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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2011803" data-attributes="member: 18387">Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks is a collection of pre-constructed supervillains for Champions, the world’s best-known superhero role playing game.  This is not a d20 game.  Instead it uses the venerable Hero system, which has been around in one form or another since the early 1980s.Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks is a huge book, 233 pages in length, full-size 8x10 format.  This is in fact the biggest supplement of its type that I’ve ever seen.  That’s even more impressive, since unlike most collections of supervillains this one was written by a single author, Steve Long.  The book is a paperback, which brings the cost down somewhat.  It retails for $24.95, quite reasonable for a work of this length and scope.  It contains close to 100 individual supervillain write-ups, all carefully statted out, with black and white illustrations.  Every character has a portrait and there are a few action shots at the beginnings of chapters.  The quality of the art ranges from mediocre to quite good, and is never bad.  The cover illustration is particularly fine, although it depicts a new character and doesn’t really say “Champions” to me.Steve Long is the game’s creator and arch-guru.  He’s written the bulk of the Champions material that has come out since the 1980s and it all bears the stamp of his imagination.  He was the right guy to write this book.  For all you long term Champions fans out there, this book is the ultimate extension of the Enemies series, with all the villains you know and love best collected together in a single place, revamped and re-written for the new edition of the game, with a bunch of new characters to help flesh out their ranks.  Most of your favorites are probably here.  Dr. Destroyer, Grond, the Foxbat, Cheshire Cat, the Ogre, Mechassasin, Dark Seraph, the Monster, Black Paladin, Eurostar, all the classic villains except Professor Muerte (who I personally didn’t like that much anyway). For people who don’t even own a copy of Champions, this book is of limited utility.  The Hero system is so rules-intensive and so unlike most of the other systems out there that you’re going to have to rebuild these villains from scratch in order to adapt them to your favorite game.  The descriptions and character concepts are fun largely well-written, but you’ll have to decide for yourself whether that’s worth twenty-five bucks.The book is organized into sections.  First, after a brief and rather colorless introduction, we have some world-conquering master villains and their minions.  We start with the big one, Doctor Destroyer himself.  It’s a wonder this guy still hasn’t taken the world over yet, as tough as he is.  The good doctor himself gets more than three-thousand words of coverage, not counting his stat-blocks, fitting for a villain of his stature.  This is the most powerful version of Doctor Destroyer we’ve seen yet.  He has an awe-inspiring 2516 points.  The following section details his major minions, like Gigaton and Rakshasa, his robots, his minions, his bases and his organization.  It’s really well fleshed out.  I would have been happy to buy it as a stand-alone book.  Menton is not included in Dr. Destroyer’s ranks but he’s still in the book.  The golden-skinned master of the mind has just gone into business for himself.There are other world-crushers, each adapted for a different style of play.  Gravitar, for example, is a 1,000 point gravity manipulator who uses her sheer brute power to smash anything in her way.  She provides an entirely different set of challenges from a typical Doctor Destroyer adventure, and her motivations are completely different as well.To cite another example, Takofenes the Undying Lord is a sorcerer of terrible power, who once ruled the world and intends to rule it again.  His methods tend to be much more straightforward than Dr. Destroyer’s, and of course he’s a mystic with a whole other kind of feel to his plotlines.  Istvatha V'han, Empress of a Billion Dimensions, is actually more powerful than Dr. Destroyer, what with having the resources of a billion dimensions at her command (but in fact that title is an exaggeration, she rules no more than a mere  million or so worlds).  In fact she’s too powerful for the PCs to take on directly, so they’re going to have to think of indirect ways to foil her plans.  Again, this is very different from a plot that revolves around smashing one of Dr Destroyer’s terror machines before he conquers the world with it.Menton is a villain of the first rank as well, but he’s more interested in gratifying his impulses than in conquering anything.  And of course he’s a psi, which creates yet another type of challenge for the PCs.After the Arch-Villains, we have a selection of suervillain team, arranged from most to least powerful.  They range from the fiendish Crowns of Krim (crime?) led by our old friend Dark Seraph (who is powerful enough to be a menace to world security in his own right), through the touch, experienced professional villains of Eurostar, right down to the lighthearted super-thieves of GRAB.  All of these teams have strong unifying concepts, all of them are loaded with interesting characters and plot seeds, and all of them but the “Ultimates” are good.  Here too, each team not only has a different level of power, but a different set of motivations and a different style of play.  The Crowns of Krin commit bloody atrocities and scheme to take over the world, while Eurostar hits targets of strategic value to the Western World with razor-sharp tactical precision, killing anyone who gets in their way with ruthless efficiency.  The Ulimates would be as ruthless as Eurostar, but their offensive powers are mostly entangles and other such binding effects, so they’re far less lethal.  PSI is a team of psychics who influence events from behind the scenes as much as they engage in flat-out street battles. They pose a different kind of challenge from any of the others, both in the types of powers they use and the kinds of storylines they’re likely to get involved in. GRAB is just interested in acquiring more money and getting away with the loot.  They’re a fun-loving bunch who don’t really want to cause more havoc then necessary, and lend themselves to a very different style of adventure than, say, the Crowns of Krim.Next we have a long list of solo villains, each adapted for a particular kind of role.  We have minor-league master villains like Holocaust, Anubis and Slug, neophytes like Riptide, hero-busters like Utility and Mirage, who live specifically to make superheroes’ lives hell, noble “Robin Hood” style thieves like Lady Blue and despicable maniacs like Blowtorch and Black Harlequin.  Every conceivable angle on the genre gets hammered down.  Every villain has a distinct set of motivations and every one has at least one plot hook in a sidebar.  This is a remarkable achievement, and it’s a little exhausting to read all at once.After the NPCs, we have a brief section on changing the characters descriptions and stat-blocks just enough to adapt them into other roles.  Do you have a concept for a villain but no time to come up with a stat block?  Here’s how to adapt an existing stat block and turn it into your character.  I personally didn’t think we really needed a section like this, since most of this advice seems pretty obvious, but it does no harm to have it, I suppose.We conclude with some much-needed quick reference charts to gauge the relative power-level and types of villains in this book, making it easier to choose the right villain for your adventure.  It seems like a simple thing and it is, but it makes using the book much easier.Anyone who has ever tried to run a game of Champions will know how tough it is to create good NPCs and how vital it is to have a solid collection like this one.  This is the standard villain bible of the Champions universe, and you’re probably not going to be able to avoid buying this one.  With that said, I’m afraid I’m going to have to complain a little.  The whole concept of the Champions Universe runs contrary to the way I run my games.  The great thing about the old Enemies supplements was that they weren’t specific to any campaign setting.  You could drop any one of them in anywhere; each villain or team was pretty much an island.  That’s much more useful than having to shoehorn your campaign into an official setting, but I guess it doesn’t do as good a job of selling you core books.  It’s disappointing to see that even Steve Long and Champions have been lured into doing business this way.There are other problems with this book as well.  Although Steve Long does a great job of giving these characters differing motivations and modus operandi, anyone’s imagination would begin to fail after writing this many character back-stories. There are only so many variations you can use and still stay within the boundaries of the genre. He’s not really repeating himself that badly, but after you’ve read too many of these write-ups it feels like he is.  What’s more, there are so many characters in this book that the cool ones get lost and diluted among the mediocre ones.  It’s ironic that the book’s greatest strength, its sheer size and scope, should also turn out to be its greatest failing.  Buy it anyway.  You’re going to need it.</blockquote>

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