Opal

The world knows Jackdaw - or Jack Daw - as one of those bizarre theme villains, only a little more coherent than the likes of Foxbat. He orchestrates overly complex bird-themed crimes, throughout Europe and the broader Westernized world, with grandiose goals that could never work even if they were carried through. As it stands, he has inflicted a lot of collateral damage - though no direct deaths - and driven up insurance rates wherever he operates. So heroes & law enforcement begrudgingly take him seriously. Jackdaw wears a high-tech battlesuit that looks like an all-black reject from Battle of the Planets, including a beaklike visor and feathered cape that actually let's him fly. He uses some sort of bowdlerized 'martial arts' - mostly judo with hints of wushu when pressed - but primarily depends on gadgets and a huge flock of trained and/or robotic birds (generally raven-sized in spite of his name). He stands over 6' and speaks with an exageratedly cultured old-fashioned "mid-Atlantic" accent. He never betrays anger or fear, but affects boredom or amusement, instead. He has been foiled every time, defeated many, but never captured. Jackdaw often fights as a member of ThinkBank, but he is generally considered a dupe or hireling.

1. Have you played a lot of other games, not used maps & tokens, and prefer it that way? Then go ahead. Otherwise, a hex map & minis are very helpful. 2. Depending on the version, character sheets can have a lot of what you need. As far as actual play it's not particularly complicated. 3. Character Building is the more complex part of the game. So start with sample characters and villains from the books or on-line... ....again, unless you're experienced with other games that have a lot of choice that way....

Science! Check. That leaves Technology, Engineering, & Math...

Sorry, I apparently forgot how to count! Maybe if I had been forced to watch E/I programming on Saturday mornings, instead of Isis or Land o/t Lost, I wouldn't be making mistakes like that. The Informers are 4 young-adult heroes whose powers all tie into STEM topics (1 for each). They're quick to give interviews, especially right after a battle, in which they try to educate & inform their young fans, and get them interested in careers in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics. Remember, some demograpghics are underrepresented in STEM fields, so membership in the team takes a variety of factors into account. Be sure to give an example of how they riff off a dramatic use of a power to educate & inform their fans (who are meant to be grade-schoolers).

Darth Carna Since 2001, tens of thousands of people have identified themselves as "Jedi" when filling out the religion sections of various census forms. There's even a Temple of the Jedi Order with tax-exempt status in the US. Some people take it more seriously than others. Some way too seriously. One of those was an obsessive fangirl and avid cosplayer who was outraged with the canon interpretation that said Jedi /couldn't love/, that love was an emotion that led to the Dark Side. Well, then, she reasoned, the Dark Side can't be evil. She set out to prove that. Darth Carna is a slight young lady wearing a full-coverage hooded robe and face mask, all in black, and loose but for the wrists and gloves, she apparently wears some sort of boots and leggings under the robe, as well. Her costume is apparently made of ballistic cloth & insulated to provide a little protection against firearms and other deadly weapons, and her mask is equipped with efficient filters. She wields a black carbon-fibre bo-staff as a weapon, lightsaber crystals being sadly unavailable on backwater distant-future worlds like Earth. She displays impressive acrobatic and martial arts abilities, and if it stopped there, she'd just be a relatively harmless nut. However, she also has mental powers, minor telepathy & mind-control, and significant telekinetic powers, she uses to appear to perform feats of great strength, including being able to leap and levitate nearly to the point of flying, as well as to strangle enemies from a distance and lift or hurl modest-sized objects, like busses. She also claims precognition and can heal life-threatening injuries at a touch in less than a minute. The last two were actually her primary form of heroism until she joined Pentacle. She would intuit when a deadly act of violence or accident would occur, make her way to the vicinity, and either prevent it or heal any of the victims she could. When she gets the chance she rails against the moral bankruptcy of the Jedi's 'ancient religion.' "Come to the Dark Side: we have Love."

1" hex = 2m Assuming a 1" hex battlemat, that's also a convenient size for minis or standies, closer to the 25-35mm minis you can readily find, or the old cardboard heroes, rather than using up to 2" tall minis... that'd be, 50mm? Dropping a convenient TT scale like hexes or squares for in-game measurements is OK... essentially meaningless, really... how hard is it to divide by 2 all the time? Any harder/easier than multiplying by 2 when you want an in-world measurement?

Mime (Over Matter) Doesn't actaully need to dress like a mime or go through the classic bit of walking into them and feeling out their dimensions in order to create invisible walls of force, but finds it amusing to do so, most of the time. I know: mimes aren't clowns.

Degenerate Dwarf Looks like and all-white Tolkien-esque high-fantasy dwarf. Uses a impenetrable field of degenerate electron gas as both defense and attack.

Now I'm picturing a scenario in which utterly evil beings are invading, but one of them is mentally ill or really twisted by it's life experiences, and starts helping the humans, and doing good, but is unable to face that so rationalized it as evil. " I'm not saving you, I'm using you as part of a plot against my enemies..." ...I think Spike may have gone through a phase like that on Buffy...

A) no. You can have multiple systems of magic, but they're all Hero System B ) yes. Maybe throw in some skill-as-power or slightly over the top martial arts C) no, but you could put in some minor inefficiencies, like each type of magic uses a different skill...

(I totally get that.) There have been many takes on evil, but IRL, even people doing the most horrifically evil things rarely think of themselves /as evil/, they think they're doing something for a greater good, or they have no choice, or they don't understand, or, at the outside as some of the above, don't care or don't feel. But a demon, a demon could be Utterly Evil, it does evil, because it knows that what it's doing is evil, and doing evil is it's strongest motivation and highest aspiration. Because /being/ evil is its essential identity and it couldn't bear to be - or even think of itself as - anything but entirely evil. Heck, demons probably get all angsty and conflicted when they accidentally do something that has a good consequence for someone. (I know that's whacked morality that doesn't work, and there's probably a category error in there somewhere, but demons aren't real, so...)

I haven't done that with a villain team, but I have used a rival hero teams to provide the odd object lesson.

Lyta the Hippo Lyta comes from an alternate Earth on which primates were the only genus of placental mammals that failed to attain sentience and become part of an advanced pan-species utopia. At some point she found a magic belt that brought her here, and sometimes provides some random but useful power. Aside come that she's large, strong, perky, intelligent, and friendly. Unless you're a nasty primate, then she'll prep you in an unappreciatedly elegant way and feed you to Cerberbull - who she finds just dreamy. Maybe her mind was warped by shifting dimensions or Myth Master did something to her, whatever the reason, she has a complete mental block that causes her to percieve her teammates as normal, lovely, anthropomorphs like those of her homeworld - and all other humans as horrid primate vermin. Actual anthropomorphic animals might be able to get through to her, though.

3. You could go there: Robin Hood. He could keep up a pretext of heroism. Other possible names given the archery theme could be: Archer, Sagitarius (they're funny), Fletchet, Hunter (or Jaeger, or look up hunter or archer in any language), Tell, Ranger, Yeoman....

Wow, he even dresses the part. That reminds me: Edward Leedskalnin, creator of the megalithic Coral Castle, could have be a TK or brick on that basis.

Hi Asperion, I'll play: Latest Discovery: Vulcan! Scientists today announced the discovery of decipherable binary radio transmissions from the direction of 40 Eridani. Very faint EM signals had been noted from that system for many years, but were never decoded. In retrospect, it appears these were incidental EM emissions from an advancing technological society. The first messages deciphered, similar to those of Earth's own SETI program, begin with simple universal mathematics and progressed quickly to sophisticated systems of logic, and, finally, enough language to provide a brief description of these extrasolar intelligences and their world. The results will shock you. please turn to p27... Next Planet: Barsoom (yes, the hard part will be explaining how scientists have /missed/ this one for so long...)

Hmm. Rasputin has quite the association with RPGs, now that I think of it, he was even given as an example of 18 CON in the 1e AD&D DMG, 1979. I never used him in a game, but he was the origin story of an NPC hero in my old campaign world - White Tsar, supposedly Alexei Romanov & a disciple of Rasputin, a low-power super-soldier, but virtually immortal... I can't remember the exact build, but the f/x was you could shoot him full of holes and he'd bleed more than a human body could hold, but still stagger around, as if he were taking one last dying action...after another...

Come to think of it, back when the BBB was current, a group did run, for a little while, a high-power supers level game, set in the distant past where the PCs were on the level of minor deities (an Angel, a startrekkian sentient energy being, a primeval spirit ....) ... high-power supers seemed to work fine for that though it was less in the high defenses and heavy hitting and more in the weird powers and VPPs....

That has been a persistent theme in the genre, or at least, an old theme. Heroes tending to be physical paragons, villains tending to be deformed (they went over that in Unbreakable, IIRC). Part of the visual and allegorical (and 'for kids' in the sense of not expecting kids to be sophisticated thinkers) nature of the medium: good & evil are not just in the characters' words and deeds, but obvious from their appearance.

I think I read this in one of the Stainless Steel Rat novels by Harry Harrison. A world used a medium if exchange called wir that were based on labor provided by the individual, and used to purchase the produce of the labor of others. They were tracked by a global computer network. Sorta market communism. Another interesting one from Tanith Lee's Drinking Sapphire Wine: the virtually-immortal people living in domed cities on a distant-future Earth had all their needs met by robots - who were powered by (thus paid in) human gratitude.

Howard Hughes - supposedly the inspiration for Tony Stark. Elon Musk - first eccentric industrialist since Howard Hughes to fit the bill. Which, of course, brings us to ... Tesla, the quintessential mad scientist, reputed to control lightning with his bare hands, create force fields, interdimentional gates, intercontinental death rays, and an earthquake machine - his real inventions weren't a lot less fantastic. (I guess he'd work as a villain, too.) Oh, while nobody beats Uncle Al on the mystic side, Harry Houdini, either as a mystic or a super-skilled debunker (or both - shielding mankind from the supernatural terrors ...)

The Black Sheep Clad in darkest black, bullet-resistant bioengineered wool felt, his cowl topped with curled rams horns, this dread vigilante anti-hero vigilantly stalks criminals of all stripes, for they are a cowardly, superstitious lot... ... Oh, and he's a skilled pilot with a perfectly-restored vintage WWII Corsair. Yup, just dated myself again.

The Savior Though she doesn't deign to claim the title, the Savior is a primeval goddess from the dawn of humanity. She taught man (she may work with terribly progressive animal rights terrorists, but she is binary AF) to hunt and to kill or die in defense of the tribe, and woman to do basically everything else. But, after many millennia of living in bloody harmony with nature, there came a time when the herds vanished and the trees did not set fruit, and, in desperation she taught man the plough... ...it's been sheer chaos ever since - war, overpopulation, tyranny, the wheel, science... It. Must. Stop. For a long time she was a forgotten shadow of divinity, but ever since the New Age types started worshipping "the Goddess," she's been regaining power and awareness. She wields magical powers over human emotion, animals, and can heal or kill. She appears as a woman of indiscernible age and indeterminate race in a bone-white hooded robe carrying a sickle in one hand and an apple in the other. The former is no deadlier than a normal implement of its type - except that it passes through armor and other non-magical defenses as if they weren't there. The latter is far more powerful: a single bite can heal, kill, enslave, empower, or transform a willing subject - in a variety of "poetic" ways, depending upon their deepest subconscious needs - she often offers it without explanation, especially when a mortal surrenders or begs for mercy. It's been the origin of several villains, many monsters, various minions in her service, and perhaps a hero... Too laconic and mysterious to be a proper leader, she none the less occasionally vetoes a plan, offers a cryptic suggestion, or just takes the team into some dangerous situation without explanation.

Indian Princess Trafficked at a young age from no one is sure where, possibly eastern Europe or the Middle East, her resemblance to the Disney take on Pocahontas led to her being pimped out as said 'indian' princess, to customers into that sort of RP. After years of misery, she snapped, and, in a dissociative state, killed several people with her bare hands, before disappearing into the urban underworld of homeless encampments and drug dens, where, after many suicidal risks and several actual suicide attempts, she finally realized that she was had some sort of mutant power. No matter how badly she was beaten or wounded, or how severely she ODd, she'd wake up the next day with no ill effects. She was discovered by Perrillium scientists on a routine human guinea pig round-up, and while she lacked any offensive powers, recruited into the Six Savages - seven's a cooler number, anyway - trained in martial arts by Scalphunter, given a pair of vibronic tomahawks by Coyōtl, and ironically took her politically incorrect code name. While happy enough to be hurting others instead of being hurt for a change, she was still prone to periods of dissociation in which she couldn't differentiate friend from foe, let alone stay on mission. The attack on The Midwest Crusaders was not one of those times, she killed three of the Combine octuplets and wounded a fourth before they could merge into their giant-size form, weakening him proportionately. Unfortunately, she lost one of her weapons which was stuck in the wounded brother when he merged. After the heroes were dead, she lost the second when it stuck in a man's ribcage - after that the mob quickly overpowered her. She did not wake up the next day.

I've been missing the Cold War - never thought I'd say that - so, even at the risk of a bad Russian accent, Turncape sounds fun. You've got thriller potential, in escaping the iron curtain and proving themselves in the West, plus fish-out-of-water comic relief adapting to 70s consumer culture... They all sound good, though.