The Bad Guys is a collection of pre-made supervillains for use with Green Ronin’s superb superhero game Mutants and Masterminds. The book is 156 pages long and contains write-ups on fifty one supervillains, about half of whom are grouped into five villain teams. James Thomson is the author, and unlike many such collections, he appears to have written the whole thing. That’s an impressive amount of work, although maybe not as impressive as Steve Long writing the 233 page supplement Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks. The Bad Guys is actually available from three different sources, both in .pdf and printed form, for three different prices. The .pdf is available from rpgnow.com for about $7. There is a print edition available at lulu.com for about $20 and a deluxe glossy paper full-color print edition is available from the same source for twenty eight.
In terms of cost, the black and white print version and the .pdf compare extremely favorably to most other products on the market. The .pdf is a fraction of the price of Green Ronin’s supervillain collection Crooks and it holds more villains.
I’ll admit this right up front. I’m shocked. This is the best supervillain NPC supplement I’ve read in a long time. It’s produced by some rinky-dink little company called Plain Brown Wrapper Games that makes .pdfs and print-on-demand books, its production values are shabby and low-rent, but the content is so good it makes you wonder why these guys aren’t writing comic books. It’s a little punk-rock upstart product, kicking the big guys in the shins. The writing style is clever, witty and thoughtful throughout. It’s also kind of dark. The author is funny when he’s being scary and scary while he’s being funny. It’s a lot more like Darkman or the Authority than it is like the Justice League of America. Maybe the closest equivalent in comics would be Frank Miller. The villains themselves are amazingly original and well conceived. You will find no retreads or rip offs of familiar comic book villains here. The author has completely reinvented almost everything he’s touched. To keep myself from babbling at random about how great this book is, I’ll walk you through it step by step.
The book’s cover is attributed to Tony Perna, but it looks more like a colored montage of the black and white pieces he did for the Devil’s Workshop superhero art collection. It’s a good cover from a graphic design standpoint, and shows some of the book’s flair. The rear cover blurb is hilarious but useful and this too sets the tone for the rest of the book. Here are a couple of fragments “… a veritable smorgasbord of crime, where the sneeze guards of evil are always clean and the bacon bits of infamy never run out!...It’s time to don the bicycle helmet of villainy and head-butt the smirking face of justice!”
We begin with a lively, fun introduction which does a good job of setting out the author’s objectives. I agree with a lot of what he says here. For example, he explains that there are no world-conquering arch-villains of the Doctor Doom model in this book. Why not? Because characters like that will steal the focus of your campaign. The villains in The Bad Guys are meant to be modular, so that you can put any one of them into your campaign without disrupting things. World-crushing uber-villains are harder to do that with, so there aren’t any in the book.
There is also no campaign world, no “Plain Brown Wrapper Universe.” These villains are meant to be placed in your existing campaign, they don’t form a whole separate world of their own. That is absolutely how it should be done and nobody else does it that way anymore. Everyone wants to sell you a campaign setting these days, so that they can keep making you buy core books. So now there are a zillion fake comic book universes out there, all but a few of them pretty much the same. I don’t need to buy another one, I just need some cool villains for my game. Here at last is a collection that delivers.
The villains themselves form the meat of the book. They are organized by PL, going from the least powerful to the most. Unlike most Mutants and Masterminds sourcebooks, this one actually gives us more low-level villains than high-level ones. That’s a welcome change.
Each villain gets a lot of space. Few have less than 750 words and most get over a thousand. A great deal of care seems to have gone into each one. Almost all of them are sympathetic to some degree, and the few who aren’t are inventively hateful and evil. The character names are all original, and frequently kind of snarky (U-Go-Grrrl, Doctor Shock, Woodchuck Man, God).
Stat blocks are crude but effective. In fact you could say the same about the formatting throughout. The lack of money shows, but it’s actually part of the book’s charm. Because each villain begins on their own page, there is a lot of white space left over after some of them, and this I admit isn’t so charming. Neither are all the typos.
Every villain but U-Go-Grrrl comes with between one and three adventure seeds. Most have two. I call them adventure seeds, but they’re much bigger, longer, and more detailed than your typical plot hooks, more like mini-adventures. This is good added value. There are 101 of them in total and a lot of them could be used without the rest of the book. Like everything else in the Bad Guys, they tend to be funny, angry and kind of dark, with a lot of unexpected twists on familiar comic book themes.
While every villain in the book gets their own character portrait, the book holds so much text and goes into so much depth on each villain’s entry that the art is stretched a little thinner than I’d prefer. Looking over the comments at rpgnow.com, everyone seems to agree that the book’s artwork is one of its biggest failings. I’m not sure that’s true. In fact there are a few individual pieces that are weak (Broken Arrow, Vampire Girl) but far more that are really strong, particularly the images by Christopher Shy and Samuel Araya. How were these guys able to afford Christopher Shy?
The first chapter is entitled: Minor Threats, and it starts out with a really good one. Sicko the Clown. Not quite the Joker, not quite Obnoxio the Clown (from Marvel’s “Crazy” magazine), he’s an evil pervert clown with a twist that I shouldn’t reveal here. He’s also so funny that reading his write-up made me laugh out loud. His adventures are even better, particularly the insane, hilarious and weirdly touching “A Very Special Sicko the Clown Christmas.” If you like South Park, you’re going to love this guy.
We move on to Big John, a cruel and repulsive white supremacist giant on a suicidal rampage across the heartland. He’s as horrible and scary as Sicko is funny, although his entry is written with a lot of wry humor. Although he’s far from my favorite character, I thought I’d mention him because of the way his entry sets the tone for the rest of the book. Here the author seems to be drawing on true crime books and case studies of authentic psychopaths as much as he is on the comics.
Chapters two and three are devoted respectively to “Moderate Threats” and “Major Threats.” Here are some of the highlights along the way.
U-Go-Grrrl (great name, but then again most of the names in this book are great) is a crazy speedster who used to be a superhero, but misbehaved so badly that she was thrown off the team. Now she’s a kind of hyperactive Courtney Love or Anna Nicole Smith, whose crazy, dangerous antics the public loves to hate. “She flirts broadly, badly and often” the author writes. Now she’s got a crush on one of the PCs! Her awful and ill-thought-out attempts to get the player character’s attention grow more and more dangerous, but her status as a celebrity makes her tough to prosecute.
Doctor Moloch and his arch-nemesis Azeraphel the Screaming Angel are among the funniest characters in the book. Doctor Moloch is a horrendously powerful demon, Professor Emeritus of Depraved Studies at some university in Hell, whose true name got leaked on the internet a couple of years ago: “so now any cheapjack magician with a web-browser and a set of black candles can yank poor Dr. Moloch up out of Hell and force him to run their shabby errands.” Teenage satanists send him on stupid missions and he has no choice but to grit his teeth and obey them. As the author writes: “For the Living Incarnation of all that is evil, he’s not such a bad guy.. it’s really just a job to him.”
Azerpahel the Screaming Angel isn’t nearly so nice. Sent here to stop Dr. Moloch from whatever crummy errand he’s running at the moment, she can’t tolerate even the slightest amount of evil and so she’s always getting distracted by the need to inflict punishment on poor hapless bystanders for crimes like: “..coveting a flashy car or touching themselves improperly at night.”
Chapter Four lists five supervillain teams in ascending order of power. Like individual villains, teams come with between one and three adventure seeds that involve the whole group.
The teams include: The Nowhere Men, an amusing collection of “Super-derelicts” including guys like the Ratcatcher and Woodchuck Man, who rule skid row in secret. The Ratcatcher’s adventure seed (entitled: Lord of Winos, Prophet of Doom), is one of the saddest, spookiest and most evocative things in the book. It’s also pretty funny.
Vernichtung 5 (which I think means Annihilation 5 in German) is a disorganized gang of teenage super-skinheads from Germany, including such thugs as der Totenkopf and Zyclon B. They’re rotten to the core, but they’re also kind of hapless and lost. Lots and lots of good plot hooks are included, as well as a surprise ending that will make you fall off your chair laughing.
Next up are the Corpus Christi Good-Time Boys, a hilarious dysfunctional soap-opera of a team, whose history reads like a cross between a rock band and a true crime book. They’re as hopeless as most real criminals! Some of the funniest stuff in the book is in here. So is some of the worst art.
Then we have the Four Deuces, a professional, highly effective crew that works for the New York Mafia. They’re not for the faint of heart. The author seems to have watched Goodfellas and Scarface a lot more than the Godfather. His picture of the Mob is totally brutal and unromantic. There’s some very mean stuff in this section. Some very funny stuff too. All of the Four Deuces are exceedingly well fleshed out and individualized (the “Ace of Wounds” is my favorite). Some exceptionally good adventure seeds here too.
Last we have Executive Solutions. A corporate mercenary team headed by a legendary cold-war spy named Jim Flint, Agent Twelve. He’s sort of a cross between a psychopathic Nick Fury and Mr. Burns from the Simpsons.
My favorite Executive Solution has to be Major Maximum. He’s a disgraced super-soldier from the 1980s who’s never outgrown wearing camouflage pants. Major Maximum is gay, but refuses to admit it even though he’s been involved in a steady relationship with a male teammate for years (he feels that the fact that his boyfriend isn’t really human lets him off the hook). You can actually see Major Maximum and his boyfriend, the Gray Golem, brawling on the front cover of the Bad Guys, right at the center of the illustration. What you can’t see is that they’re fighting over who left a copy of the movie Red Dawn stuck in the VCR.
The book concludes with a list of characters by PL, so that if you need, for example, a PL 9 villain on short notice you will know just where to look. This is a nice touch, but may be less helpful than the one in Crooks. Since so many of these villains are already so specialized for particular needs, it’s not as easy to just grab one at random.
To wrap this up, the Bad Guys is a great book, even though it looks like it was hammered together in somebody’s basement on a broken speak-and spell. If you’re looking for the same old thing, for yet more pale imitations of Doctor Doom and the Joker, look elsewhere. If you’d rather have something really cool and different, here it is. I can only give it four stars thanks to its cheesy layout, low-rent formatting and sometimes sub-par graphics, but I wish I could give it six.
