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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2011802" data-attributes="member: 18387">Crooks is a book of pre-made Mutants and Masterminds supervillains, for Green Ronin’s superhero RPG Mutants and Masterminds.  The book is 128 pages long, hardback, illustrated in full color, printed on glossy paper.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book of supervillains that cost this much to produce.  It’s expensive at $27.95, especially for a book that’s less than 150 pages long, but you can see why.  This is a handsome book and it looks good sitting next to your copies of Freedom City and Mutants and Masterminds. It uses the same format as all of Green Ronin’s other superhero books. It’s a kind of fake comic book template.  Quite attractive and well designed.  Cully Hammer did the cover and a lot of the interior artwork.  He’s really good, but then again so are most of the other artists who worked on this project.  There were a lot of them.  The title page lists Axel Ortiz, Andrew Hou, Arnold Tsang, Brian Stelfreeze, Corey "Rey" Lewis, Cully Hamner, Ed Tadem, Eric Canete, Heather Martin, Jake Parker, Jason Martin, Karl Waller, Kyle Hunter, Leonard Kirk, Ramón Pérez, Sean Chen, and Steve Scott. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never heard of any of them before, except from other Green Ronin projects.  They all do good work.Clearly no expense was spared on putting this book together, but for some reason there is a lot of white space at the end of some of the individual entries.  And while each villain comes with an extremely useful stat-block summary that simplifies using them in combat, the layout of the stat blocks themselves is pedestrian and dull.  These are about the only bad things I can find to say about this book.  It’s hard not to be impressed with the overall product.  Like all of Super Unicorn’s work, this is a class act.The book begins with a seven-page comic entitled: Tears for Everyman.  It uses some of the villains from this book and some of the generic heroes from the basic rule book, weaving them into a clever little plot that demonstrates the overall tone of the book; part silver age, part goofy 1980s Chris Claremont X-Men. The comic itself is so good that it could stand alone as a product.  The level of illustration and writing are right up there with the stuff commercial superhero comics are putting out.The first chapter of text (for some reason it’s in really tiny 9-point type) gives you the history of the Meta-4 universe.  Here I disagree a little bit with the Super Unicorn team’s design philosophy.  The great thing about classic supervillain supplements like Enemies or Villainy Unbound was that they didn’t come with any specific campaign world.  Instead they had villains you could plug into your own campaign.  Much better and more versatile, IMHO.  Now everybody wants to sell you a campaign world so that they can keep throwing core books at you.  Even Steve Long over at Hero Games seems to have caught the virus. However, with that said, it’s hard not to like the Meta-4 universe.  It covers most of the ground that major comics companies have laid into their backstories, starting with the dawn of time and moving forward through the world war two epoch, the silver age, the seventies, eighties, nineties and today. It shows a lot of sensitivity to the history of comics, and how our conception of superheroes has evolved. It’s also full of clever little references and in-jokes, although there aren’t as many of these as there are in Freedom City.While the timeline largely revolves around superbeings and their affairs, it also outlines the history of the 20th century and how it has been affected by superheroes. It puts a lot of emphasis on the US, but of course that’s where most superhero comics are set. Many of the names of major politicians are different, especially in the present day, but you can tell who they stand in for.  The Iraq war has happened, so did Vietnam, but the author doesn’t take any specific position on either of those wars (although deeper in the book there is a supervillain entry that gives us a clearer picture of the author’s position on current events).   The Meta-4 universe fleshes out and gives back stories to the generic heroes from the basic rulebook, and explains most of the other illustrations as well.  It’s cute, fun, flexible and reasonably generic.  It is not however compatible with the (better) campaign universe in Freedom City, despite the author’s claims to the contrary.  To merge the two, you would have to make big changes to one or the other.This is followed with a chapter of “Mooks”, low-powered opponents who can be used as henchmen. Everything from security guards and soldiers to two different types of evil robots and lots of supernatural monsters (vampires and werewolves, to name a few).  Mooks range in level from PL1 street thugs up to demons, who start out at PL10.  Some people have complained that a PL 10 demon isn’t really a mook.  I wonder why they would care.  The real question is, do you find it useful?  All of the mooks are good.  Some, like the Stellar Guard, the Combots and the Air Pirates (who have just about the only illustration in the book that I don’t like) are specific to the campaign world), but they can be easily adapted to for use as some other kind of NPC.  Interestingly enough, when you add in all the mooks, the book contains at least one NPC of every level from 1st through 20th.Next come the villains themselves.  The villains are organized in simple alphabetical order.  Supervillain teams are integrated with the solo villains by name.  There is no separate section for groups.Some of the villains in this book are characters from the core rulebook, fleshed out in much greater detail (the Atomic Brain, for example, and Kalak).  All of them get lots of space, few have less than a thousand words, not counting stat blocks.  Each one has a great big full-color illustration.  Every one has at least one adventure seed included and some have as many as three.  Sometimes there are little extras thrown in as well.  For example the Atomic Brain comes with a map of one of his headquarters (inside a volcano on a deserted island, naturally), and the Rose Monk comes with an extra stat block for a brotherhood of sinister martial artists who may be hunting him.The stat blocks themselves are laid out with no particular style and they’re in fairly small print.  Apart from this, the content is truly excellent.  It’s not just that the authors have given us a wide selection of powers and power levels to choose from, they have also given us a villain for every conceivable kind of adventure.  Want a desperate race to save mankind from atomic holocaust?  Then the Atomic Brain is your guy.  Want to foil an intricate plot to steal a big pink diamond?  Then use the young ladies of the Clique.  Want a scary, horrific adventure with a touch of mystery? Then use the Nihilist.  Want an even more upsetting supernatural adventure like the kind you’ve read in Hellblazer?  Then I’m afraid you simply must use the Beholder.Some of the best character concepts in this book include:  The Beholder, who is by far the scariest, creepiest, most loathsome villain I’ve ever read about in any superhero RPG.  An artist of crime and cruelty, he walks around in a bondage suit with the Shroud of Turin stapled to his face! He’s relatively low-powered, suitable in both tone and PL for gothic Batman-style adventures, but you can scale him up by adding some of his demonic fans (his work is popular in Hell and has quite a following down there). The Bestiary, an American superhero team who turned against their country after unveiling some awful secret about the Iraq war.  Whether you’re in favor of the war or against it, you have to admire the author’s bravery for even including a team with this premise.  What kind of hate mail must Super Unicorn be getting?Doctor Dungeon, a goofy silver age villain whose motives are described as “escape, steal things, rampage, get in the papers, get locked up, repeat.”  He has a powerful, but non-lethal (he’s silver age, after all) attack, a costume that looks like Jack Kirby designed it and a tendency to rant about how brilliant he is.  What’s he doing in the 21st century?  He’s been in jail since the sixties and he just finished his sentence last month.Moonquake, the embittered son of a famous superhero, determined to destroy his father’s legacy and do the world as much harm as possible before he gets gunned down.  A rampaging villain with gravity powers, superbly well-designed by the author to wreak a lot of havoc in urban settings.Murder Man and Butcher Boy.  A shocking, funny, vicious parody of Batman and Robin, complete with a Murder-mobile and a Murder-cave.  No one suspects that this polite billionaire and his youthful ward are the most feared names in the underworld—because they rule it!The Toreador, one of the world’s greatest assassins, a hero-killer with inimitable style and grace, now getting just a little too old and dissipated to do his job the way he used to.  How can a character this evil be sympathetic?Those are just examples.  All of these characters are good, many are great.  There’s not a clunker in the bunch.The book’s final chapter contains new rules, including a “crisis level” mechanic that allows the PCs to have an effect on the overall quality of life in their world, and a legal system for resolving trials.  I don’t think I’ve seen anyone attempt to create mechanics like these since Superhero 2044.  They’re a welcome addition to the game.  I would have been happy to buy them in a stand-alone product.The book concludes with a list of villains organized by Power Level and an index.  Both are useful and too few books of this type include either one.In summation, while I know this book is expensive it’s probably not going to come out in softcover, so treat yourself and buy it anyway.  You will be glad you did.</blockquote>

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