accomplish anything, yet he 
  has proudly spent his whole adult life working for the 
  feds.  Generally conservative, he nonetheless worships 
  John F. Kennedy (not for his policies, but because he 
  was so much fun to hang out with in Las Vegas during 
  the Rat Pack era) and he swears that Kennedy was 
  killed by left wing elements in the State Department.   
       He feels that women should know their place, he 
  mistrusts people of color and he still thinks the Civil 
  Rights movement was a foreign plot.  He grudgingly 
  admits that this wasn’t the case with the anti-Vietnam 
  
    
  movement, but only because he spent so much time 
  fighting them and came to know them so well. He 
  loved Richard Nixon and keeps a picture of him on the 
  wall of his office, but he never trusted Ronald Reagan 
  or his commitment to fighting the Cold War.  He hates 
  hippies and environmentalists with a passion that isn’t 
  wholly sane, yet he’s a vegetarian and had 
  experimented with both Zen philosophy and 
  psychedelic drugs as early as 1955.   
       Perhaps Flint’s perspective on things is best 
  summed up by the dominant feature of his office—an 
  eight foot portrait of himself.   
       These days Flint lives mostly on his yacht, in 
  international waters.  His clients sometimes get to 
  meet him in person, but his Parahuman agents seldom 
  do.  More often, the Resources are ushered into his 
  office and listen to his orders on speakerphone, 
  underneath his gigantic, glowering portrait.   
       A crotchety, irascible old man, while he isn’t senile 
  he sometimes misunderstands what people say to him.  
  He can go on and on about some idiotic thing he 
  thinks someone has said, sometimes bringing the 
  imaginary incident up months or years later.  It is 
  utterly impossible to convince him that he has 
  misheard anyone, and it can prove fatal to contradict 
  him too any times.  
       While he understands a great deal about various 
  types of high-tech spy gear, he doesn’t understand the 
  internet and won’t allow it to be mentioned in his 
  presence (fortunately his staff are more competent in 
  this area).  A bachelor, he hates kids and jokes that 
  anyone who brings one aboard his yacht risks being 
  thrown overboard in mid-ocean along with their brat.  
  At least we think he’s joking.   
       Mr. Flint is accompanied everywhere by his 
  personal assistants, the blankly malevolent Miss 
  Zelma Zimmer, who does everything for him, and the 
  merely blank Mr. Smith, who appears to do nothing at 
  all.  Smith always stands just behind Mr. Flint on the 
  right.  Neither Mr. Flint nor Miss Zimmer ever look at 
  Mr. Smith or seem to acknowledge his presence. On 
  very rare occasions he will lean forward and whisper 
  something in Mr. Flint’s ear, but the old man never 
  seems to react to this.   
       In fact Smith is Flint’s ace in the hole—he’s a 
  parahuman with the ability to detect and shut down 
  other parahuman powers. He’s quiet, loyal and 
  nondescript, a hovering presence that few people 
  really notice.    
       Flint rarely goes anywhere without at least a few 
  bodyguards, mostly ex-special forces personnel hired 
  through a separate division of his company.   Give him 
  enough bodyguards to impede your players, but not 
  enough to overwhelm them.  
       Anyone who gets past both Mr. Flint’s security 
  staff and Mr. Smith will face the man’s own 
  formidable psychic powers—a trait he has managed to 
  conceal all these years.  Because his psionic abilities 
  are his most carefully guarded secret, he’s not likely to 
  let anyone live who has actually seen him use them. 
   
        
      For games set in the 50s and 60s, here's what Agent 
  12 looked like in his glory days. 
  Agent 12 in his 
  prime 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 20 (+5) Con: 18 (+4) 
  Int: 13 Wis: 20 (+5) Cha: 12 (+1) 
  Initiative: +10 Attack Bonus (Melee): 
  +11 Attack Bonus (Ranged): +11 
  Defense: +24/+13 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +6 Fortitude Save: +6 
  Reflexes Save: +10 Willpower Save: +10   
   
  Skills: Balance +10, Climb +10, Bluff +10, 
  Demolitions +7, Diplomacy +11, Disable Device +4, 
  Drive +8, Hide +10, Intimidate +10 Knowledge 
  (Espionage) +10, Listen +10, Move Silently +10, 
  Search +10, Spot +8, Survival +5 
  Feats: Accurate Attack, Assessment, Attack 
  Finesse, Chokehold, Connected, Dodge, Evasion, Far 
  Shot, Great Fortitude, Improved Grapple, Point-Blank 
  Shot, Power Attack, Precise Shot, Psychic Awareness, 
  Quck-Draw, Talented (Listen and Spot), Toughness, 
  Track 
  Powers: Powers: Super-Dexterity +5 (Extras: 
  Super-Senses, Super-Strength, Super-Wisdom; Flaw: 
  Super-Strength only applies toward skill checks; Cost: 
  9pts), Telepathy+8 (Cost: 2pts) 
  Equipment: Pistol (+3 Lethal), Rifle (+3 Lethal) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Irrationally obsessed with 
  concealing his psi powers, will use them only in the 
  most dire emergency conceivable. 
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Zelma Zimmer 
  PL: 6 
  Str: 8 (-1) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 12 (+1) Int: 
  14 (+2) Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 10 (+0) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +3 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +4 Defense: 
  +7/+6 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +1 Fortitude Save: +1 
  Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower Save: +5   
  Skills: Diplomacy +4, Innuendo +5, Intimidate +8, 
  Listen +8, Profession (Personal Assistant) +9, Spot +9 
  Feats: Connected, Far Shot, Iron Will, Indomitable 
  Will, Point-Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Talented 
  (Intimidate and Profession: Personal Assistant) 
  Powers:  
  Equipment: Big Ugly Pistol (+5 Lethal), Can of 
  Mace (+5 Stun attack) 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Fanatically Loyal to Mr. 
  Flint 
   
       Jim Flint’s redoubtable assistant.  She looks like a 
  badly preserved sixty-year old, but in fact she’s 
  seventy-five.  Spite keeps her young, as does her 
  unwavering fanatical devotion to Mr. Flint.  She does 
  everything for him, has devoted her life to helping him 
  rid the world of Communism, and she’s more than a 
  little in love with the man.   
       All of the office staff are afraid of Miss Zimmer, 
  and with good reason.  Blank and emotionless, yet 
  also cruel and mean—she wants it to be known that 
  she is a powerful person and that she can have you 
  destroyed.   
       Everything she says is couched in carefully precise 
  business-speak.  Nor does she ever raise her voice 
  above a threatening murmur.  She never unwinds, 
  never smiles, never makes small talk or any kind of 
  informal remarks.  Most of all she never, ever says 
  please or thank you for anything.  Yet you are required 
  to say please and thank you to her.  She speaks for the 
  great man, Mr. Flint himself.  Everything in this office 
  is his.  Therefore everything in this office is hers.  She 
  is not required to say please.  
       Despite her insistence on rigid office protocol, if 
  Miss Zimmer senses weakness on the part of any 
  member of the office staff, she will try to force them 
  to buy the crappy rip-off long distance service that her 
  loser boyfriend sells, or Amway products, or diet 
  remedies or whatever shabby pyramid scheme the two 
  of them are into this month.  No one ever seems to see 
  this boyfriend, but he’s real enough (his name is 
  Harvey Glick, and he’s a classic watery-eyed, 
  whining, sixty-five year old ne’er-do-well).   
       There are no personal objects on Zelma’s desk, 
  apart from a single dead plant. 
   
  
    
  Mr. Smith 
  Real Name: Thomas and Peter Smith 
  PL: 12 
  Str: 12 (+1) Dex: 12 (+1) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 12 (+1) Wis: 16 (+3) Cha: 10 (+0) 
  Initiative: +1 Attack Bonus (Melee): +11 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +11 Defense: 
  +21/+20 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +1 Willpower Save: +5   
  Skills: Spot +10, Listen +10, Innuendo +4, Move 
  Silently +10, Swim +6 
  Feats: Detect (superpowers), Iron Will, Psychic 
  Awareness 
  Powers: Neutralize +13 (Extras: Neutralizing 
  Block, Neutralizing Field, Nulification, Nulify 
  Without Concentrating; Cost: 6pts) 
  Equipment: Concealed Body Armor +4 
   
       Mr. Flint’s silent shadows, Tom and Peter Smith 
  are his ace in the hole.  They’re also Flint’s only living 
  sons.   
       Identical twins, the Smith brothers look and dress 
  completely alike.  They never appear together and 
  most people have no idea that there are two of them.  
  Either one or the other Smith always stands behind 
  their dad’s left shoulder, quiet, nondescript, making no 
  facial expression at all.  “Smith” never seems to say or  
  do much of anything.  While Zelma Zimmer fusses 
  and makes phone calls and adjusts my Flint’s tie, 
  Smith just stands there.   
       Both Smith brothers dress conservatively but 
  unostentatiously, wearing business clothes even on 
  Mr. Flint’s yacht.  Neither one ever seems to sweat.        
       The Smiths’ superhuman powers are simple yet 
  deadly effective. They can detect parahumans and can 
  snuff out their powers at a distance.  Their power-
  suppression ability is invisible—they don’t have to say 
  or do anything to make it happen, which makes it very 
  hard to tell where the effect is coming from.    
       If a disguised parahuman enters Flint’s presence, 
  the Smith boy on duty will lean down and whisper the 
  information in Mr. Flint’s ear.  Flint never outwardly 
  reacts to this information, but he will most certainly be 
  thinking about it.   
       The Smith boys’ mother was a Russian parahuman 
  agent who lived under in deep cover in Baltimore.  
  She was a very attractive woman, so Flint blackmailed 
  her into having an off-again, on again affair with him 
  for a few years back in the early seventies.   
       Despite the shabby way he treated their mom, both 
  Tom and Peter are fascinated by and totally loyal to 
  their dad. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Mr. Flint's 
  Bodyguards 
  PL: 4 
  Str: 16 (+3) Dex: 14 (+2) Con: 14 (+2) 
  Int: 13 (+1) Wis: 12 (+1) Cha: 10 (+0) 
  Initiative: +6 Attack Bonus (Melee): +10 
  Attack Bonus (Ranged): +9 Defense: 
  +16/+14 Speed: 30 
  Damage Save: +2 Fortitude Save: +2 
  Reflexes Save: +2 Willpower Save: +1   
  Skills: Intimidate +4, Listen +5, Spot +6 
  Feats: Attack Focus (Armed), Attack Focus 
  (Ranged), Chokehold, Improved Initiative, Quick 
  Draw, Talented (Listen and Spot) 
  Powers:  
  Equipment: Pistol (+3 Lethal), Body Armor +2 
  Weaknesses: Quirk: Willing to die for Mr. Flint. 
   
       These guys are pretty tough.  Culled from the best 
  of America’s elite forces, they don’t have as much 
  armor or as high tech weaponry as a lot of villainous 
  super-agents, but they’re still very effective with what 
  they have.  
       They tend to be a little older than most security 
  personnel, men in their thirties and forties with as 
  much combat experience as possible.  All of them are 
  personally loyal to Mr. Flint and his vague pro-
  American, anti-communist credo.  None of them are 
  fanatics, but as bodyguards they won’t hesitate to lay 
  down their lives for their employer if they have to. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
  Appendix A: Villains by PL 
   
  PL 4 Jim Flint’s Bodyguards (Page 139) 
  PL 6 Zelma Zimmer (Page 137) 
  PL 7 The Ratcatcher (Page 53) 
  PL 8 Grease Monkey (Page 79), Sicko the Clown 
  (Page 5), Zyclon B (Page 67) 
  PL 9 Big John (Page 8), Boy Howdy (page 89) 
  Doctor Shock (page 10), Johnny Black (page 75) 
  Mano del Muerte (page 12), Der Shreik (page 69) 
  PL 10 The Lone Star Lady (page 86), Jim 
  Dandy (page 88), Doctor Destructor (page  81), 
  The Texas Twister (page 82), The Moebius 
  Man (page 62), Blitzenhammer (page 64), 
  Broken Arrow (page 14), UgoGrrrl (page 17), 
  The Unicorn (page 18), Vampire Girl (page 
  20), Wolf-Dog (page 22) 
  PL 11 Mr. Fist (page  84), Double Deuce 
  (page 94), Diamond Deuce (page 103) 
  PL 12 Ace of Wounds (page 97), Agent 12 in 
  his prime (page 136), Cimarron Starr (page 
  77), Executive Solution D (page 115), God 
  (page 24), Helen Damnation (page 27), Mr 
  Smith (page 138), Executive Solution F (page 
  130), Lady Deuce (page 100) 
  PL 13 Der Totenkopf (page 60), Executive 
  Solution M (page 119), Executive Solution Z 
  (page 121) 
  PL 14 Jim Flint, Agent 12 (page 135), The 
  Steel Deuce (page 105) 
  PL 15 Bones (page 108), The Snow Queen 
  (page 29), Executive Solution Y (page 132) 
  PL 16 Azeraphel, the Screaming Angel 
  (page 41), Black Thunder (page 32), The 
  Death Angel (page 36), Doctor Moloch, PhD 
  (page 39)  
  PL 17 The Hammer of Doom (page 43) 
  PL 18 Executive Solution X (page 123) 
  PL 19 Captain Valiant (page 46) 
   
  
    
  Index 
  Ace of Wounds-------------------------------------97 
  Agent 12--------------------------------------------135 
  Azeraphel, the Screaming Angel----------------41 
  Big John--------------------------------------------8 
  Black Thunder------------------------------------32 
  Blitzenhammer------------------------------------64 
  Bones-----------------------------------------------108 
  Boy Howdy---------------------------------------- 89 
  Broken Arrow-------------------------------------14 
  Burning Woman, the (see “Executive Solution Y”)  
  Campaign World---------------------------------3 
  Captain Valiant-----------------------------------46 
  Cimarron Starr-----------------------------------77 
  Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys, the ---------72-74 
  Dan Dauntless, Rocket Ranger (see “Executive 
  Solution R”)  
  Death Angel, the ---------------------------------36 
  Der Shreik-----------------------------------------69 
  Der Totenkopf-------------------------------------60 
  Diamond Deuce-----------------------------------103 
  Doctor Destructor-------------------------------- 81 
  Doctor Moloch, PhD------------------------------39 
  Doctor Shock--------------------------------------10 
  Double Deuce--------------------------------------94 
  Executive Solutions------------------------------111-114 
  Executive Solution D-----------------------------115 
  Executive Solution F-----------------------------130 
  Executive Solution M----------------------------119 
  Executive Solution R-----------------------------125 
  Executive Solution Q----------------------------128 
  Executive Solution Y-----------------------------132 
  Executive Solution X-----------------------------123 
  Executive Solution Z-----------------------------121 
  Feats and Powers, new--------------------------4 
  Flint, Jim------------------------------------------135 
  Four Deuces, the --------------------------------90-93 
  God------------------------------------------------24 
  Gray Golem, the (See “Executive Solution Z”) 
  Grease Monkey, the -----------------------------79 
  Grim Diddle--------------------------------------55 
  Hammer of Doom, the --------------------------43 
  Helen Damnation--------------------------------27 
  Jim Dandy----------------------------------------88 
  Jim Flint, Agent 12----------------------------------135 
  Jim Flint in his Prime (stats)-----------------------136 
  Jim Flint’s Bodyguards-----------------------------139 
  Johnny Black-----------------------------------------75 
  Johnny Bionic (see “Steel Deuce, the) 
  Johnny Machine (see “Steel Deuce, the) 
  Johnny the Robot  (see “Steel Deuce, the) 
  Lady Deuce------------------------------------------100 
  Limited Immunity to Prosecution (New Feat)---4, 17 
  Lone Star Lady, the ---------------------------------86 
  Major Maximum (Executive Solution M) 
  Mano del Muerte------------------------------------12 
  Moebius Man, the ----------------------------------62 
  Mother Moebius------------------------------------70 
  Mr. Fist----------------------------------------------84 
  Mr Smith--------------------------------------------138 
  Murder Machine (see “Doctor Destructor”) 
  New Feats and Powers---------------------------4 
  Nowhere Men, the --------------------------------49-50 
  Obscenity, the--------------------------------------128 
  Ratcatcher, the ------------------------------------53 
  Der Shreik------------------------------------------69 
  Sicko the Clown------------------------------------5 
  Six Dollar Man, the (see “Executive Solution F”)  
  Snow Queen, the ----------------------------------29 
  Steel Deuce, the-----------------------------------105 
  Teams----------------------------------------------49-139 
  Texas Twister, the --------------------------------82 
  Threats, Major------------------------------------29-48 
  Threats, Minor------------------------------------5-12 
  Threats, Moderate -------------------------------14-28 
  Der Totenkopf-------------------------------------60 
  U-Go-Grrrl----------------------------------------17 
  Unicorn, the ---------------------------------------18 
  “Using This Book”--------------------------------3 
  Vampire Girl---------------------------------------20 
  Vernichtung 5--------------------------------------57-71 
  Winter Steele (see Cimarron Starr) 
  Wolf-Dog-------------------------------------------22 
  Woodchuck Man-----------------------------------51 
  X----------------------------------------------------123 
  Zelma Zimmer------------------------------------137 
  Zyclon B--------------------------------------------67
   
   
   
   
   
  
    
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  System Reference Document Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.; Authors Jonathan Tweet, Monte 
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