GMBC ep28 - TotalCon 40 - D-List Supervillain
Jim Bernheimer
D-List Super Vallain series
Speaker A
00:00:12.240 - 00:00:19.760
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club, where great fiction becomes your next great tabletop role playing experience. We recorded this episode at total con fusion.
Speaker B
00:00:19.760 - 00:00:20.080
40.
Speaker A
00:00:20.240 - 00:01:03.180
Yes. For 40 years, the con has delighted New Englanders in the depths of February with a chance to play games.
From its earliest years at Clark University to its current home at the Royal Plaza Hotel in Marlborough, Massachusetts, Tolkon has hosted hundreds of board game tournaments, miniature battles, and, yes, tabletop role playing games. The topic of our discussion was Jim Bernheimer's D list supervillain series. Personal favorite of mine and a great launching pad for our Game Masters.
All regulars to the show, Ian Eller, David Clarkson, and Sean Murphy, who join me in the conference center early Friday morning at the Con to talk about superheroes, supervillains, evil corporations and how David Clarkson is wrong about. Well, listen in and you'll find out. Let's get into the conversation,
Speaker C
00:01:05.080 - 00:01:05.480
everybody.
Speaker A
00:01:05.480 - 00:01:07.760
Podcast voice on Nothing.
Speaker C
00:01:07.760 - 00:01:08.200
Very good.
Speaker A
00:01:09.000 - 00:01:10.560
Yay. Welcome to the Game Master Foot Club.
Speaker D
00:01:10.560 - 00:01:11.040
Hey, everybody.
Speaker A
00:01:11.040 - 00:01:11.440
How's it going?
Speaker D
00:01:11.440 - 00:01:12.000
Here we are.
Speaker B
00:01:12.000 - 00:01:12.560
We're doing it.
Speaker A
00:01:12.560 - 00:01:14.720
We're doing it. Are we doing it? Are we doing it? I think we're doing it.
Speaker B
00:01:14.720 - 00:01:16.360
I think we're doing it. Welcome to the game.
Speaker C
00:01:16.360 - 00:01:16.840
We're live.
Speaker A
00:01:17.000 - 00:01:27.880
We're live here at Total Con with our massive crowd, everybody. As the sound of so many people clapping.
Speaker B
00:01:27.880 - 00:01:29.480
Theater of the mind. Theater of the mind.
Speaker A
00:01:29.480 - 00:02:12.920
Eric. I can hear the crowds now. They're roaring. Oh, my God, I feel like Matt Mercer.
So, hi, we are here today at Total Con with some Game Masters to talk about Jim Burheimer's D list superhero series, specifically Origins of a D list Superhero, which is a fantastic superhero humor based superhero book. And I think everybody here is going to like it. But first, let's get our GMs introduced.
We're going to go from left to right, which makes no sense to anybody who is on the podcast because they can't see this, but it helps us here. So we're going to start with Ay. Ryan, introduce yourself and tell us who your favorite superhero. No, actually, given that it's D list, it's not.
It's actually not D list superhero.
Speaker B
00:02:12.920 - 00:02:14.120
It's super villain.
Speaker A
00:02:14.360 - 00:02:16.600
How so your favorite supervillain is?
Speaker D
00:02:16.680 - 00:02:28.920
Well, my name is Ian Eller. I am a GM and a writer and an occasional player of superhero games, which by, I mean a lot. My favorite D list supervillain must.
Must be Captain Boomerang.
Speaker A
00:02:29.080 - 00:02:29.640
Damn it.
Speaker B
00:02:29.640 - 00:02:30.360
Good choice.
Speaker D
00:02:32.360 - 00:02:34.600
But he's the dumbest and the worst and so the best.
Speaker B
00:02:34.940 - 00:02:35.340
All right.
Speaker A
00:02:35.340 - 00:02:36.220
Fantastic.
Speaker C
00:02:36.540 - 00:02:47.340
Sean. Yeah. Sean Murphy. DMing for many years reading comic books for even longer. I don't know. Does Blastar count as a D list supervillain?
He's got a lot of power.
Speaker D
00:02:47.420 - 00:02:48.620
He has a D list name.
Speaker C
00:02:49.260 - 00:02:59.660
He has one thing he does, he blasts and that's it. But somehow he keeps being this threat that takes on the Avengers and everybody else, so that doesn't work. I'll go with Stiltman.
Speaker B
00:03:00.140 - 00:03:03.660
Stilt man. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker A
00:03:03.660 - 00:03:19.480
My name is Eric Jackson. I'm the host of the podcast and I'm the reason why all the these people got up early to at a con, which is fantastic.
So thank you so much for getting up. I'm going to go outside of comics and say that team Rocket, Jesse and James and Meowth are the best D list super villains.
Speaker B
00:03:21.320 - 00:03:27.000
My name is David. What count villains. They are villains. They have some powers.
Speaker A
00:03:27.000 - 00:03:30.440
They can capture magical animals. It's a. It's a lame power.
Speaker B
00:03:30.680 - 00:03:34.920
But anyway, it's not like stilt man has a lot of claim to things.
Speaker D
00:03:35.000 - 00:03:35.320
It.
Speaker A
00:03:35.320 - 00:03:37.400
Yeah. And you took ST man, so Kite Man.
Speaker B
00:03:37.400 - 00:03:41.540
Oh, yeah. He's redundant. Yeah.
Speaker A
00:03:41.620 - 00:03:42.180
At that point.
Speaker D
00:03:42.180 - 00:03:42.580
Yeah.
Speaker B
00:03:45.540 - 00:04:05.540
Anyway, anyways, my name is David Clarkson. I am often a GM of superhero games. I do love the fun of them and the mix of genres. I also am part of the crew running the Rising fears conventions.
That's my big claim to fame here and I'm here to show for my event. But I love the genre and I enjoy being with all these good fellas.
Speaker C
00:04:05.780 - 00:04:06.220
Yep.
Speaker A
00:04:06.220 - 00:04:07.820
Fantastic. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B
00:04:07.820 - 00:04:17.840
Oh, dearest. Oh, is m. Mixer Plique. Well, no. What do you mean no? He's not. He's not exactly top tier. He is a tier.
Speaker D
00:04:17.840 - 00:04:18.160
No,
Speaker A
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he's got like powers.
Speaker B
00:04:22.560 - 00:04:30.120
He does have kill like powers, but he creates complications for Superman, which is great. I like to see him all tangled up with problems.
Speaker C
00:04:30.120 - 00:04:31.040
Dave, you're wrong.
Speaker B
00:04:32.000 - 00:04:33.880
Thank you, Sean. Your job is done.
Speaker A
00:04:33.880 - 00:04:35.560
Sean's purpose for being here is.
Speaker C
00:04:35.560 - 00:04:40.080
Is Dave said, Sean, you come and tell me when I'm wrong. Congrats. Get here.
Speaker B
00:04:40.080 - 00:04:41.440
We're good. Yeah. We're doing this.
Speaker A
00:04:41.440 - 00:04:42.160
We've already done.
Speaker B
00:04:42.380 - 00:04:43.380
All right, so let's talk a little
Speaker A
00:04:43.380 - 00:05:48.470
bit about the book before I make you guys start talking about some of the gaming stuff that evolves around it. I know this was a last minute ask, so some of you have maybe not had as much time to prep as others. So let me give you a quick summary.
Okay, so the D list supervillain series stars Cal Strangle, who starts out as a talented low level engineer who gets screwed by a superhero corp tocracy Think morally bankrupt Stark Industries that supports Ultra Weapon. Think Iron man with more guns and finds himself so beaten down by the corporate lawyers that he can't earn a living legally.
So he becomes the D list supervillain. Mechanical.
The world is very comic book coded with aliens, ancient gods, time traveling dinosaurs, old guys with magical bugles, mutant superpowers and bizarre science all wrapped into one wacky story. That is basically the best summary I can give of it at that point.
After that, I highly recommend reading it just for the sarcasm, but also if you like superhero stories, it's a pretty good take on it. So does anybody want to make any comments about the book now that I've talked about it?
Speaker B
00:05:48.470 - 00:05:59.190
Well, the inner monologue is the, you know, the most entertaining part of it.
The fact that, you know, he's sitting down and going on and on about the troubles of actually being a super villain, you know, and getting the back, you know, the behind the scenes.
Speaker A
00:05:59.750 - 00:06:41.590
Yeah, there's definitely a. There's definitely. I'm going to talk about this when we talk about stuff we're going to steal.
There's definitely a real interesting dichotomy between the, the super. How the super villains are organized and how the superheroes are organized. It's really kind of interesting.
But more importantly is if you were going to try and run a sarcastic super villain game, low level super villain game, what mechanics would you use to support that? What game do you think is probably going to be the best possible game to allow that kind of banter without the.
With, with only the occasional cosmic influence popping in and mostly just trying to figure out how you're gonna pay rent? Anybody want to start?
Speaker D
00:06:42.550 - 00:07:46.700
Well, I would say that one of the benefits of a game like the hero system and champions in particular. And when I speak of champions, I mean the big blue book, like everybody who speaks of champions should.
Yes, yes, or that's fourth edition for those that don't know.
But anyway, it's built kind of on the assumption of a more Marvel like, as opposed to DC like universe, which means everybody has lots and lots of disadvantages and complications and personal rivals and enemies. And that's what you need when you're talking about that kind of story.
Because the punching other people stuff only fills a tiny amount of time in that kind of story, right? Like you need people that can't pay their rent. You need Spider man not being able to, to get Mids for Aunt May. You need that kind of thing.
And that's a very Marvel kind of thing as opposed to a D.C. kind of thing.
And I think champions, especially fourth edition, sort of built on those assumptions where, oh, I need more points to make better my superhero better. The only way to get those is to grab disadvantages and complications. Right?
Speaker B
00:07:46.700 - 00:07:51.820
Yeah. They definitely do a lot of emphasis to it in that as they start developing the Champions line.
Speaker D
00:07:52.400 - 00:08:06.640
And I mean, Champions is complex and I don't know anybody who like gonna leap out to run it today.
But that specific part of that system where it really emphasizes eking as many points as you can of complications for your character, I think would help.
Speaker B
00:08:06.640 - 00:08:18.000
In all these predecessors random chart like Vanza Vigilantes and Heroes and Heroes Unlimited. Or they're all just random and they. You didn't have to rolled stats. You just rolled stats. You rolled abilities.
Speaker C
00:08:18.500 - 00:08:18.820
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:08:19.060 - 00:09:08.300
The mechanical Cal Stringle character in the book is an engineer. And he spends a lot of time in the book just talking about how he's going to eek, like just a little bit more power out of his particular thing.
Originally he was working on the Ultra weapon power suit. And then he's mechanical because he's just got Gauntlet to begin with. And then he's like adding little bits and pieces in through the story.
At one point.
He eventually adds magical mirrors that he got from a dinosaur God from the past time that allows him to have infinite ammo because it goes to a pocket dimension. Like, it's like he really goes like.
And I think Champions is a great way to like, if you were going to build a character over time and you're like, oh, I've got. I got my. My game master gave me like 40 points in magic.
Speaker B
00:09:08.300 - 00:09:09.780
What am I going to use this for?
Speaker A
00:09:10.420 - 00:09:10.980
Okay.
Speaker D
00:09:11.620 - 00:09:12.820
Why not? Sure.
Speaker B
00:09:14.020 - 00:09:14.780
And it's very clever.
Speaker A
00:09:14.780 - 00:09:24.380
Like that way the character is very competent and very clever at taking the little he has and building it into something else. It's again, engineering porn to a certain extent there.
Speaker B
00:09:24.380 - 00:09:24.820
Yeah.
Speaker C
00:09:24.980 - 00:09:25.460
Sean.
Speaker A
00:09:25.460 - 00:09:27.540
Snarky D list supervillains.
Speaker C
00:09:27.700 - 00:10:42.870
So I would. And that's possibly just because it's. My newfound attraction is the Marvel. Marvel Multiversity System. It's. They are taking.
The system seems to have been built to. How do we make the. Here's the characters we want to have. How do we reverse engineer them into a role playing game?
It doesn't really work well when you're trying to create a new character using the existing characters in the universe. And it does feel like that. Part of the attraction of this book is that we're being introduced to a universe that exists around him.
And it's well established. And I Think that that for me, having a well established framework of such as the Marvel Universe would help the story be easier.
And it's, you know, you're taking Geoff Johns, when he ran, did his Flash run. He spent a lot of times on the rogues and the interaction between the rogues. And every now and then you have an issue just with their backstory.
Deadly foes of Spider man really went into that.
And every time you see the good sinister sickness runs are all about sort of how the villains interact as much as how Spider man eventually stops them in the end. Having that group history, I think would help make this story easier for people to sort of gronk onto.
Speaker B
00:10:43.590 - 00:10:50.470
Yeah. Makes you buy into the reason that they get defeated because you've been watching them struggle and have their own internal conflicts.
Speaker C
00:10:50.550 - 00:11:10.800
So this guy isn't that much different. So take Scott Lang, who becomes the second Ant Man. He was an assistant, assistant to Tony Stark, ex con.
And he gets promoted and gets Tony's seal of approval, and that's how he gets the Ant man uniform. That story could easily have taken a left turn where drunk Tony fires him.
Speaker B
00:11:10.880 - 00:11:11.280
Yeah.
Speaker C
00:11:11.280 - 00:11:15.400
And he gets blackmailed from being able to work in the tech industry because Tony Stark.
Speaker B
00:11:15.400 - 00:11:15.840
Yeah.
Speaker C
00:11:15.840 - 00:11:22.600
Gets on his 1%er Slack channel and says, don't hire this guy. That's it. Like, that could easily have been.
Speaker B
00:11:22.600 - 00:11:25.920
Yeah, it could have been, you know, Iron Man's big foe.
Speaker C
00:11:26.190 - 00:11:26.390
Yeah.
Speaker B
00:11:26.390 - 00:11:27.790
Or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker A
00:11:28.030 - 00:11:30.430
Or Iron Man's D list foe.
Speaker B
00:11:30.430 - 00:11:32.590
Oh, true D list foe. No, it's big foe. You're right.
Speaker A
00:11:32.910 - 00:11:34.630
Not until like book three.
Speaker C
00:11:34.630 - 00:11:56.380
Yeah. But that would be the fun is having this guy eventually sort of get back to.
And again, one of the things that's nice about this multiverse thing is you can just create different universe. Like what if Tony doesn't sober up?
What if he's a complete A hole and he fires Scott Lang and the story then for that campaign is how does Scott Lang eventually get in a enough things to get revenge on his drunk boss?
Speaker B
00:11:56.540 - 00:12:06.300
That's an interesting tip. I hadn't realized that about that Marvel game.
Basically, as opposed to having unlimited possibilities of characters, like a generic system, it's just unlimited universes with the same character.
Speaker C
00:12:06.300 - 00:12:42.550
And the reason why it's good is that you can say there was a deviation at the point where you feel like, I don't remember, I don't know, I don't know. All the new continuity, the way I do the stuff that was out in the 70s.
So my turn is when I was talking with Iron about this, my turn is, what if the Defenders found Captain America? That changes a whole lot of things from there. And I. I know all the stuff from the 70s backwards.
I can handle that lore without having to know, like, how many iterations of the Defenders have been. What about this crazy one where they're all just the Daredevil and, you know, all Daredevil?
Speaker B
00:12:42.550 - 00:12:43.950
Every. Everybody's Daredevil.
Speaker D
00:12:43.950 - 00:12:44.150
Wow.
Speaker C
00:12:44.150 - 00:12:54.630
Well, no, no, Jessica. There's a new iteration of their Defenders. There's different iterations of the Defenders. I don't know them all.
I know the original group pretty well, so that's where I'd make my deviation point.
Speaker A
00:12:55.350 - 00:12:57.870
That'd be pretty cool. Come on board. Let's do it.
Speaker C
00:12:57.870 - 00:12:58.390
Okay.
Speaker D
00:12:59.030 - 00:12:59.910
Let's do it.
Speaker A
00:12:59.910 - 00:13:00.550
Let's do it.
Speaker B
00:13:00.550 - 00:13:01.030
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:13:01.270 - 00:13:10.150
That has become the rallying cry of this. Of this podcast. We keep coming up with really great game ideas and everybody's like, well, we should get together and do that.
And we're like, ah, the true villain.
Speaker B
00:13:10.150 - 00:13:10.670
The 8.
Speaker A
00:13:10.670 - 00:13:15.200
The A list villain. All gaming, which is scheduling and getting people together.
Speaker B
00:13:15.200 - 00:13:15.760
That's right.
Speaker D
00:13:15.840 - 00:13:21.760
My game for RPG Con is about D list super villains. Like, literally. That is the plot of that game.
Speaker C
00:13:21.760 - 00:13:24.400
Oh, I'm sorry. What system are you using for that Marvel?
Speaker D
00:13:26.720 - 00:13:29.280
I'm going to make up characters. Well, I'm not.
Speaker B
00:13:29.280 - 00:13:33.760
You're not going to make up characters. Poor Rob has to learn a new system.
Speaker D
00:13:33.760 - 00:13:39.120
I'm going to have my assistant, Rob Trimarco, everybody. You may have heard him on other podcasts. He's my personal assistant.
Speaker B
00:13:39.120 - 00:13:39.920
Is he really?
Speaker A
00:13:40.000 - 00:13:42.480
Fantastic. I can't wait for Rob to hear this.
Speaker B
00:13:42.480 - 00:13:47.380
I know. Realizing he's assistant Rob.
Speaker A
00:13:47.380 - 00:13:50.620
I didn't realize you got promoted to. From. From piss boy to.
Speaker B
00:13:51.340 - 00:13:56.620
Just wait till he comes to you with his account, with his abacus and says you come up with champions characters.
Speaker D
00:13:57.260 - 00:13:58.460
Like, I'm sorry, I can't.
Speaker B
00:13:59.900 - 00:14:02.380
He can do it in his sleep, though, unfortunately for him.
Speaker A
00:14:02.540 - 00:14:04.620
Oh, that part. He's had that part of his brain.
Speaker B
00:14:04.620 - 00:14:08.940
Oh, well, yeah. We used to actually spend Saturdays coming up with Champions characters, and that's all we really did.
Speaker C
00:14:09.500 - 00:14:10.660
Fantastic. Wow.
Speaker B
00:14:10.660 - 00:14:11.060
Yeah.
Speaker D
00:14:11.060 - 00:14:14.080
How to get the most out of those? That 60 point multipower.
Speaker B
00:14:14.080 - 00:14:15.760
That's right. It's amazing.
Speaker C
00:14:16.080 - 00:14:16.440
Yeah.
Speaker B
00:14:16.440 - 00:14:18.800
I've certainly seen some engineering porn.
Speaker D
00:14:18.800 - 00:14:19.120
Right?
Speaker B
00:14:19.280 - 00:14:19.760
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:14:20.000 - 00:14:20.880
I can do it.
Speaker B
00:14:21.120 - 00:14:25.600
Yeah. How about a magic swive that can't be used when it's out of your hands. That's not a disadvantage.
Speaker D
00:14:25.760 - 00:14:27.800
No, it is. What if I dropped it?
Speaker B
00:14:27.800 - 00:15:02.000
What if I dropped it? What if I fall down? No, sorry. If I pick system, the One that I tend to gravitate to is my icon system that I run a lot.
And it inherited from examples like Champions before. The idea of we should definitely emphasize the negative aspects of being a hero. The disadvantages. They even built it in the mechanics.
You get extra points, inspiration points that you can spend in game to make things happen by catering to your disadvantage in the scene. It implements one of those mechanics, so it's a lot of fun to see that get done.
People have to spend time on that in the game if they want to do stuff.
Speaker A
00:15:03.120 - 00:15:05.440
So it really connects the character to their.
Speaker B
00:15:05.680 - 00:15:14.360
It does. The players have no choice. They have to address that.
Otherwise they're just going to have less of an opportunity to do stuff in game, which they should be trying to do as much as possible.
Speaker A
00:15:14.440 - 00:15:16.680
Yeah, absolutely. Have you guys played Icons?
Speaker C
00:15:16.920 - 00:15:17.560
Oh, yeah.
Speaker B
00:15:17.560 - 00:15:18.040
Okay.
Speaker D
00:15:18.040 - 00:15:23.280
I have played it once. I think it's like mutants and masterminds meets fate, right?
Speaker B
00:15:23.280 - 00:15:23.640
Yes.
Speaker D
00:15:24.440 - 00:15:27.960
I work on mutants masterminds just because I know it better than I got in school. Sure.
Speaker B
00:15:28.200 - 00:15:29.960
You know, I want to do less math.
Speaker D
00:15:30.440 - 00:15:31.800
Oh, oh, no, not math.
Speaker B
00:15:33.640 - 00:15:35.560
Evil math. I'm not looking to do so much math.
Speaker D
00:15:35.640 - 00:15:36.280
It's not bad.
Speaker A
00:15:36.520 - 00:16:38.570
I know I installed mine, which was Champions because, like I said, I felt very engineer y. But my backup is there's a new Invincible, the comic book TTRPG that's coming out that looks like it's going to be cool.
It's got a kind of high lethality, which is always great. It's got a neat little dice pool system that allows you to also be able to push your character a little bit so you can.
Given the right circumstances, you could have. You can mechanically work it out so that, like a D list superhero could figure out how to, like, take down Thor or some big player. And so there's a.
It's got the. It's got the juice to be able to make this situation happen in it. As far as the system is going, it's built for that.
So that was why I was like, oh, well, this looks like it could totally work now. It's in Kickstarter right now. So it's not like I've played it, but this is just from the free roll that I downloaded.
And it looks like, oh, that'd be cool. And I actually. I'm a terrible human because I haven't read the Invincible comics yet. And I absolutely. And there's also the cartoon that's out too.
Speaker C
00:16:38.570 - 00:16:38.850
There's.
Speaker A
00:16:38.850 - 00:16:39.530
Yeah, there's a lot.
Speaker B
00:16:39.530 - 00:16:39.890
There's a.
Speaker A
00:16:39.890 - 00:16:51.610
There's an animated cartoon that's out. And so if you're fans of that, I would definitely recommend these books.
And if you're reading these books, I would recommend backing that Kickstarter because this will probably. I think that'll work for it. That'll work out.
Speaker D
00:16:51.610 - 00:16:59.940
And Invincible does love its dumbass villains. Like oh yeah, some of the dumbest, best dumbest villains and I'm curious how
Speaker B
00:16:59.940 - 00:17:12.220
they implement the lethality as opposed to being just some, you know, acknowledgment of like oh and supposed to falling down, you could just be dead. I'm wondering if they work it into the mechanics in any way in an interesting way because it's not inherent typically to a comic book game.
Speaker A
00:17:12.300 - 00:17:25.060
Yeah, no, it's very, it's very hard. Yeah. When I was looking for. I was looking to see if there was a.
If somebody had made of the boys TTRP because I figured if that anything that also kind of. Yeah, but that's just crazy.
Speaker B
00:17:25.140 - 00:17:29.460
Nobody wants to be brought up on a lawsuit. Totally true.
Speaker A
00:17:29.460 - 00:18:58.390
Absolutely.
All right, so I know you guys haven't read as much of the book as possible, but if there is stuff that isn't mechanical, if you weren't going to just run this book but you were going to steal stuff from it, if there were things portable out of it. I had already said that one of the things that I liked about it was the financial aspect of heroing and super villaining.
Like the villains need to steal stuff because they need to fund their, their organizations. That's how they do it. That's pretty straightforward.
But the heroes are either like government agents and they're getting paid there or they have, they have a whole bunch of like sponsorships and promotional deals. There's a character called Whirlwind Wendy who's in the book and who's in the book and she's got like, she's supposed to, to be real.
She supposed to be this really nice squeaky clean Midwestern person. That's her sales personality.
But she's actually like some like she's some foul talking kid from the Bronx and so she's like in the, when she's off camera it's always like she's just swearing up a storm and but she has to keep this image up and that's. There's part there, you know, she can't date certain types of other heroes and they want to keep her like.
And like it gets very poppy and that like almost pop star management at that point for the heroes. And then the villains of course have this whole network of Underground people sell things to other people. And there's a whole economy there.
And I think putting a villain economy and a hero economy and looking for the places where those connect. I think that would be a great way to build a superhero game.
Speaker D
00:18:58.390 - 00:19:37.110
It would be very interesting, I think, to make things like fame and reputation a really big deal in a superhero game. I don't think I've ever done that in. And I can't think of a game off the top of my head that has it built in.
But like the Boys, for example, where everybody is a celebrity and you want.
You need endorsements and all of that stuff, even if you're a member of the seven or one of the lower tier teams, making that important in play would be an interesting way to go about talking about progression. Right. Because it's a superhero game. You don't necessarily want everybody to get more powerful.
What you might want is for them to like get better endorsements, to like get that Nike swoosh on their cape or whatever it takes in order to be the top tier.
Speaker B
00:19:37.110 - 00:19:45.830
It's an interesting problem to solve because it makes me think of. Just to go off on a tangent, science fiction games, because you got the big space opera games, they got the serenity type games or traveler, which is
Speaker A
00:19:45.830 - 00:19:46.510
what I grew up on.
Speaker B
00:19:46.510 - 00:20:01.120
Where you care about, do I have enough money to put gas in the tank? Yeah, you gotta need to have something like that in the superhero game that I. We want this gas, fame in this case, or endorsements.
And you need to give them some reason in game to constantly pursue it other than you're supposed to.
Speaker D
00:20:01.200 - 00:20:09.440
Yeah, but not spreadsheety stuff. Like if we buy this much of this on this planet, we can sell it for this. No, it's on this planet, if you want that you can push on adventure stuff.
Speaker B
00:20:09.440 - 00:20:11.120
You can use spreadsheets and champions though.
Speaker A
00:20:11.120 - 00:20:12.240
Yes. Yeah.
Speaker C
00:20:12.240 - 00:20:12.880
That they.
Speaker A
00:20:13.120 - 00:20:52.800
That's how I. That's how I make champions characters. I have a spreadsheet for them. It's the only way I could do it otherwise. It's crazy. Yeah.
No, I was just thinking even going less modern and more classic.
The whole interaction between J. Jonah Jameson and Spider man, like his whole, like there are whole comic book arcs about him trying to repair his reputation after something comes out in the paper and everybody hates Spider man and then they like Spider man, and then they hate Spider man and then they like spider Man. So there's a character who like really models that fame, fame, renown versus villainy kind of thing.
And that's really what happens with Mechanical, obviously. Obviously. He starts off as this.
Speaker C
00:20:52.960 - 00:20:54.080
Spoilers for the book.
Speaker A
00:20:54.160 - 00:21:28.440
He starts off as this, as this lowlife character. And then eventually a terrible world ending plague happens. And since he's inside of his suit, he's the only one who like is immune to the plague.
And so he ends up saving everybody. And so he's a hero. I mean just like, was this or not Save the world and the world is where I get my burritos.
So I kind of need the world to be around. Was sort of why he did it. But like, and so now all of a sudden he's got all these renowned points and he's like, oh, can I get a deal?
Can I do a thing? Can I date this chick? Blah, blah, blah, you know, like that kind of a thing. So that's all in there?
Speaker C
00:21:28.680 - 00:21:29.160
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:21:29.160 - 00:21:30.120
What about you guys?
Speaker B
00:21:31.400 - 00:21:47.250
I love the gray morality. You know, I started my role playing on Vampire the Masquerade. So anything with it looks like everybody's doing good.
And then once you look beneath the surface, you start seeing the cracks and you start dealing with the negative implications of that. I always like to implement that in a story.
Speaker D
00:21:47.410 - 00:21:51.170
Right. Which is ultimately a game about D list supervillains. If you're thinking about that.
Speaker B
00:21:52.770 - 00:21:55.850
Yes. It doesn't care about D list supervillains. I never thought of that.
Speaker D
00:21:55.850 - 00:21:56.570
But you're absolutely right.
Speaker A
00:21:56.570 - 00:21:58.770
They are, they have these, they have crappy little powers.
Speaker D
00:21:58.930 - 00:21:59.690
Trench coats.
Speaker B
00:21:59.690 - 00:22:00.130
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:22:00.369 - 00:22:02.130
Yes, Lots of trench coats.
Speaker B
00:22:02.130 - 00:22:02.970
Lots of trench coats.
Speaker C
00:22:02.970 - 00:22:03.410
You're right.
Speaker A
00:22:05.170 - 00:22:09.990
But that is, that's one of the things that the book talks about a lot is like, who is the hero?
Speaker C
00:22:10.220 - 00:22:10.380
Right.
Speaker A
00:22:10.380 - 00:22:21.020
Like we've got the main character, Ultra weapon, and he's the guy who saves the planet all the time, but he's really this big old jerk who is doing terrible. Who's doing terrible things on the side.
Speaker C
00:22:21.420 - 00:23:43.500
So when you think about a fantasy D and D game, you have adventurers who have a certain amount of power.
They start off weak and eventually by going into sacred places and killing people, they get enough money to move ahead and become more and more powerful. So D and D games are essentially learn, you know, starting with D list supervillains who work their way up interacting with the system.
And Peter David in the last Avengers story has this line that heroes are reactive, villains are active. And that's just before spoilers for a 20 year old story. The villains bomb Avengers headquarters, like blow it all up. And there's sort of that.
That's the thing that comes out in the book is that like he has to start really Working. He doesn't have established contracts he can get or sponsorships or things where the normal ways, which one makes money.
He's got to go out there and hustle a little bit. He's got to sort of make things for people so that he can sell those.
And then he could buy his own things for the things he wants to do and make still more money. So there's something appealing.
And I think it comes like D and D, like, oh, well, we have to get out there and work and interact with the world to make things happen. It's kind of the reverse of what you do in superhero stories where you're reacting to other people who are more entrepreneur. Evil about the world.
Speaker B
00:23:44.140 - 00:23:45.420
Yeah, it's interesting take.
Speaker A
00:23:45.420 - 00:23:46.020
I like that.
Speaker D
00:23:46.020 - 00:25:06.700
I had a discussion online with Kevin Crawford, who is the guy that does worlds without number, Ashes without number, all those. And I said, I want you to make capes without number necks. I want that to be your neck.
Because I'd love it if he did, like, a superhero game built in that way that he does his games. And he basically said, I can't do a superhero game because superheroes are reactive. There's no forward motion.
There's no sandbox for superheroes because they're waiting for a thing to occur. And I don't necessarily agree with that. I think you can build a campaign that's more proactive.
We do have comics of people bouncing between universes in search of something. Like, every once in a while, there's a defender's title or whatever that comes out where they have a quest or a goal. Right.
But generally, I get the view that superheroes are there to wait for bad things to happen and try and stop those bad things.
And the reason why all of these twists on superheroes are always that the superheroes are jerks on the side, I think, is built into that idea that if we're watching these people on more intimate level, you get two choices. You have soap opera stuff, which is. Superheroes are great at soap opera stuff. Right.
Or the other thing is they have to kind of be jerks because what else are you. But what other. Other part of the story are you gonna tell if they're not just stopping the comet that's gonna hit the planet or whatever? Right.
Speaker C
00:25:06.700 - 00:25:07.020
Your.
Speaker D
00:25:07.020 - 00:25:14.850
Your homelanders are. There are jerks because that makes them interesting. Beyond just their ability to do whatever superhero bullshit they're.
Speaker C
00:25:15.320 - 00:25:42.910
There aren't that many. And I'm really straining my brain here to Thunderbolts, where they had a public Persona of being this.
But There were super villains and they were trying to, like, make money on the side, like, so that was sort of the twist on it. But like books out there where the heroes are jerks and we watch them like the. It's not Homelander isn't the title of the comic book, it's the boys.
It's those guys going out there that are the heroes of that book or the stars of the book, anyway.
Speaker D
00:25:42.910 - 00:25:44.950
Well, sure, they're the protagonists of that book.
Speaker C
00:25:44.950 - 00:25:45.830
Fair enough. Yeah.
Speaker D
00:25:45.830 - 00:26:12.730
But that cynicism built into making all these copies of our well known established characters. Interesting people tend to lean toward, again, that. That negative behavior. Right. Because it's an immediate hook. Right.
Superman is really a jerk when he's, you know, not on camera is a thing that's easy to grab onto. And I think you see it a lot in not your major titles.
Speaker C
00:26:12.730 - 00:26:13.610
Right, right, sure.
Speaker B
00:26:13.610 - 00:26:16.170
Yeah. Because they're not taking down a sacred cow.
Speaker C
00:26:16.890 - 00:26:17.250
Yeah.
Speaker A
00:26:17.250 - 00:26:27.130
Are you.
But are you saying, basically, are you saying that from either a gaming standpoint or from a fiction standpoint, that people find bad behavior more entertaining than somebody going out?
Speaker D
00:26:27.850 - 00:26:29.610
I would be shocked if that were true.
Speaker A
00:26:29.610 - 00:26:30.090
Oh, my.
Speaker B
00:26:31.450 - 00:26:45.680
I've always said it's far more interesting to see a villain story get built than a hero story, because everybody want, you know, they generally want the good guy to be good guys. But to see a villain suddenly come around and be rational and have reasons for. That's interesting. That's interesting.
Speaker A
00:26:45.840 - 00:26:50.480
You're saying, like, having a superhero cure cancer is not. Not your idea of a fun book.
Speaker B
00:26:50.800 - 00:26:52.400
Yeah, that wouldn't be an exciting book.
Speaker A
00:26:53.920 - 00:26:55.360
Turns people into dinosaurs.
Speaker B
00:26:55.360 - 00:26:56.360
I'm reading that now.
Speaker C
00:26:56.360 - 00:27:20.300
I'm reading that book like, so the best super villains, the ones that last, are ones that you can look at and say, I know why they're doing the thing they're doing. Like, Magneto is an amazing supervillain because he has a backstory of being oppressed.
And he's looking and saying, my people are going to go through that same thing again. And the transition for getting him onto the X Men for a while, even when he's on them, they still don't
Speaker A
00:27:20.300 - 00:27:31.320
trust him, and they shouldn't, because he has a solid agenda that is antithetical to the assimilatory concepts that Xavier is putting out there.
Speaker C
00:27:31.400 - 00:27:37.760
Although what you'll see in the more recent X Men is that Cyclops, of all people, is sort of like, maybe Magneto's right.
Speaker B
00:27:37.760 - 00:27:38.120
Sure.
Speaker C
00:27:38.600 - 00:27:46.960
Maybe we are trying to sort of like, all to get together Kumbaya moments isn't getting anything but dead mutants. Maybe we should be more aggressive about this instead of.
Speaker B
00:27:46.960 - 00:27:58.050
It's somewhat unbelievable to think that the whole swath of the X Men, that they don't have plenty of people that do agree or look at his, look at his opinion go. The guy makes sense. The Xavier guy seems to be pounding his head against the wall.
Speaker A
00:27:58.050 - 00:28:20.210
You don't see. It's not bending towards justice on that one. You know, a lot of those timelines are not, you know, pro. You don't see a lot of pro mutant stuff.
Once again, people behaving badly. All right, so we've sort of drifted into this at this point because otherwise we'll move right into media things that you might want to.
If you were going to. What was this? You guys? Podcasts cannot see the gestures.
Speaker D
00:28:20.290 - 00:28:22.930
That's right. That's why I did a gesture.
Speaker A
00:28:24.030 - 00:28:25.190
Okay, fantastic.
Speaker D
00:28:25.190 - 00:28:26.230
Thanks for calling me out.
Speaker A
00:28:26.230 - 00:28:42.030
Hey, no problem, man. Trying to boost, trying to make this. Trying to boost the bad behavior. We're doing all right.
So if we're going to talk about media things that have D list super villains in it, along with our D list super villain, Mechanical Dave, let's start with you. What are you going to pick?
Speaker B
00:28:42.350 - 00:28:53.520
Oh, other media. I go back to Wild Cards. Wild Cards, one of my favorite series on that.
And you get to see the whole swath of, you know, powers and abilities all the way from the terrible, you know, unfortunate situations.
Speaker A
00:28:53.520 - 00:28:57.000
That's that little known writer, right? I can't think of his name. What is it?
Speaker B
00:28:58.040 - 00:28:59.760
Oh, it's. Wait a minute.
Speaker A
00:28:59.760 - 00:29:00.280
Martian.
Speaker B
00:29:02.200 - 00:29:10.160
No, now you're making me forget. It's not like I was gonna say Robert Lewis Asper, but no, it's not him. It's. What the hell's his name?
Speaker D
00:29:10.160 - 00:29:11.040
George R.R. martin.
Speaker B
00:29:11.040 - 00:29:13.640
Yeah, George R. Martin did the whole thing.
Speaker D
00:29:13.640 - 00:29:14.280
He don't.
Speaker B
00:29:14.280 - 00:29:15.760
He was part of it.
Speaker D
00:29:15.760 - 00:29:17.800
But they're all apologies by other people
Speaker C
00:29:18.180 - 00:29:20.420
because he finished those books when he said it.
Speaker B
00:29:20.820 - 00:29:37.540
There it is. Yeah. That's why to the top of your head there was like so many who finished a book.
But yes, I did like the fact that they basically showed the swath of superhero and super villain abilities and not just the top tier ones. In fact, the top tier ones didn't appear as much.
Speaker A
00:29:37.620 - 00:29:38.580
Anything else or.
Speaker B
00:29:40.260 - 00:29:40.980
That's my media.
Speaker A
00:29:41.060 - 00:29:41.820
Fantastic.
Speaker C
00:29:41.820 - 00:30:36.910
I mean, I kind of feel like Thunderbolt Bolts is probably the closest one to this in that you see them starting off, they're all masters of evil disguised as supervillains. Again, spoilers for a 20 plus year old storyline. But as they go along, they sort of like, oh, well, I don't. I kind of like being a hero.
And there's a part of me that at the time was like, oh, that's such a nice thing. And they end up sort of fighting amongst each other over, like, who they want to be.
And Moonstone is trying to sort of of play them off each other and da, da, da, da. I do wish there was one where they were. They could just.
It feels like that's an instinct of a mainstream comic publisher to sort of eventually make them a good character. Like, take any prominent female villain. Eventually they become the love interest or sort of anti hero of the thing. Catwoman.
Cheetah is now friends with Wonder Woman, or at least they get along okay. And they've worked together.
Speaker A
00:30:37.390 - 00:30:38.190
Poison Ivy.
Speaker C
00:30:38.190 - 00:30:43.910
Poison Ivy is now the mayor of Gotham in the comic books as of, like, this week or something.
Speaker A
00:30:43.910 - 00:30:44.590
Oh, wow.
Speaker C
00:30:44.750 - 00:30:52.270
Yeah. So because she becomes an eco terrorist and people are like, man, you're speaking up to society. You're pushing back on corporations. We love you.
Speaker A
00:30:53.390 - 00:30:55.390
There's that change in Renown thing again.
Speaker C
00:30:55.550 - 00:31:02.790
Exactly. Harley Quinn starts off as, you know, Joker sidekick, and now she's got her own gig on there. And she just.
Speaker A
00:31:02.790 - 00:31:05.870
They just put out a thing. She's got a. She's on the bat team now. She did.
Speaker B
00:31:05.870 - 00:31:06.710
Oh, yeah, I saw that.
Speaker A
00:31:06.710 - 00:31:10.870
They're doing previews of her bat costume. Yeah, she's part of the bat family now. That's crazy.
Speaker C
00:31:10.870 - 00:31:33.400
Well, when she started doing that in the. In the cartoon that came out in hbo. Yeah.
She was sort of joining them and was surprised by the amount of time they spent training because that's not a thing. She didn't have the discipline, which is possibly a different. Another difference between superheroes.
Supervillains don't have necessarily training rooms or danger rooms where they train how to fight supervillains or superheroes.
Speaker B
00:31:33.400 - 00:31:34.720
It's a survival of the fittest.
Speaker C
00:31:34.720 - 00:31:59.580
But anyway, I digress.
I think that sort of series had the same sort of situations you're talking about in the book here, where there's one character, the techno character, who eventually has to go to jail for killing somebody, like, face consequences in a way that he didn't have to to if he hadn't sort of taken on this hero gig and started liking people. Yeah.
Speaker D
00:31:59.580 - 00:32:42.760
So there's a bunch of comic book series that, like, for example, Geoff Johns wrote a rogues miniseries. But I think the one that I. This is not good, but it is. It fits the mold of like, oh, look, a bunch of D Listers.
Some of them heroes, Most of Them villains coming together and doing an interesting thing is Legends of Tomorrow from the cw, from the Arrowverse. Right? Like a bunch of morons all packed onto a time traveling spaceship and like having adventures against.
My favorite villain of all time is 100% is Vandal Savage. And the fact that just the fact that Vandal Savage was the villain for one of those seasons, I was like, I'm in.
Speaker C
00:32:42.760 - 00:32:45.200
You do know he's the current commissioner in Gotham City?
Speaker D
00:32:45.200 - 00:32:45.580
Is he?
Speaker B
00:32:45.730 - 00:32:51.530
Vandal Savage is really. What the hell's going on? They're all going. They're all going straight.
Speaker C
00:32:51.530 - 00:32:59.250
No, no, he's not straight. He's corrupt. Like he's planting evidence about Batman having killed people as the commissioner. Don't worry, he's still evil.
Speaker D
00:32:59.250 - 00:33:31.190
The first story I ever wrote and sent to DC Comics when I was a youngin and I really wanted to write comic books was a Vandal Savage story that opens with him. Aliens arrived 10,000 years ago and Vandal Savage leads the other Neanderthals to beat them to death and kill them. And he buries it.
And then he comes gets it 10,000 years later in the modern DCU. And I was so excited, I sent it off and they sent back a letter that said, thank you for your submission. We don't take unsolicited submissions.
It crushed me. My 15 year old Ayan went, oh
Speaker A
00:33:31.190 - 00:33:32.750
no, what do I do?
Speaker B
00:33:32.750 - 00:33:34.270
But you didn't let it stop you.
Speaker D
00:33:34.350 - 00:33:36.310
That's right. I still never made it.
Speaker C
00:33:36.310 - 00:33:36.750
Yes.
Speaker A
00:33:36.990 - 00:35:21.070
I've still never done it. I'm gonna mention one of my favorites is the Velveteen versus series by Seanan McGuire. This is about superheroes though.
For a while she ends up being a super villain. It is very much. Seanan McGuire said that it is basically what if the Disney corporation controlled superheroes.
And it is all about this sort of corporatization of the heroes. And it has a lot of this like fame and it does the soap opera thing, but they plan it out. It's very reality tv and the story is about a.
The character Velveteen who tries to leave. And much like Cal, she basically gets blacklisted. Like if you're not a hero, you must be a villain.
And therefore like she has to go in hiding and she ends up dealing with a lot of super villains as well as superheroes. And it's a great series and Seanan McGuire is a great, great writer. Just a quick note in case Seanan McGuire ever listens to this.
Seana, you are my number one pick for the show. If I can ever get you on the show, I absolutely want it. But on top of that, the book by Natalie Zena Walshatz, A Hench, was a great one.
I really liked that. It was a great story about a hench person for a supervillain. And it talks a lot about what happens to the folks who work for super.
For the super villains. She's like the second in command. She's the person who does all the organizing while the big guy rants and raves about his.
His rivalry with the main superhero guy. And she just pulls her hair out all the time because he just like, I must destroy this dude.
And she's like, but we're making so much money if you just don't pick fights with him, like we can. And she. Her superpower is like spreadsheets. She's amazing. So I really like Hench.
Speaker B
00:35:21.070 - 00:35:24.590
That's the old adage of why aren't these super villains just marketing their inventions and.
Speaker C
00:35:24.750 - 00:35:33.130
Well, and it's. It's in the Austin Power series too. Like, oh, we're doing quite well in all these areas right here. What?
No, we need to be doing laser beams or whatever.
Speaker A
00:35:33.290 - 00:35:43.610
What is this?
And, and you already mentioned my third choice, which was the super foes of Spider man, which is a great comic book series of all the D list supervillains.
Speaker D
00:35:43.610 - 00:36:19.710
So what do you think is the driving force behind that? Pretty common. Want to look at superheroes as if they were run by Disney, right? Or whatever.
Like even on the boys, the TV show version of that story, like, it is very much about that corporatization and whatever. And you even see it in stuff like every time Booster Gold gets a miniseries and they try and make him a thing again, right?
Like make Booster Gold happen, which they can never quite do, but that is built deeply into that, right? Is it because in the real world are the closest thing we have are like sports stars. Is that why we do that to superheroes?
Speaker A
00:36:19.710 - 00:37:30.170
I think everybody who we. I do think right now in our culture, we have this idea that famous people run, are part of corporations and have money.
This isn't the same case as it was like in the 1930s and 40s when like Albert Einstein was literally a pop star. Like, he could not go places, he was mobbed.
People were like, he's the smartest man in the world and we want to pay attention to him because he's a scientist and science is cool. Like, there was a period of time when where the world was like that and it's not now.
But yeah, now everything is like all a lot of the power is concentrated in corporates. And so it makes sense to take your most powerful people and attach them to the corporate thing.
Or we could say that maybe the people who own the distribution of comics, the big powerful corporations like Disney and other people, are purposely attaching themselves to these superhero characters. Characters to, you know, burnish their brand. Right. Like, it's making them look better, like Disney. Disney's great because they. They host Marvel.
So even if they're an evil corporation on the side, but they have Marvel, they must be good. Right. Does that make sense?
Speaker B
00:37:30.410 - 00:37:32.490
That gets Kathy to pay the subscription.
Speaker A
00:37:32.650 - 00:37:35.570
Yeah. And let's be honest. If anybody was not gonna pay the
Speaker B
00:37:35.570 - 00:37:40.330
subscription, yes, you stand against it. But she's like, but they have Star Wars. I'm like, but they are Disney stuff.
Speaker A
00:37:40.330 - 00:37:40.810
Yes.
Speaker B
00:37:40.810 - 00:37:42.490
She's like, they have Star Wars.
Speaker A
00:37:42.490 - 00:37:45.860
It's so hard. I don't know what they to do. Those are my recommendations.
Speaker C
00:37:46.100 - 00:37:53.780
We have a problem. Superheroes are not gray generally, as they've been presented. Gray.
Speaker B
00:37:53.780 - 00:37:54.260
Oh, gray.
Speaker C
00:37:54.260 - 00:39:01.630
There's good and there's evil. And I think we're moving into a society right now where it's a lot harder to tell who the good guys are.
Eric was suggesting that there's almost a sort of, like, by making them squishy gray, by, like, these corporations or whatever, then rebelling against them becomes the hero. And I think we're in a time of society where people are looking at our structures that we have and are wondering, is that the best we can do?
Superheroes have always been sort of put out as the best we can do. So I feel like some of that tearing down. And, you know, it's interesting, the Hench book.
There's like, three or four other books out there where, like, people are, you know, working for super villains and working their way up to supervillains. And any books are out. There's three, four different series out there. It's an interesting phenomena where people are like, hey, what if they're just.
They've just got bad press? It's not, you know, what if that's what's going on here?
Or they were outcasts not because they're wrong, but because society didn't like the message they were giving. It's my best guess is that we're not interested right now in good and evil, or at least we're not.
Speaker B
00:39:01.870 - 00:39:03.190
We don't want to believe we're not.
Speaker C
00:39:03.190 - 00:39:10.270
We're not clear on what. What is evil. So exploring the space of what that means is more interesting to us.
Speaker D
00:39:10.270 - 00:39:21.790
I wonder if you could Track that as a cycle. Like remember the Bronze Age of comics happened because everybody was also disinterested in black and white explanations for stuff. Right.
It was at the end of Vietnam.
Speaker A
00:39:21.790 - 00:39:24.630
And like I was gonna say that's Nixon, Vietnam, all that stuff.
Speaker C
00:39:24.950 - 00:40:15.920
So look at the 80s, Reagan era. That's when you have the Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Vertigo sort of rises up.
Like, I think we go through these cycles of, hey, let's explore the other space. Let's be a little bit dark about these things in comic book and comic book related stories.
And it depends on what kind of society and frankly of the people that are creating them too. Like, I'm not writing comic books right now.
It's a 22 year old who's trying to find housing and trying to make this all work together and figure these things out. His experiences and the things that he wants to sort of explore. Or she. Sorry for the error there.
Or they want to explore is different than what I want to explore necessarily. But I enjoy reading it, but it's not as personal for me.
Speaker B
00:40:16.720 - 00:40:40.960
I agree with this cycle because we've certainly heard that told more than once that we keep going through that cycle of we want to worship our heroes and now we want to tear them down, now we want to worship them again. Where do you think the. I always found the phenomena of the breakout heroes in the early 2000s, heroes being the most, you know, best example of it.
There's a lot of different media at that time that said, what if normal people had powers? How would they struggle with it? How does that factor in that? Is that.
Speaker D
00:40:41.120 - 00:40:42.720
Well, I don't actually think.
Speaker B
00:40:42.720 - 00:40:43.280
Right turn.
Speaker D
00:40:43.360 - 00:40:48.560
That's not what was happening with that show. What was happening with that show is they wanted to do a superhero show and they did not want to put people in contact with.
Speaker B
00:40:48.560 - 00:40:49.520
You think they're just afraid of it
Speaker D
00:40:49.520 - 00:41:22.420
because they looked stupid. But our first story, the first story we have written down is basically a superhero story, right? Yeah, like.
Like it is straight up, like he wrestles God stuff. Like we have always done this where we create in our media the pinnacle of humankind, whatever that means at a given moment. Right.
It's just that, like during that era, people wanted that. They just were afraid to put costumes on it. Like, think about that first X Men movie, right?
It was so hard to get them in black leather, you know, by itself. Right. Like. Like just. That was a huge lift.
Speaker A
00:41:22.580 - 00:41:22.980
Sure.
Speaker D
00:41:23.060 - 00:41:31.700
Blade came out. Blade.
Blade is a straight up superhero story, but we're just gonna put that guy in a tripod With a katana, because that's the closest thing to a cape we can possibly.
Speaker C
00:41:32.020 - 00:41:34.619
That's what he wears. This comic book too. So that helped.
Speaker B
00:41:34.619 - 00:41:54.740
Well, were the only books for that sort of story, was it just a reaction to the popularity of the TV show? You know, weren't there other books that tapped into that idea, which ordinary people.
Ordinary people gaining powers, you know, the wildcards books, you know, that. That's where I first encountered it. Suddenly a normal person got a mutation virus and suddenly manifested.
Speaker D
00:41:54.740 - 00:41:59.660
I mean, back to Captain America, Steve Rogers was a normal kid who got power.
Speaker B
00:42:01.020 - 00:42:01.980
It was interesting.
Speaker C
00:42:02.380 - 00:42:36.700
So it's a common theme, though, where you find. I mean, go Hero's Journey where you find out you're a special person.
Yeah, like, oh, it turns out my father was a Jedi too, or a Jedi too, or whatever it is. Like, you're Harry Potter. You're living in a closet and suddenly, like, someone shows up and says, you're very special.
You have power, you're very special.
And, you know, and that sort of theme of, I think if you're adolescents in general, sort of like the idea that, like, in the middle of all this, I'm really special, even though I'm surrounded by all this. This drudgery.
Speaker B
00:42:36.700 - 00:43:04.880
True. And the, you know, the X Men, you know, they start off like, I'm a teenager. I just manifested power.
Now Charles Xavier shows up with his buddies and tells me how great I am. But they gloss over the getting used to it.
Then he goes on, they go off to the special school with all the other people that have powers, and then that's their struggle as opposed to now go to regular high school and suddenly I'm held in detention. But I can teleport home. What am I going to do? Should I teleport home or should I pretend I don't have power?
Those are the things that made those stories stand out differently.
Speaker C
00:43:04.880 - 00:43:25.960
Yeah. And they go back and forth and sort of how much they do the training for him.
Like Grant Morrison, when he took over the X Men, made the school even larger and more sort of interpersonal interaction between students trying to figure out what their powers was and created some of the same sort of weird high school dynamics you'd see any high school drama. Now they have superpowers.
Speaker A
00:43:25.960 - 00:43:28.080
The X Men. The X Men TV show.
Speaker B
00:43:28.080 - 00:43:29.468
Oh, yeah, yeah. The 97.
Speaker A
00:43:29.572 - 00:43:31.360
97 one. Yeah, that was. Yeah, that was.
Speaker B
00:43:31.360 - 00:43:31.920
Yeah, true.
Speaker A
00:43:32.400 - 00:44:09.040
That was very much along that how do I deal with having superpowers kind of a thing. I think just to go back to what we were talking about before.
I think part of the reason why we do the corporate thing is because I think corporations are of. Are something that we all can agree on. I think most people can agree that we are not part of, like, the 1%. And so it's very.
That's something other from us, as opposed to when you want to define what good is. I think there's a very strong divide, and there's a number of. There's a number of different opinions on what good is.
But we can all agree that maybe corporate. If somebody has all the money and they're not helping me, then they must be bad.
Speaker D
00:44:10.400 - 00:44:24.930
Right. If you get paid to do a thing, that means you don't really mean it. Right.
Like a little bit of, like, you're not really a hero if you have to get paid to be a hero. Right. Which. Which is unfair because, you know, firefighters and cops have salaries. Right? Yeah, you know, they definitely.
Speaker A
00:44:24.930 - 00:44:30.650
That was in the. In the latest Superman movie. They were, like, picking on the Green Lantern and. And the. And the.
Speaker B
00:44:30.650 - 00:44:31.770
And the Justice Gang.
Speaker A
00:44:31.770 - 00:44:47.070
The Justice Gang. Yes, the Justice Gang, who. Who was funded by blah, blah, blah.
And somehow that made them feel a little less than Soups, because Soup is just out there doing his thing. Because he can't. Because he's trying to do his best and he isn't. He's been. And yet he's still holding down a job.
Speaker B
00:44:47.230 - 00:44:50.110
Yeah. Like, he needs to worry about where all the nails are coming from. Yeah.
Speaker C
00:44:50.430 - 00:45:01.710
And that's explored in the first time that Spider man meets Fantastic Four, where he's like, hey, I could join your group. And they're like, oh, we don't pay people. Maybe we come up with stipend or whatever, but we just work off of all the patents that Reed has.
Speaker B
00:45:02.030 - 00:45:02.990
You don't have a salary.
Speaker C
00:45:02.990 - 00:45:05.150
He's like, oh, never mind.
Speaker B
00:45:05.710 - 00:45:07.510
How's Aunt May gonna get ramen?
Speaker C
00:45:07.510 - 00:45:22.050
I guess we did a lot of damage to your building for no apparent reason. Perhaps a letter would have sufficed to sort of understand your hiring policy, corporate structure.
But, you know, I mean, so, yes, the whole idea of, like, the Avengers have a mansion.
Speaker B
00:45:22.530 - 00:45:23.050
Oh, that.
Speaker D
00:45:23.050 - 00:45:30.130
And that was Luke Cage's whole bit. Right. Like, that. Like, when he. When that book started, it was about, like, he had to make his rent, man.
Speaker B
00:45:30.130 - 00:45:41.300
True. I like the Jennifer Jones series because they delved into that.
She was just going about her life, and this superhero stuff was really getting in the way. Jessica. Yeah, I meant Jessica.
Speaker C
00:45:41.300 - 00:45:42.060
You're wrong, Dave.
Speaker B
00:45:42.060 - 00:45:43.340
Thank you, Sean. Thank you.
Speaker A
00:45:43.820 - 00:45:44.700
What a perfect place.
Speaker B
00:45:44.700 - 00:45:48.460
What a perfect Place to go to promo, promote promotions. Okay, great.
Speaker A
00:45:48.540 - 00:45:57.900
So now that we've. Now that we've started and ended with Dave being wrong, why don't we talk about things that are right about what's happening with everybody?
And actually, we'll start with Dave. Dave, I know you've got a shelf for the cons.
Speaker B
00:45:57.980 - 00:46:17.050
Yes, I am. I am legally required to shill for the Con Rising Phoenix Convention taking place this April 23rd to the 26th down in Milford, Massachusetts.
We welcome everyone and we are accepting game signups right now. And very soon, we'll be opening up registration for games, so please get online. Rising Phoenix.com. please sign up.
Speaker D
00:46:17.050 - 00:46:17.730
I'll be there.
Speaker C
00:46:17.970 - 00:46:18.610
I'll be there.
Speaker B
00:46:18.850 - 00:46:20.530
Excellent. We'll all be there.
Speaker A
00:46:20.530 - 00:46:23.010
We'll all be there. It's fantastic. Sean.
Speaker C
00:46:23.090 - 00:46:25.890
No, I'm just gonna endorse Rising Phoenix.
Speaker A
00:46:25.890 - 00:46:26.930
All right, fantastic.
Speaker D
00:46:27.650 - 00:46:51.540
So I have had in recent years, recent weeks, a few wake up calls about things to worry about. As far as the future is concerned, my ticker isn't working as great as it should.
So this summer, I'm going to start something that's been in my bucket list for a long time. I'm going to finally create my own RPG instead of just doing freelance for other people's RPGs.
And I expect to do my first public play of it at Carnage next year.
Speaker A
00:46:51.780 - 00:46:53.380
Nice. That's my goal.
Speaker B
00:46:54.100 - 00:46:56.290
Get all the kinks out before you come to Rise Phoenix.
Speaker D
00:46:56.290 - 00:46:59.290
Well, you know. No. Lots of kinks.
Speaker B
00:46:59.290 - 00:47:01.490
Lots of kinks. I love your game of kings.
Speaker C
00:47:01.490 - 00:47:02.610
I was going to say, you know,
Speaker A
00:47:02.850 - 00:47:04.050
that's not my impression.
Speaker B
00:47:04.130 - 00:47:06.450
It wouldn't be an Iron Ella production without some kinks in it.
Speaker D
00:47:07.250 - 00:47:07.970
At least two.
Speaker A
00:47:09.170 - 00:47:37.310
I can't wait till the first time. We just randomly put Ian's game into one of these. One of these shows. And obviously we are going to be recording here.
We have Michael St. Eric, who's been doing our recording here the whole time. Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Michael.
Yeah, he and I will both be at Rising Phoenix, where we will be having not one, not two, not three, but four podcast recordings with various authors. Very exciting stuff. Elizabeth Behr, Scott Lynch. I cannot think of Ms. Monocle's first name. Trisha Wooldridge.
Speaker B
00:47:37.550 - 00:47:38.070
Something like that.
Speaker A
00:47:38.070 - 00:47:55.570
Yeah, yeah, Trisha Wooldridge. All of those. All the four. Four great authors who are gonna be.
Who are all gonna have a chance to talk to and also get some game masters to talk about how we can turn their books into more fabric, which is the plan. All right. Anything else before we close folks, the
Speaker B
00:47:55.570 - 00:47:57.370
audience are the real heroes they are.
Speaker D
00:47:57.370 - 00:47:57.930
Thank you.
Speaker B
00:47:58.010 - 00:47:58.810
Thank you everyone.
Speaker A
00:48:01.210 - 00:48:02.170
Thank you audience.
Speaker C
00:48:02.570 - 00:48:03.050
Yay.
Speaker A
00:48:03.050 - 00:50:02.170
You guys are fantastic. And that was the Game Masters Book Club coming to you from Total Con40. Thanks again to Sean, Dave and Ian for a great discussion.
Thanks to the staff of Con, especially their fearless leader Steve Patno and Chris Spinney who helped us with technical support and good humor.
Speaking of technical support, this recording comes as the result of Michael Stair and his trusted sidekick Forest Edwards who helped set up, manage and expertly delivered the recording. Michael will be handling our future shows at Rising Phoenix Con in April.
And if you have a project you need recorded like a live play podcast, talk about dragons, or just a podcast like this one where you talk about great books, be sure to contact michael@saintair.com that's s t a a y r e.com join us next episode when we journey back to the future in Sterling E. Lehner's 1974 post apocalyptic sci fi novel Hero's Journey. David Clarkson, Scott Lagotte and Chris Grannis will be.
You can find a complete transcript of today's discussion as well as links to all of our podcasts@k-square productions.com GMBC.
You can learn about upcoming episodes on our social media on bluesky at gmbookclub bluesky social on Facebook @GameMastersBook Club, on Mastodon @GameMastersBook Club and on Instagram amastersbookclub.
If you've enjoyed the show, please like subscribe and comment on our episodes in your chosen podcasting space and be sure to share those episodes with your gaming community. You've been listening to the Game Masters Book Club brought to you by me, Eric Jackson and K Square Productions.
Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our music. Later, gamers and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising apart.