Cool Things to Put in a Base

[Agent X]

I'm hoping to borrow (steal) the great ideas you have had for a base.

 

So what kinds of things have you put in base? I'm asking for unique features or little things that any base might have but, for some reason, most people forget to include. The base I am building is supposed to be this technological wonder, a tesseract, with vast interior space parceled out on multiple levels. It's meant to be a source of adventure for the heroes in my new campaign in and of itself.

[Blue]

My favorite base feature is actually a disadvantage. I *ahem*... borrowed... from a book (Angel Station, by Walther Jon Williams). The base is haunted, but not in the traditional sense.

 

The previous owner used to use the base sensors to record everything he did so that his ideas were always on record and he could call them up should he forget them. There is, however, a flaw in the sytem which causes the holographic projectors in the base to replay his image at random intervals and with random footage.

 

So one day you're walking down the hall and the (now deceased) owner of the base walks past you mumbling to himself about quantum physics. You're sitting in the security area reviewing tape of the villains and suddenly he appears, eating an apple and making bodily noises. You're trying to work (silently) in the lab and suddenly he's there, rambling about his latest experiment.

 

Makes a good jumping off point for adventures, when he shows up and says something that interests the heroes.

 

I actually stole four or five things for this campaign from Williams, but since my players don't read him, they'll never know.

[Agent X]

Originally posted by Blue

My favorite base feature is actually a disadvantage. I *ahem*... borrowed... from a book (Angel Station, by Walther Jon Williams). The base is haunted, but not in the traditional sense.

 

The previous owner used to use the base sensors to record everything he did so that his ideas were always on record and he could call them up should he forget them. There is, however, a flaw in the sytem which causes the holographic projectors in the base to replay his image at random intervals and with random footage.

 

So one day you're walking down the hall and the (now deceased) owner of the base walks past you mumbling to himself about quantum physics. You're sitting in the security area reviewing tape of the villains and suddenly he appears, eating an apple and making bodily noises. You're trying to work (silently) in the lab and suddenly he's there, rambling about his latest experiment.

 

Makes a good jumping off point for adventures, when he shows up and says something that interests the heroes.

 

I actually stole four or five things for this campaign from Williams, but since my players don't read him, they'll never know.

That is the kind of stuff I'm looking for! Thanks.

[phydaux]

Re: Cool Things to Put in a Base

 

Originally posted by Agent X

The base I am building is supposed to be this technological wonder, a tesseract, with vast interior space parceled out on multiple levels. It's meant to be a source of adventure for the heroes in my new campaign in and of itself.

 

Hmm... Most of my bases come in at the "Super Flop House" level, but I'll try to list some ideas.

 

1) A Toilet (I challange you to look at any VIPER or UNTIL base, or any old D&D mod, and tell me just where anyone went to take a dump?)

 

2) A Kitchen

 

3) Pantry/Storage Room (you have to keep the vaccuum cleaner somewhere)

 

4) Laundry Room (Those costumes get a little rank after a while)

 

5) A Rec Room (NOT a Danger Room, but a place for the PCs to play Nintendo and stuff)

 

6) A Med Facility (Some villains have really big Killing Attacks)

 

7) Bedrooms

 

8) Comm Room (Got to LOVE Monitor Duty!)

 

9) Meeting Room (Preferably with high DEF walls. Some of those conversations get a little heated...)

[Blue]

Glad you like it

 

The other thing that's useful in my base is a security measure that I don't have the statistics for just now.

 

It's an area effect teleport with two memorized locations. One is the holding cell downstairs and the other is outside the base. It's generally set up so that anyone breaking into the lobby area can be teleported directly to holding (where they will have to waste precious phases trying to break out) or to the outside, whereupon the base can be sealed up immediately--leaving the villains back out in the cold.

 

You could always megascale it and teleport them someplace far away, or even to the police station.

[lemming]

Re: Cool Things to Put in a Base

 

Originally posted by Agent X

I'm hoping to borrow (steal) the great ideas you have had for a base.

 

So what kinds of things have you put in base?

 

A Giant Penny

[loraxxx]

base-boards

 

no really--how about an intruder pacification system?--very useful, especially if the characters don't take appropriate steps to protect themselves....

 

(mr spock, flood all decks with neuro-zine!!--i mean every deck except this one--oh, crap!!)

[KnightShade]

A library might be nice. Especially for those times when there's a puzzle the PC's just can't solve, they can go look for answers there.

[Hermit]

I like phydaux's list.

 

Another suggestion I have is a Greenhouse/indoor garden. A little plant life can liven the place up, provides better air, and is good for meditation.

 

You've already thought of the "Danger Room" I'm sure

[Ghost who Walks]

Most of our bases have been pretty ordinary. Here is some of the more unusual stuff:

 

1) The secret subpen for the minisub, that only the Russian member of the team knew about.

2) An old fire truck in the vehicle bay (the team hada fire projector on it). The team leader could order it out, and it was manned by the base staff. Wendy Brooks drove.

3) The firepole, allowing nonflyingh heroes to quickly drop down levels.

4) The danger lot (from the first base). This was an Ex-Man joke, taken to ridculous levels. Instead of a Danger Room, it was an empty lot, where heroes took cover behind the busted Ford, crawled down the cement pipe, and ran through the old tires. Great fun.

5) Don't forget a parking lot, otherwise the heroes park on the street. One of the characters had his car stolden because of that...

 

Don't forget base staff!

Besides Wendy, we have had:

1) The test robot for a corporation, that was supposed to vacuum. It wandered around, and no one could understand how to reprogram it.

2) The Groundskeeper. We had Hideous the Groundskeeper (seems to have vanished in 5th edition). He was a brick, with a scarred face. Later he got his face healed, and became a superhero.

3) Base Manager: Daughter of the team leader, she kept on trying to go on missions (had no powers). Owns her own arsenal of weapons, including a rocket launcher. Also had a pet elephant, to ride into battle on. (she later got powers, and became more respectible)

4) Mutant from other world. Like it sounds. He was the handyman, and kept of putting chairs in his room in the hope that the players would come in there, and talk with him. They had an intervention instead.

5) Police Liason: Gruff and chain smoking, she was assigned to the team because she was up for administrative review for shooting a suspect. Her job was to access the police database, and send any evidence collected to the police lab for analysis.

 

Note #1: I am still working on a way to get the characters to have a giant penny! (they already have the deactivated Dalek)

 

Note #2: Find the old module called ""Stormhaven", produced by Blade/Flying buffalo. Originally done foor the Espionage system, contains the greatest plans for a superhero base. Ever.

[Supreme Serpent]

Costume-making machine.

 

Large, walk-in closets.

 

More than one way in/out. More than one way up/down levels.

 

Sensory Deprivation tank.

 

Craft room. Pottery wheel, easel/paints, etc.

 

"The Vault of 8- Activation Foci" - lots of "failed" inventions - useful stuff in the right situations, just very unreliable and not stuff you'd want to take with you every mission. But sometimes...you may want to go in and look for that SubHarmonic Flameproof Force-Bubble.

 

Premade costume closet. For easy infiltration. Set of VIPER uniforms for the team, gorilla costume, ninja suits, etc.

 

Large aquarium with fish no one recognizes, that maintains itself & feeds the fish on its own.

 

Video monitors that are not labeled and show rooms no one recognizes, that apparently aren't in the base...

[Mark Rand]

If the base is, or was, a mage's house it could be bigger on the outside and have gateways to other realities or rooms that aren't on the house's original floorplan. Imagine, walking through a gate in the living room to a hotel ballroom or from the basement rec room to a four floor gymnasium. Of course, it could be haunted, too.

[Blue]

Originally posted by Hermit

You've already thought of the "Danger Room" I'm sure

The twist on this for "our" base is that the DR is completly virtual. Reasoning that the massive amount of destruction that takes place in a danger room would be very costly, instaed a simple room was designed with virtual hookups and characters are linked up by electrodes to the environmental computer. So fights are closer to "holodeck adventures" in the sense that the environment changes and seems boundless. Characters on there are "programmed" in an approximation of their real world selves.

 

In mechanics: Essentially, it's like "extradimensional travel", with a "leaves vulnerable physical body behind" limitation. And I implemented the "Split attention" rule, where if you want to be able to make perception rolls in the 'real world' while plugged in to the virtual one, you react in the virtual world at a -1 SPD. (That was for the benefit of paranoid players/characters who fear I'm going to have villains beat them to a pulp in their own base while they are logged in).

[Old Man]

Originally posted by Ghost who Walks

3) The firepole, allowing nonflyingh heroes to quickly drop down levels.

 

This one suggestion has inspired me to design a superhero base concealed in a strip club. I guess I need to get my mind out of the gutter.

[lemming]

Originally posted by Old Man

This one suggestion has inspired me to design a superhero base concealed in a strip club. I guess I need to get my mind out of the gutter.

Hey, you got to make money in some fashion and it's convienent.

[Agent X]

Originally posted by Mark Rand

If the base is, or was, a mage's house it could be bigger on the outside and have gateways to other realities or rooms that aren't on the house's original floorplan. Imagine, walking through a gate in the living room to a hotel ballroom or from the basement rec room to a four floor gymnasium. Of course, it could be haunted, too.

I'm actually planning on doing something like this although with sci-fi sfx. There are going to be floors you can reach from the elevator between the floors normally listed. There will also be doors that lead to floors that shouldn't be accessible as well. The base is going to be about 35 years old with tons of twists and turns from the past adventures of the former inhabitants.

[Pteryx]

A base from an old RPG I played in...

 

* ...featured a dimly-lit room filled with one-way portals to other realities.

 

* ...had a network of caverns directly underneath it, unbeknownst to its inhabitants until one fateful day.

 

* ...suffered from a strange curse(?) of unknown origins that caused books on the bookshelf to be randomly replaced -- sometimes with long-lost or outright dangerous tomes.

 

* ...included a poorly-lit corner in the first floor/main room that one of the characters favored.

 

* ...did, indeed, have a bathroom. (The camera never went into it.) -- Pteryx

[Ghost who Walks]

Originally posted by Old Man

This one suggestion has inspired me to design a superhero base concealed in a strip club. I guess I need to get my mind out of the gutter.

Dirty Old Man.

[Lightray]

Wha? Page 2 and no one has mentioned what every self-respecting superhero team base needs: the Trophy Room!

 

Preferably with gadgets that the supervillains will want to steal back, unidentified artifacts that will someday activate and wreak mayhem, and at least one item that will hatch into a dangerous alien.

 

Libraries, also good. Several times I've had a scenario saved because of the base's library Cramming skill.

 

My own wizard had an extradimensional base of fluxuating geometry and architecture, ridiculous size, that was becoming sentient, and apparently contained (at least) an entire world within it. All the campaign GMs loved it, because they could describe anything in it, and odds were it would have changed or been lost by the next time we went looking for it. Rather like the Tardis, really.

[ChuckB]

I had some thoughts on an NPC team that we use in our campaign.

 

1-The base was situated on a Native American reservation so the group's activities within the base were held accountable to tribal law , but not govt. laws.

 

2 - The base itself was a modified observatory

 

3 - The base had a "Panic Room" (just in case things got really bad.)

[RevHooligan]

In one campaign I ran the heros had taken over for the deceased superteam that previously occupied the top ten floors of a Manhattan skyscraper. They had to remodel after the explosion that killed said supers and were well funded, so they went full-on MTV cribs.

 

However, after a major hunted (Finn, the killer robot) took the elevator up to the base and blasted a hero in the kitchen, they remembered to add some security devices like locks on the doors.

 

The killer robot in question was rebuilt and reprogramed (with a built in coffee maker.) He became the housekeeper, handyman, librarian, recepionist, and security chief. Sixty years later in continuity, he's the supreme mage on Earth.

[Blue Jogger]

Secret Passageways - Usually forgotten in more modern bases. They should have extra concealment than the rest of the base. Don't forget the small hidden elevators.

 

THE Archives - An area where EVERYTHING is stored. Including the stuff that should have been thrown out decades ago. The supercomputer's backup files, all the way to the original punch cards are stored here.

 

Large indoor Swimming pool - Heated by the base's nuclear reactor heat sink to a wonderful 90 degree Farenheit.

[Lord Liaden]

Holding cells. Sometimes you can't get a Stronghold van to pick up right away... or maybe there's a reason you don't want to turn your prisoner over to the government.

 

Rooms capable of special environments (Life Support) for the occasional water or methane breather, superheated mineral lifeform, or other visitors with unusual requirements.

 

Gremlins! These don't have to be mystical creatures - the base computer could have a virus or nanite infection. They're just an excuse for things in the base to go haywire, in such a way that the PCs can have an adventure trying to determine and eliminate the cause of the problem.

 

It's also possible to build interesting Followers for the base, responsible for serving the needs of the team as a whole. Besides the standard domestic help and technical assistants, how about a lawyer on retainer to handle the fallout from property damage and injuries to civilians? Or a publicist to manage press conferences, counter negative news reports, and generally polish the team's image?

[zornwil]

The team I GM for has the effect of natural light piped in and fake windows, so that while underground it still seems airy and light.

 

They also have a food replicator. Unfortunately the absent-minded scientist who built it never quite finished the job and it only makes baloney, which he likes. So does the amorphous blob who can take any shape, and so does the multiform detective. So it just stayed that way.

[Dr. Anomaly]

I can't reccomend the old Mystic Masters supplement enough for this...the house/base in there had some truly neat ideas. You can rip them off even if your group is technically-oriented instead of mystically inclined.

 

You might also take a look at DC's Blue Devil comic...during the later run, the hero discovered that a closet in his brownstone had a connection to the House of Wierdness, the counterpart to the more famous House of Mystery.