M&M 2nd Recommendations?

[EditorBFG]

I'm a little hurt that no one has come out and recommended Sons of the Gun, which I was lucky enough to edit for Big Finger Games. I can't take any credit for this (other than, you know, adding commas and a couple sidebars) but it is a really useful book of villains, and I would in fact go so far as to say that it does more to make sure you can actually use the NPCs presented in your game than any other super-villains product. (A staff review at RPGNow said "I assumed that NPC supplements were pretty much all the same, but Big Finger Games has upped the ante quite a bit by going above and beyond the average... Other D20 genres could learn a thing or two about NPC books by reading this one.") And there are a lot of adventure hooks, which, coupled with new features like "Origin In A Box," will hopefully make it so you could get a whole campaign out of this one product.

Beyond that, I heartily recommend Ultimate Power. The usefulness of Freedom City, I would say, depends on how "Silver Age" you want your game to be-- that book is a real labor of love, Steve Kenson's artfully-crafted valentine to classic Marvel at its most four-color. The Claremont Academy was my favorite homage. Speaking of which, the Green Ronin site says there is a teen supers supplement coming up. Also, I think Autumn Arbor is extraordinarily detailed, and while some characters are much better than others the setting is really developed.

As for adventures, it is a shame that Brand's Brand never came out with any other products, because their Church & State is one of the best superhero adventures for any system that I have ever seen, a compelling mix of investigation and big superheroic slugfests that weaves together a lot of the elements what comic writer Warren Ellis calls "the 4th Movement," the new way of looking at superheroes that created Grant Morrison's JLA, The Ultimates, The Authority, Civil War and New Avengers. I think setting Church & State in Freedom City or Autumn Arbor with heroes and villains woven into the city in the ways provided for in Sons of the Gun (with the urban sensibility of Sons providing the thematic glue for the whole thing) would be amazing.

Now I'm a little mad at myself for having a current M&M game set on another planet... Not sure I can use the above idea myself, not without a lot of work.

 

[The_Universe]

How about a free adventure?

Dr Null: Battle on the Bay Bridge

It's got bridges (well okay, just one), rampaging tripod walkers (well again, just the one), and bugbots (lots and lots of those).

Like I said, the first one's free, but once you're addicted to that Dr Null goodness, oh we'll talk my friend, we'll talk...

Having played this a little less than a year ago at the NC game day, I can say with authority that it rocked my socks off. Great adventure!

I've got all the official M&M stuff from Green Ronin, in addition to several of the Ronin Arts PDF hero and villain packs. My favorite book so far has actually been Lockdown, but not by any huge margin - FC2 is probably more useful overall, but Lockdown's got all sorts of villains and tons of adventure hooks (as well as a lower price point).

The game doesn't have a lot of print support (at least as compared to D&D), but it's got all sorts of PDF support - nearly all of them of extremely high quality.

 

[Thanee]

Thank you for your recommendations. Very helpful!

I didn't even know about Ultimate Power yet. Gonna have to check that one out, I guess.
Freedom City is definitely high on my list... I do not plan to build my own big campaign setting here, so using the 'default setting' seems like a good idea. In fact, I already did use some of FC (with the Cpt. Kraken adventure in the back of the M&M 2nd Ed. book, which brought the PCs into contact with the Freedom League).

RPGNow is down right now, so I cannot check out the two links above, but will do so later.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Thanee]

And since there are so many helpful people here already, maybe this is a good opportunity to repost my post from a while back, where I asked for opinion ideas concerning my planned (it's still in this stage, since we have been playing mostly SR4 and a weird sci-fi campaign using HERO recently) campaign for M&M.

[SBLOCK]Hey there!

I've been running a few games with the 2nd Edition Mutants & Masterminds rules, using the adventure ideas in the book for now, and the players seem to have enjoyed it a lot (I guess, when there are hints about how they would like to continue there from one of them during almost every of our regular game sessions, it is a strong indication that they did ).

Now, I've some vague ideas what to do to continue with the campaign, but it's not very well thought-out yet. And that's where you come into play...

Here's what I have and what I am pondering currently, let me know what you think and if anything comes into mind, which might be useful (especially some fun adventure scenario ideas).

The characters have recently become junior members of the Freedom League in Freedom City. There are three of them, one is basically an Earth Elemental (strong, tough, can glide through earth); another is a bit akin to Green Lantern (can create objects with his ring, and so on); the third character is a Telepath (some mental powers and she can also move back in time a few minutes in a very limited fashion (so she cannot do that all the time)). PL is 8 for now to keep things within limits, but will rise at certain stages in the campaign towards 10 or 12.

I do not really want to have one of those Prevent the Apocalypse plots. That might happen later in the campaign, though (see below).

For now, I thought about using a race of alien ape people as villains. This will give them a common theme, while allowing for a wide variety of NPCs (large or small, strong or intelligent, etc). They are up to something (though, I do not know what yet; but I have an idea, which will be explained later)!

They could make a few raids or robberies (stealing funds and materials, high tech stuff, building materials, etc), which the heroes are then sent to investigate, which should put them on their trail; later they might even be able to prevent some further attempts.

Then the heroes might track the villains to the jungle (south america or africa), where they will find out, that it is not just a small group, but rather an entire country of apes, who are busy building high-tech installations there (making themselves a defensible home base).

The current idea is, that the apes are not really evil, and that they are the enemies of another race (the real villains), who aim to exterminate/enslave them (for whatever reason). The apes fled from them, and came to earth to find a new home in some remote place, but they needed materials, which they could only get in the civilized areas. The only contacts with mankind so far have been rather violent, so the apes did not really think about asking them for help. Once the true villains enter the stage, however, the heroes should ally with the apes and fight together against this common enemy, when they realize this.

So far for the very rough overview I have currently.

Maybe you have some neat ideas what to do with this. Let me know! [/SBLOCK]

Bye
Thanee

 

[EditorBFG]

Turn the PCs into monkeys at some point, Thanee. It's a no-brainer. The all-monkey issue!

 

[Swack-Iron]

And since there are so many helpful people here already, maybe this is a good opportunity to repost my post from a while back, where I asked for opinion ideas concerning my planned (it's still in this stage, since we have been playing mostly SR4 and a weird sci-fi campaign using HERO recently) campaign for M&M.

Well your game already sounds very Silver Age and definitely already plugs into Freedom City, so Freedom City 2nd ed. is starting to look like a no-brainer for you. The book has thousands of story ideas liberally sprinkled into it, a lot of which have the same flavor as what you're proposing.

The rest of my reply behind a spoiler tag, out of respect for your original spoiler block.
[sblock]
And what you're proposing has a lot of potential! M&M has always had a bizarre (yet charming!) fascination with simians, so you'll find a couple of immediate hooks that way:

* Dr. Simian is an evolved ape who's become a criminal mastermind. Similar to Gorilla Grod from the Justice League cartoon. Excellent scheming villain, who could either be a leader of your first round of bad guys, or oposed to them since he feels threatened by something like him.

* The Primate Patrol are a group of superheroic, well, primates from an alternate Earth. This super-team is featured in the adventure Time of Crisis (which was a 1e adventure, but Green Ronin have stated that it will be updated to 2e in the not-so-distant-future). They aren't stated out in FC2e, but it might not be too hard to get your hands on Time of Crisis and the conversion should be easy (if someone out there in net-land hasn't already done it).

* Crater apes were once the slaves of the inhabitants of Farside City, a lunar metropolis on the far side of the moon. The deposed leader/supervillainess of Farside City supposedly has a bunch of crater apes at her command.

In addition, Freedom City features a few ancient races that could serve as your mysterious bad guys: Atlanteans, the remnant of the Incan empire found in the Lost World, the ancient and twisted Serpent People or Morlocks of Sub-Terra, rogue Ultimen.... and then there are all the potential bad buys from outer space. [/sblock]

Have fun!

 

[Thanee]

I actually only know terms like 'Silver Age' and so on from the M&M book.

But that does sound good... if Freedom City has some ideas and plot hooks, that's even more a reason to get it, eventually.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Gilwen]

Get Ultimate Power and then rip out chapter five fromthe MnM 2nd book and paste in the UP stuff. I have found that UP has higher reuse value than the Masterminds Manual, but I am not changing a bunch of stuff off the bat either so YMMV.

Gil

 

[Thanee]

The Mastermind's Manual contains some very specific changes, I have been missing in M&M 2nd. In fact, I had asked about much of the stuff a good while ago on the ATT forums and the universal answer to pretty much all my questions was: this will be detailed in Mastermind's Manual.

So I figured, it could be a book, that I would get some use of.

Bye
Thanee

 

[EditorBFG]

Bumping this back up to ask, did you all see this:

Adepts of the Arcane (M&M Superlink) by Big Finger Games

http://enworld.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=15200&]

We're trying to rewrite the rules for how character books are done, making them more useful than before. Free. pdf demo here:

http://www.bigfingergames.com/img/BFG1304demo.zip

Since we're suggesting M&M books, I suggest this one. Of course, I am biased, but we worked really hard.