Blacklight is my first Mutants and Masterminds character. Originally created for a 1st Edition Mutants and Masterminds game set in a world inspired by John Byrne's Superman & Batman: Generations with new heroes taking on the legacies of the older retired characters. As no one had gone for Superman I figured why not make a new version of Superman. I took all of the basic superman powers and tweaked them to have a more energy based spin to them as per the red and blue versions of Superman. Boy was he powerful.

With the release of ICONS, the line artist for the game was doing cheap commissions of characters in the ICONS style. I figured why not pull out a few older characters and have them done up. Blacklight was at the top of the list. Here he is with his stats updated 2nd edition as faithfully as I could (Tweaking regeneration so it works like it did in 1e for instance). Read the Full Article

Once I decided what I was going to make for people, Lady Bee was the first one that I started working on. A while back when I created a poll asking people what their superpower would be, Leah had answered 'Self Healing'. This brought to mind pure regeneraters like Wolverine of Claire from Heroes but I wanted something a little quirkier.

I drew inspiration from an old (7th Doctor) aventure called 'Delta and the Bannermen'. In it, a young human falls for a human-looking alien queen bee and ends up consuming a bunch of royal jelly to transform himself so he could be with her. Continuing with the Bee theme, this got me thinking of the recent Colony Collapse Disorder. Going with some classic Marvel tropes, I put together the idea of a scientist working on CCD through an enhanced Royal Jelly that ends up in her system. This gives her wings, extra strength and tougheness as well as regeneration. I want to avoid the control of bees thing beause that's a bit too cliched. Instead I wanted to touch on the Spiderman web shooters by giving her a set of invented bee stingers.. basically a dart gun that can deliver different types of toxins or even cures.

For the figure itself, I used astraight forward Wasp Heroclix as the base. It was pretty straight forward to give her a bee themed outfit rather than the red one she came with. The real fun in modifying the figure was popping off the wings so that I wouldn't get the yellow and black paint all over the wings. Read the Full Article

This was my gift for Tricia and she was the hardest one for me to do. Over a decade ago now, Tricia played in a Play-by-Email Aberrant game I was running. Her character for that game was a native american powerhouse named Thunderbird. Basically that world's answer to Wonder Woman. My first thought in setting down was to try and recreate that character. Canabalizing my Hero Clix I took Jinx's body for the flowing skirts and general lack of clothes and mixed it with Arclight's head because it had the closest hair for what I wanted. The head was slightly too big for the body. I figured I'd paint it and that would cover up some of the imperfections. This unfortunately just made it worse and she ended up looking like and elderly fae character with exam. In the end I started over. Read the Full Article

The Prologue: I started the game with a quick overview of Freedom City and how this world was different from our own. Specifically there was the bloodier American Revolution that culminated in the British surrender at Freedom City and detonation of the first nuclear bomb in Germany rather than Japan. After that I let the player's each describe an only slightly guided prologue for their character. Read the Full Article

I have been talking about this game for a while. Getting it off the ground was a little bit of a hassle with real life issues getting in the way. In the end though, I was able to get three players together only two months later than the original start date. Here is how it went down. Read the Full Article

I feel it is important when running a game to run a game that you'd want to play in. With that in mind, for my upcoming Paragons of Freedom game I took a moment to write up my own alter ego for the game. He will likely never show up in the game but that's sort of his powers.

For his background, I started with myself but then I stripped out computers and gaming from my interests and looked for common threads. It reminded me of a time when I compared my Stage Crew and Church work to being a Ninja.

"If I'm doing my job right, no one notices I did it." Read the Full Article

This post is actually going to be very self indulgent. Recently the Atomic think tank upgraded and given that I'd been on there since 2003 I wanted to go through and document some of the ideas that have come out of my head and seen decent discussion. There is at least one item on this list where no one cared even a little. It is here because I want to delve into that item for some specific inspiration. If you're just passing through, no need to worry about a list of links but if you're curious to see what I get up to from time to time, well then here you go. Read the Full Article

Hello Gamers and Geeky Friends,

I tend to wear my geek on my sleeve and spend a lot of time talking about RPGs. The sad fact however is that I haven't played in a game since April and rather than whining about it, I thought I would instead do something about it. With that in mind, I'd like to invite people over to my house to play a game of Mutants & Masterminds. They say do what you love right?

The game would be a 'Paragons of Freedom' style game meaning that it would be set in the fictional world of Freedom City but the style would be heavily influenced by television superheros in the vein of Smallville or Heroes.

I am hoping to start in September (August is a very busy month) meeting once every other month or so on the weekend for 4 to 5 hours. The kitchen table at our house in Bethesda opens up and should be able to support a number of players. I'm pretty relaxed at the table and think I tell a pretty good story that is heavily shaped by the player's desires and the character's actions.

One thing some friends did back in college was play a game called 'Crusaders' that I was always sad I never got to be a part of. The basic concept was that you played yourself, only with superpowers. I think that would be fun but only if everyone else was comfortable with it. At the very least, it should make things easier for anyone who is interested in playing but hasn't done this sort of thing before.

Please let me know if you're interested, I'd love to have you join.
-Bill Read the Full Article

In recent discussion, it has become apparent that my game group is very busy. Not a whole lot of time for getting together and even less time for actually running a game. As I've been talking about for a while I do have an idea for the next arc, but its going to require the players to create new characters. That isn't exactly in keeping with the plan to minimize effort that needs to be put in. So in one of my last emails I suggested that would could do character creation in game. For a four hour game, creating characters during the session could eat up a lot of game time. So I suggested M&M Lite... Read the Full Article