Supervillains in their Secret ID

[Steve]

Have you ever considered what a supervillain is like in their secret ID, and how they interact with the world in their civilian identity?

 

Imagine Mantara (pgs 192-193 of CV3) taking a day off to just visit the aquarium. Not plotting anything. Maybe she just likes looking at the clownfish.

 

How about Black Paladin (pgs 35-38 of CV3) teaching a medieval history class, grading exams or writing a paper on something he finds intellectually interesting for publication? Publish or perish, after all.

 

Maybe Foxbat (pgs 117-119 of CV3) goes to a comic book convention as plain old Freddy Foswell and attends the panels of his favorite comic artists?

 

Even if they never get shown much at the table, thinking about little things like this bring a supervillain even more to life for me. They aren't plotting bank heists or world domination all the time. With a secret ID, they have to deal with the DMV, the IRS and scheduling visits to the dentist.

[Lord Liaden]

I've always tried to work some element of a villain's Secret Identity into my uses of them. One of the easiest ways I find to do this is for PCs to unknowingly consult the villain for their SID's expertise. For example, perhaps the above mentioned Black Paladin has been committing crimes related to artifacts, histories, or motifs from his past life as a knight. Heroes might seek the advice of Prof. Allen Walker of Millennium City University, an expert on medieval history and culture... who also happens to be the supervillain Basilisk. (Champions Villains Volume Three).

 

Speaking of the Basilisk, his character sheet in CV3 includes a KS: Wine. Perhaps Walker is a connoisseur and/or collector of fine wine. He might be found incognito at a wine tasting event, or bidding on a rare vintage bottle... which if he fails to buy it, he may try to steal as the Basilisk.

[DShomshak]

I've thought that many published villains don't deserve the 15 points from Secret Identity, because they don't show any sign of trying to maintain a life outside their villain activities. In some cases, this would even be impossible. For instance, Radium (CV1, in Project Sunburst) has Secret ID even though he lives in a bright red containment suit that keeps him from killing everyone near him thorough radiation exposure. Yes, his pasty is hidden: Finding that he used to be a soldier named Jason Matthews takes a Skill Roll at -10. But his entry doesn't say why this information would matter OK, so his connection to the military Project: Sunburst matters. It's an enormous secret waiting to explode (heh) into a scandal that might ruin people who are still alive and in government. But that is a different kind of Social Complication.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

14 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

I've always tried to work some element of a villain's Secret Identity into my uses of them. One of the easiest ways I find to do this is for PCs to unknowingly consult the villain for their SID's expertise. For example, perhaps the above mentioned Black Paladin has been committing crimes related to artifacts, histories, or motifs from his past life as a knight. Heroes might seek the advice of Prof. Allen Walker of Millennium City University, an expert on medieval history and culture... who also happens to be the supervillain Basilisk. (Champions Villains Volume Three).

If Medieval art treasures are involved, the heroes might consult the art appraiser Jos Terhune, a.k.a. Tartarus of the Devil's Advocates (CV2). Or hey, bring Walker, Terhune, and Professor John Black together, none knowing who the others are! That should be good for a few laughs, as well as a brawl.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Steve]

That raises a good question. Which villains would be most active in keeping a secret ID?

 

Foxbat would likely be one of the more active maintainers, but his main psych of thinking he’s in a comic book would probably drive him to do this.

 

Others I’m not so sure about. Some of them seem to have psychs that would lead to poor impulse control. Black Paladin does have a secret ID, but how long could he really keep it?

[wcw43921]

For as long as it takes the PC investigators to roll a three on their Deduction skill. 

[Lord Liaden]

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

If Medieval art treasures are involved, the heroes might consult the art appraiser Jos Terhune, a.k.a. Tartarus of the Devil's Advocates (CV2). Or hey, bring Walker, Terhune, and Professor John Black together, none knowing who the others are! That should be good for a few laughs, as well as a brawl.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

I remember years ago, I was helping another forumite who wanted to run a game artifact-hunting scenario inspired by The Maltese Falcon, brainstorm the Champions villains who would fit the role of the antagonists to the PCs. He wanted to use Cateran as the analogue to Brigid O'Shaughnessy. He also wanted an art expert villain as the Joel Cairo analogue, so I suggested Jos "Tartarus" Terhune. We rounded out the cast with Slun for Sidney Greenstreet's Gutman, and Pulsar as Gutman's overconfident gunsel Wilmer.

[Stanley Teriaca]

Most villains shouldn't have either a secret or public identity. There secret is safe as long as they are not captured, and there identity is as public as long as their names are in the paper.

[Duke Bushido]

3 hours ago, Stanley Teriaca said:

Most villains shouldn't have either a secret or public identity. There secret is safe as long as they are not captured, and there identity is as public as long as their names are in the paper.

 

 

Valid points, but I take the oppoaite tack:

 

Villains who have been captured and processed no longer have a Secret ID, at least not most of them.   It would be difficult to run the fingerprints of Plasmus, for example.  Characters whoe develop physical characteristics that cant be concealed- well, they aren't going to easily handle Secret IDs, either.  As an example, Rook (former player's character now an NPC in the youth group's universe) is a brick who, like many bricks, developed immense stature and musculature. She is eight feet tall and wider across the shoulders than most doors and is seventy-two years old.  She couldn't maintain a secret ID if she wanted to.

 

Still, those sort of chracters are a minority of characters (at least, those who aren't bricks, who seem to receive physical grotesquery at a disproportionately high rate).

 

But again: the majority of villains who get even a little bit through processing are never going to have a points-worthy secret ID without completely changing their villainous ID, and in forty-four years of Champions history, I don't believe I have stumbled across one of those in any official product.

 

Still,like LL, I have occasionally enjoyed letting the villain's  secret ID assist the PCs on a case- in one case, I had a villain's secret ID who became a regular go-to Contact with the PCs-- to the point of eliminating four of his alter-ego's competitors, celebrating each victory with the heroes, ingratiating himself into their lives until they finally figured him out (caught him rifling through some,of their files on other "competitors" and after trying to figure out what they had in common, the high-tech HERO recognized the architecture of some spyware left behind in their systems--

 

The players were genuinely surprised, and genuinely felt taken in, and they somehow managed to both be furious and hurt by it as well as love it as a plot twist that they had fallen to, hard.

 

They were _thrilled_ when they finally took him down: it was very personal for every one of them. 

 

unfortunately, it also cemented in their minds that they should never reveal their own secret IDs, even to each other (which was always a problem even before that camoaign, and this made it worse), so we have an entire battery of various Bat Signals in use....

 

 

eh...

 

win some; lose some, I suppose.

[Lord Liaden]

In the Champions Universe, PRIMUS maintains a database of all supervillains whose identities and abilities are known, which is available to other law enforcement agencies. Whenever law enforcement captures a villain, that data is entered into the database.

 

Superheroes who don't break the law are not required to register their secret identities or powers for the database, but registration is often the price for cooperation with government agencies. In-universe the heroes' part of the database has never been broken into, nor the information in it used for nefarious purposes. (I'm sure supertech genius heroes contribute to its security.)

[Duke Bushido]

Ah, Primus.

 

Second only after VIPER, and pushing Lit by Koo down into a distant third place for creating the most official published super villains.

 

Such a great job they do.

 

 

Reason number one they were defunded IMCU long about 1985 or so....

 

[Tech]

I strongly dislike the 'government requires you to reveal your secret id'  shtick so I never use it.  Once in a long while, I have a villain in their secret id make an appearance to the heroes. The thing is, the heroes never realize it at that time. A long time ago, I had Dr. Destroyer - without his armor - make an appearance and the heroes didn't realize. When the mentalist got a little suspicious and tried to read his mind, his high ECV and mental defense gadget prevented it. Heh. So, yeah, it's a once in awhile thing.

 

What I'm much more likely to do is have a villain show up in costume, either for help or someone they need to contact for some reason. In one episode, they had to meet someone at a bar to get information. What they didn't know is their contact was Ripper. He said if someone could out-drink him, he'd give them the info. I think the hero lost but he was impressed so he gave them the info they wanted.

[BoloOfEarth]

Regarding hero secret IDs and sanctioning by the government, I've used Bob Greenwade's Oregon Hero Sanction before to good effect.  

[BoloOfEarth]

Regarding villain secret IDs and capture, in past campaigns I've had some high-tech supervillains start a support company to manufacture near-perfect fake IDs (complete with hacked-in info inserted into official databases), "cleansing" the villain's actual fingerprints / other identifying info, etc.  All as justification for villains buying Deep Cover, plus it gives the heroes something to investigate.