Character Creation: With Great Power Master Edition

More superheroes? Yes please!

The Game: With Great Power (Master Edition)
The Publisher: Incarnadine Press (their site seems to be down)
Degree of Familiarity: None with this edition, but I've run the previous one
Books Required: Just the one

What is it with game companies just letting their websites go fallow? At least when Growling Door folded we had the good grace to a) publicly say we were shutting down and b) shutter the site. Anyway, enough of that.

With Great Power is a superhero game, but it's got a special place in my heart. Many years ago, I had a really, really good year at Origins. I played both With Great Power and Burning Empires, both of which were kind of eye-opening in how they treated narrative responsibility and game mechanics. I have since run With Great Power a couple of times; it's not my favorite supers RPG because the mechanics are weird and it's kind of labor-intensive, but I always enjoyed it. 

This edition...I dunno. The mechanics are definitely streamlined, it would be much less laborious to run, and it wouldn't require multiple decks of cards, true. But it's just boring to read. There's no example of play, which was one of the highlights of the first edition. And after reading it, I don't get any good sense of how it would work at the table (in fairness, the previous edition wasn't really great about that either, but that's why the example of play helped). 

Anyway, let's do some super-heroing. 

So, first thing, I draw five Origin cards and answer the questions on three of them. I wish I had a PDF of the book and/or the card deck; I think I bought this at Metatopia or something. Anyway, the questions I have to choose from are:

• You have to be careful about pushing your powers too far. What do you fear could happen?
• Your powers have a mind of their own - literally. What does it want? What sort of understanding have you reached with it?
• Your powers cause a dangerous side effect. What is it? How do you keep it in check?
• You are on a crowded subway train. Someone on this train is plotting to harm a lot of people. How do your powers allow you to discover their plans?
• You cannot shoulder the burden of your powers without help. Who is your support? What do you offer them?

Well, definitely some nice complementary choices there. I believe I shall take numbers 2,3, and 5. So here's what I'm thinking. 

My hero's name is Connor Cordette. Connor is a bouncer/doorman at a popular nightclub in Wherever This Game is Set. That means he works late hours, and often winds up walking home very late at night. One night (morning), walking past an alley, he heard something crying. He actually wasn't sure if it was animal or human, but was concerned, so he walked in to look. Something leaped on his face and melted over his body, slithering into his clothes and spreading over his skin. (Yes, there's some similarity to Venom here, I acknowledge that.)

Since then, Connor has developed extraordinary abilities...but there are some downsides, too.

Your powers have a mind of their own - literally. What does it want? What sort of understanding have you reached with it? 

The alien skin-slime can communicate with Connor in a very general, broad way. He knows if it's scared, hurt, in pain, or happy, but it doesn't have language the way we understand it. Connor still doesn't know where it's from or what it really wants. He knows that so far all it wants is to remain on him, and to absorb nutrients. Connor's not sure, but he feels like it's getting smarter. 

Your powers cause a dangerous side effect. What is it? How do you keep it in check?

The skin-slime needs food, and it's perfectly capable of just absorbing nutrients from organic, live matter that it touches. Connor found that out the hard way when he went to work the night after the skin-slime landed on him, he touched someone's hand and nearly killed him as the skin-slime started siphoning off the poor guy. To the untrained eye it looked like he just passed out, and fortunately Connor reined it in, but he has to be very careful what (and who) he touches. He can shift the skin-slime away from his hands if he's going to, say, pet a dog, but it's a conscious effort and he hasn't quite been able to convey to the slime that just sucking all the sodium out of a living thing is not acceptable. 

You cannot shoulder the burden of your powers without help. Who is your support? What do you offer them?

Connor's neighbor Jackie used to be a doctor, but got caught selling prescriptions and lost her license. She does medical consults for folks in the neighborhood (off the books, obviously), and Connor confided in her. Jackie acts as confidante to Connor and is trying to help figure this thing out, but she's not a researcher and she's out of her depth. She has discovered, however, that if she takes a small sample (quarter teaspoon at most) of the skin-slime, dilutes it in a saline solution for a while and then drips it into her eyes, it gives her euphoria and energy. She's looking to figure out why, but she's also become an addict. Connor doesn't know about this yet.

And now, we just...pick a few "things" about the character. Man, this got really loosey-goosey. 

OK, well, we know that Connor is a bouncer/doorman. Let's say he's more the latter than the former, which means he's connected to the party and drug scene. He's not necessarily against people doing drugs and having fun, but he's very against the violence and so on that goes with the criminal industry. As a super-hero, then, he's trying to end the war on drugs and he has no time for violent cops. 

And how about his powers? The skin-slime can alter his face, skin, or voice. It can also increase his strength and speed, and it can read the particles in the air to track or identify others. I think that manifests as Connor being able to see scents; the slime can't convey direct information, but it can let him see the scent trail left in the air by, say, cologne. 

Supporting cast...let's leave that as Jackie, for now. 

Normally at this point I would describe Connor as a superhero and state what the public knows about him, and let the other people at the table come up with his superhero name. Since it's just me, however, I'll have to do it. 

So, Connor isn't the "wear a bright costume and get on TV" kind of hero. He probably started doing hero stuff when a drug deal went bad in the club - he went to intervene but the owner stopped him and some guy got stabbed. Connor followed the stabber and his crew later on, and wished he could confront them without being recognized. The skin-slime responded, changing his face and altering his voice, and making him stronger and tougher. He jumped into the midst of them and pounded them all senseless. The guy who did the stabbing, though, he let the skin-slime drain his life almost to the point of death, and told the others that killing people wasn't tolerated anymore, even if someone owes them money. 

Costume-wise, probably he just wears black. His face looks weird and malformed, thanks to the skin-slime, and the slime sometimes flows to various parts of his body to beef up certain muscles or shield him from a blow. So probably he looks liquidy and blobby, and the thugs started calling him "the Smear." That's gross, and Connor probably wouldn't use it himself (at least not during the first issue). 

Icons! These are little snapshots that could be drawn in a comic panel. I get one red and one blue (it's a yin/yang kind of thing in the game). 

Red: The Smear pins the DEA agent against the wall by his face, the slime flowing of his wrist and over the man's mouth. His eyes widen in fear as he feels his skin going numb.

Blue: Connor sits on his living room floor, cross-legged, eyes closed, trying to communicate with the presence in his head. 

And that'll about do it, actually. If I were playing, I'd pick a Twist, but that's not part of chargen so much as play.