Review Goals:
Arcane adversaries is a compilation of magically themed villains for Champions gaming.
Barring the monster guides for Fantasy Hero it has been quite some time since I picked up a Hero system “enemies” book. I should put in a disclaimer here – while I ran Champions as my super hero system of choice for nearly sixteen years I am not doing so at present. I do still use Hero, and I do still follow the super genre.
With that in mind, I will be judging this book with a slightly different perspective than the average fanboy. I intend to look at its value for not just the Champions GM, but the genre as a whole as well. I'm less concerned about the numbers game, trusting at this point that Hero Games can get its numbers right for its house RPG. What I want to see here is if they can make interesting villains that will be likely to find use in play.
The first half – the groups:
The Scarlet brotherhood sets up the first entry – a loose confederation of covens devoted to more nefarious magics. We get the groups history, means of operation, and relations with some of the other forces present in the Champions Universe. What makes this group particularly interesting is that individual members are really not often all that potent—but they have some very effective methods of combining their magic and casting spells without ever 'being on scene.' While this can make them quite powerful, it also runs the risk in a campaign of making them no more than 'random wandering damage dice' from the point of view of the players. The the Brotherhood never messes up its normal means of operating will result in the players never even knowing there was anything going on. On the other hand, you can easily introduce them into a campaign by staging a mishap on their part, and then 'blaming' some past misfortunes of the PCs to secret Brotherhood interference down the road—the Marvel revisionist trick, where you say that that 'normal' NPC on the edge of the camera in panel 23 of issue 46 was really a major character who'd been around all along without the readers ever noticing... This is the group you use if you want a long running arcane mystery. The battle, when it comes, is likely to be easy for the PCs, but they may never actually get to that point with an enemy that operates so indirectly. I like this group myself—they're nasty in a strategic way, and looking at the plot seeds for them the first one on the list for the first sample NPC is going straight into my queue of upcoming plot lines.
Next are 'The Devil's Advocates,' a small band dedicated to the destruction of the technology paradigm. Think of the RPG Mage for a second, and the PCs in that game. Scale it down to a single team and you have this group. This group is a lot more 'supervillain' than the last, and can work as a more direct team challenge threat as well as for magical conspiracy plots. The group consists of a summoner, two strong guys, a gadgeteer, a varied spell caster, and an illusionist. The points on this team averages in the low 400s, and they are tough – so they're not ideal for an entry threat. On the other hand you could have them take down the PCs as a team, and then let clever tactics allow the PCs to rematch them in smaller groups and slowly deal with them. The real feature here, as with much of the book, is that you get plot seeds for the group, and then again for each individual member. Through those, I see a lot of ideas for 'mystical mayhem' (quoting from the book) with this team, and even grabbing those ideas for other magically themed antagonists.
That brings us to the 'Kings of Edom,' a section which can best be summed up as 'the top dogs in a Lovecraftian tale.' We get one sample King, one fragment of a king, and a series of minions and related horrors that operate for them. So it isn't really just the top, its the whole ladder. This group will be difficult in a four color game, but in a more modern style supers setting they would make a great backdrop for the 'what's really going on' part of the setup. Among the minions, I really liked the first two – a gentle albeit somewhat inbred millionaire with an evil Siamese twin, and a creature that exists in the corners and angles of reality. The section ends with something many Lovecraftian tales do not provide – a small bit on the forces that oppose these guys, the forces that originally locked them away.
Next comes a series of magical families, starting with the Sylvestries who work under the concept of a bloodline sworn over to demons, in particular one known as 'The Dragon'. This family centers around an immortal leader and his descendants – all of whom work in one way or another to bring about the fall of humanity. Of curious note in this family are the names of two of its branches – the McFarlanes and the Liefelds – names of two well known comic artists. There are some interesting characters among them, and the family is fractured enough that the bloodline could even creep into a few heroes.
Following them come the Vandaleurs, who are not much focused on evil as they are on hedonistic pursuits of personal power. They don't so much want to rule or destroy the world as have their way with it. These are the mystical Paris Hiltons with a mean streak added in – albeit unknown outside of mystical circles. If they play a role in a campaign, it is just as likely that the PCs will know a heroic one as a villainous one. The best trick to play with this family would be to 'underwhelm' the players with them – make them see just how 'useless and unconcerned' the family is by using the weaker members for a spell – until they cross one of them, and come to see just how powerful their magic runs.
The Single Villains:
After this we get to move on to solo villains, and I can't well cover them all individually, so let me give some basic information on them. You get eleven of them:
- A werewolf in the body of an unwilling student of karate. Victim of a blackmailer's plot – if the PCs ever caught the villain behind the blackmail, they might very well unleash something worse.
- A cosmic 'ordainer' gone mad with the idea of perfect order.
- A doctor turned voodoo necromancer vigilante (and one of the typos in the book, as from page 97 to 98 there seems to be a missing bit of text).
- A woman with a possessed glass eye given to her by a dead man, an eye that forces her to kill.
- A force-propelling mercenary super villainous unaware of her demonic origin.
- A mercenary harpy – a woman hard on her luck forced into a life of villainy to secure a better future for her daughter.
- A man on a quest for revenge, with his soul in the bargain if he fails.
- A figure behind the man villain, who drives his puppet of a master into greater and greater heights of atrocity.
- The witch from Hansel and Gretel.
- An Aztec god seeking the sacrifice of superhumans to fuel him on to greater power, and the cultists who serve him.
- A vigilante bent on killing all the magical horrors of the world – including the mystically themed Pcs.
Each of these characters comes with a list of plot seeds to get them into your game. Quite a number of them are easily workable into any modern or darker themed supers game, and several can form a handy bridge into bringing in more and more mystical themes.
Finally, the book ends with a reference and summary chart. The reference chart tells you handy bits like whether or not the villain is a mercenary, metamorph, master villain, and so on, ending with total points. The summary chart gives some key statistics for combat comparisons. Together these can be used to quickly pick the villain of the hour for an upcoming scenario you have in mind.
Overall:
The book is full of interesting and useful ideas, albeit not many that are original in concept. Several of them remind me of entries from past editions of Champions, such as the mystical family 'The Blood' seeming a bit like these two new families. That said, they are well built and still quite entertaining.
The tone is a bit dark in the book, not one of these is the sort of mystical villain one would find on 'Teen Titans Go,' but they are the sort you might find in the Titans comic book.
I'm currently using a different super hero RPG, and I still expect to get value out of this book, adopting the concepts and characters over.
For
Substance I'll give this book a four. The concepts are solid, and the write ups are well done. The plot seeds for each character are invaluable. The only flaw is that we have seen many of these concepts in the past. Still, if you don't want to convert old edition material or make a well known concept yourself – the book does a great job of it for you. As well, these concepts are known because they work, and Champions 5th edition needed to cover them at some point or it would be missing something. In a second volume of Arcane Adversaries a criticism on new interpretations of old themes would be valid, but in this first book that is pretty much what we expect to find and need to get for the genre to be fully covered. So while it might be a flaw, it is a minor one at best.
Modern printing demands books be printed in unusual page number divisions, and 128 is one of the magic numbers. This book's content ends on page 123. The remaining pages are filled with blanks headed by 'Notes' and two pages of advertisements for Hero Products in general and then Hudson City in particular. I feel these pages could have been put to better use with an extra villain, some generic cultists, or something along those lines. This forms a second reason for a 4 rating rather than a 5.
For
Style it takes a little more analysis. The book format is the same of any Hero Games book these days, and by the time you get to buying this book you are so inside the Hero brand that familiarity is a plus – it makes the book flow into your collection seamlessly. As a result while I have held that design against Hero books in past, in this case it becomes a plus as a practical choice. The cover is nice, though it makes the book the sort you hide on the shelf when your evangelical friends visit... It features a cult summoning up a demon after all. That demon is not to be found in this book by the way, though the cult might very well be one of the groups in the first half of the book.
The interior art is nothing special. None of the pictures really grabbed me as they have in some of the genre books. People are saying Hero's art quality has been going down, but I disagree. While the book did not grab me, it also did not negatively push me away. It was just sort of normal par material. That is a disappointment only in that magical themes are my favorite in the supers genre (unfortunately the same can not be said of my players – which just means I will get even further use out of hitting them hard with the ideas in this book).
All of that said, the style is average, so I'll give it a three on a scale of one to five.
Combined Rating:
If I sum up the two ratings and look at which holds greater weight for judging the value of getting this book, I'd go with an overall rating of four out of five stars. It is a good buy, well worth adding to your shelf, you might almost even be able to say that a Champions collection would have a hole if it was missing something to cover the themes in this book, it just isn't perfect.
