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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teflon Billy" data-source="post: 2011695" data-attributes="member: 264">Foes of Freedom is (ostensibly) an enemies supplement for Green Ronin’s Freedom City campaign setting. Green Ronin’s previous kick-at-the-can in this category, Crooks, was an unmitigated home run, so I was happy to see that their flagship setting was getting a tailor-made equivalent.My first impression is that, despite it’s great production values, Foes of Freedom falls a bit short of the bar set by its predecessor.Normally I don’t comment on the art in supplements too heavily as, though I know art is proven to drive sales, I think it’s very subjective and not something you can reasonably “Criticize” with any validity.But in the case of superhero games, I not only think it is a more important component than usual, I think it’s easy enough to describe whether a product has genre-appropriate/suitable art.The art is up to Mutants and Masterminds standards, which is to say “Industry-leading”, from M&M stalwart Ramon Perez’s cover and interior work to the rich, painting-like work of Jonathan Kirtz, to Kevin Stokes’ older-school comic-booky (?) renditions, the totality of the art presented meets or exceeds expectations. The first chapter details important Villain Groups of Freedom City (though in practice the first two are more global conspiracies than traditional “Villain Groups”). The villain groups have a nice mix of power level from that of Larceny Inc. who—with their “Robin Hood” outlook and behaviour, are just barely justifiable for inclusion in a Villain supplement—all the way up to The Labyrinth a secret cabal of world-spanning influence led by none other than King Mino’s Minotaur, from Greek Myth (Renamed Taurus here). It’s nice to see the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign, as it wouldn’t be a Green Ronin product without an antediluvian cult of snake-men lurking about <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Also included are the armament-producing group, The Foundry mentioned in Freedom City. Which nicely buffs up any needs the GM might have for combat droids and minions for the bronze automaton: Talos.The Mayombe (a cult led by superpowered practitioners of Voodoo) have already found a place in my campaign and are well done.For whatever reason though, and I wish I could place my finger on it, the supervillain groups in Foes of Freedom lack much of the “spark” I have come to expect from M&M products. Not that there is anything mechanically or conceptually wrong with them (Though I have some concerns with the layout of The Labyrinth’s section—I am still unsure if the grey-haired older guy pictured is Constantine Urallos or Johnathan Grant), I think it is well done. It just lacks. I wish I had a better description of what, exactly, it lacks.The next section, Solo Villains comes storming back with a healthy portion of the quality material I was expecting.Highlights include...The Collective: a fantastic abomination that is an amalgam of all of Freedom City’s cockroaches. A giant, intelligent, humanoid hive-mind that gets smarter, larger and more cunning as more cockroaches join the gestalt. Though there are a couple of burps in the character build that aren’t well-explained (why, exactly, is The Collective’s Growth power triggered by energy attacks?), this is a conceptual home-run, showing the versatility of the M&M character generation system about as well as we have yet seen.Crimson Katana: Another good one! A young woman possessed by the spirit of her father (A WW2-era Japanese Superhero(villain?), The original Crimson Katana). She is a determined to “undo the evils of her father”, but the magical swords she possesses often allow her father’ spirit to take control of her body and wreak havoc. Unlike most published M&M characters claiming to be “Dangeorus Combatants”, the Crimson Katana’s build back it up. Deadly art as well.Dr. Simian: What would a silver-agey setting be without a hyper-intelligent gorilla  super-scientist on the loose? Dr. Simian fills this need beautifully. The plot hooks involving use of The Primate Patrol found in the Time of Crisis adventure should prompt a few worthwhile sales of that product.Freebooter: Is a crippled young hacker, teleoperating an Pirate-style android to wreak vengeance on those he feels are beyond the reach of proper justice. To quote [bq]“…he’ll bring down a company for having laid off workers but given board members raises. He’ll dig up personal secrets of government officials and release them online if a senator votes for a lobby rather than his constituents. He hates the idea of information restrictions and fights government regulation to “Keep information free”…”[/bq]Call me a pinko, but what is this guy doing in a villain book? Hades, Lord of the Underworld: PL28 Greek God of death and the underworld…in case The Atomic Brain was just not hardcore enough for your players.Nacht Krieger: A Nazi! In fact pretty much the superpowered Nazi of the setting (according to the M&M Annual) another character build that lives up to it’s hype. Deadly to your players like the plague was deadly to Europe (maybe moreso, given that the plague only got about a third. of Europe). A humanoid shadow with a Nazi assassin’s mind. The appendix winding up the product presents some new rules and some notes on the PL of the villains presented. What are missing are page references so it’s a little harder to make use of than you might think. Some of these new feats seem rather inspired by Heroclix (the new feat Fall Guy pretty much is Mastermind), while Confuse seems to have been inspired by Perplex, but they work well here so who’s complaining?)The new Feat Immortal Experience is something the game needed badly for verisimilitude, and thanks to this feat (and the hero point mechanic) it is now possibly to credibly make characters who are thousands of years old, and appropriately experienced. Nice!In closing, I think I liked Crooks better than I liked Foes of Freedom. It had more “pizzazz” (or maybe the whole thing was just new to me at that point), but I think what it honestly comes down to is that Foes is almost 50 characters for a setting that has already had over 50 setting-specific characters detailed in its core book. I think most of the truly compelling (to the author) characters were statted-out long before Foes of Freedom was ever on the drawing board.This isn’t a bad product by any stretch of the imagination. I think it just suffers from the entire product line having set the bar so high.</blockquote>

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