by Rhonda McAvoy of The Boston Globe
March 18th, 2002

The Prudential Center was subject to a brutal attack this morning at around 8am. Three robotic figures burst out of one of the iconic "Duck Tour" tour buses to go on a deadly rampage through downtown commuters. The three were finally put down by new WatchTower recruits, most notably the terrifying destructive powers of Sapphire and Trace.

17 Bostonians were killed during the attack, and over 80 were injured before WatchTower's new "B" team arrived on the scene. While it's unclear what roles the team members play, the two women on the team both used their disintegration powers to great effect, taking care of all three robots in under a minute, and saving us from further death and destruction.

The origin of the robots is still unknown, although an anonymous source at the WatchTower lays the blame at the feet of the Downward Spiral group, known to have been terrorizing important religious sites on the east coast. While many a shopper may worship the almighty dollar at the Pru, it seems unlikely that an anti-Christian group would attack there.

From the log of Karl Maclean, WTNE Controller

8am: New recruits have lasted 24 hours without injury or fatality. Void seems to have settled into a leadership role, and may make a decent long-term recruit should we choose to extend their contract. Seven seems somewhat unreliable and bears closer scrutiny - he's already made it into the media and seems to bask in attention. Kimono is more reliable but suffers from severe cultural disadvantages here in the US: this is somewhat counterbalanced by his immense powers. Trace is, as expected, insufferably young.

10am: Fifth recruit arrived today from Texas. While he looks good enough to eat, he's sadly lacking between the ears.

4pm: New team reports a lead on the whereabouts of the old team, due to a tip-off from The Chancer. A previously unknown exotic with dimensional powers trapped and abandoned them in another dimension, with seemingly no way of recovering. Kimono negotiated some kind of agreement with the guy, but it sounds like he was conned. I don't think Mr Canning will be happy, but then again, I doubt he'd be happy even if they brought back the old team safe and sound. I've e-mailed him.

7pm: Got word that we have a sixth exotic joining us tomorrow. No idea who she is or what her abilities are. Christ, it's like superhero kindergarten.

3am: Yes, Canning is not happy. Big fucking surprise. I'm drawing up permanent contracts just in case.

by Rhonda McAvoy of The Boston Globe
March 17th, 2002

Unknown WatchTower Operative floats over Old Ship Church

Three new WatchTower operatives were spotted yesterday in and around the greater metro area. While no information has been forthcoming from the New England franchise, the identity of one of the new recruits has been confirmed as Vanja Mestrovic, also known as Void. Void's intimidating black and featureless body was seen in Stoughton yesterday morning and in Hingham yesterday afternoon. He was accompanied by two old men of Asian decent, and all were wearing WatchTower clothing.

"Void's a good guy," says Jimmy Cortez, who worked with him at Devon Energy, an oil company. "It takes a while to get used to him having eight eyes, but he's got a heart of gold." Whether that's true remains to be seen. Katherine Simmons, manager at Ikea in Stoughton, told us that he was very intimidating. "He walked in here, butt naked, with his two crazy friends and I gotta tell ya, I was scared." Simmons wasn't able to tell us anything about why the trio visited her store, as the investigation is still ongoing.

The sightings in Hingham were centered around the Old Ship Church. One of Void's companions, who identified himself to local tourists as "Seven" levitated up over the church to survey the roof. The third man, wearing a thick Japanese kimono bearing the WatchTower logo, is still to be identified. The minister of the church, Rev. Kenneth H. Read-Brown stated that the WatchTower was there as a precautionary measure, given the recent spate of anti-church exotic crime on the East Coast being perpetrated by the so-called Downward Spiral group.

Does this mean that WTNE has decided to hire more operatives? While it has long been the opinion of this reporter that six is too few, why choose now to recruit? And why the secrecy? As of yet, no-one at WatchTower New England or HQ in San Francisco has been willing to comment on this development.

The north-east used to be covered by the WatchTower New York, but a series of blunders a few years ago by the operatives at the time created a split. New England and DC created their own franchises and New York's influence was reduced considerably and awarded to a different vendor (Jack White). New England's franchise is owned by a consortium led by commercial real estate magnate, Chris Pfeiffer.

The current New England team (codenames and powers):

• Claymore - Can detonate objects remotely
• Silverhawk - Silver-armored fast flier
• Firewall - Fire generator and manipulator
• Nimbus - Weather controller
• Gemini - Creates replicas of herself

The two men on the team (Claymore and Firewall) are both capable of vast amounts of destruction. As a result, they have both loyal followers and loud detractors. To date, they have both sufficiently avoided any collateral damage that would result in the kind of bad publicity which shut down the New York franchise. Some say it's only a matter of time ...

Each franchise has its own charter of specific responsibilities (primarily geographical) but in times of crisis, operatives from other franchises will help out. As can be seen on the map, many areas are without direct coverage. Exotic crime tends to be less common in these areas, and support for local law enforcement comes from both Fortress and on an ad-hoc basis from WatchTower (usually with a very hefty hourly fee).

In response in 1994, Bill Clinton signed into law the Exotic Foreign Workers Act, which passed with slim majorities in both House and Senate. This law created a new visa, the X-1, which allowed foreign exotics to live and work in the United States on a two-year rolling term. This shored up the immediate needs at the time, and continues to allow WatchTower franchises to bolster their rosters in a hurry.

Some of the conditions of the visa include:

• Fortress screening (DNA samples, fingerprints, various scans - mechanical and exotic, etc.)
• Can only accept employment in a role in which their exotic abilities are needed
• Cannot apply for permanent residency

In return for these fairly stringent conditions, the application is processed fairly quickly (within about six weeks, which is lightning fast for the State Department).

The satellite offices are primarily administrative, although each is known to have the supplies necessary to act as a base of operations for any given action being taken by WT operatives. At any given time, WT-NE employs around 200 people, and between 8 and 12 exotics.

Watch this space for WT-NE making news headlines ...

Origins
People with exotic powers first came to the public eye in the late 50s, with a series of highly publicized crimes perpetrated by someone who could turn themselves invisible. Although this person was never caught, a team of exotic crime-fighters, known as "The American Dream," was formed to help the people of the United States feel safer at night.

There is still no satisfactory explanation as to the origin of exotic abilities. Roughly 1 in 100,000 people manifests some kind of unexplained ability, ranging from the fairly mundane (such as Martin R. from Dallas, Texas, who can instantly tell the gender of any animal and when it last procreated) to the awesomely destructive that had previously only been the stuff of legend.

WatchTower
Exotic crime rose as more and more super-powered people emerged. In response, some of the original members of The American Dream (with endorsement from then-president Lyndon B. Johnson, along with other political, commercial and popular support) founded an organization named the WatchTower, aimed at fighting crime across the United States.

It quickly became impossible to fight crime over such a vast area, and the WatchTower privatized and branched out into several franchises. Over time this became the de facto standard for cities and/or states to protect themselves against exotic crime. The WatchTower has since spread to the rest of the world, with franchises on every populated continent.

Fortress
Fortress formed at the same time as WatchTower's privatization. For security's sake, not much is known about this branch of the government. They detain exotic criminals and are often involved in their apprehension, sometimes working with (and sometimes against) WatchTower operatives. The world's only known prison for exotic criminals is run by Fortress and it's location is a closely guarded secret.

• Running a supers game
• Running Marvel system
• Running WatchTower
• Running a game for this group

I'm using Marvel for the main reason as we used it in the past: it's easy to pick up It's been ages since I've run anything: with the exception of a brief (and bland) Pendragon scenario in 2007, the last thing I ran was some D&D in 2004 when I was thinking of writing for WotC. Unlike Matt, I don't have the plug-n-play-GM gene, so I'm intending to put a bunch of prep work into this.

Now all I need to do is switch to polyphasic sleep so I get an extra three or four hours in my day.

PJ pointed me at the new Hancock trailer.
It's true, Hancock has gone from being a "Wild Wild West" kind of camp nonsense movie to a movie I'd really like to see and a game I'd like to run. That said, Iron Man, much more than the Fantastic Four or Spider Man has always been a bit of a dick when he was Tony Stark - and I loved reading his stories for it.

(He also links to Superdickery)

Superheroes are often dicks.

In the first Watchtower game, there were really three 'dick' moments. None of these were bad on the part of the player and they made for some excellent role-playing moments but they represented times when the superhero did things that were unexpected.

• Gavin's first character, Atomic III, was a non-powered descendant of a dynasty of superheroes. He worked hard, he built himself some superpower-providing devices and he started doing what superheroes do - prowling around trying to find people to pummel. In the end this played out very well as he went a little power mad, fueled by his 'power inadequacy' where, even though he was the most powerful of the heroes due to his devices, it wasn't enough. He ended up becoming a villain and threw a train at the player characters (one of whom were superstrong or supertough). Then he killed their healer. Ouch. Gavin has an amazing sense of comedy for these kinds of things.
• Gavin's second character, Wraith, was a cross between Batman and Hawkeye (but ten times cooler than Hawkeye). His actual power was the ability to be invisible and undetectable. He could sneak into places, collect evidence that was inadmissible in court and then when the criminal was acquitted, despite being guilty, Wraith would follow him home and thrash him into unconsciousness. On one absolute gem of a game, Wraith sneaked into a woman's house (he suspected she was the supervillainess Malice) and then when nothing untoward happened (she got home, put away her groceries and sat down to watch TV), rather than sneaking out, he just turned off his power in the middle of her living room. He appeared, she freaked out and he admitted he was her creepy stalker. Turns out she was actually Malice. Go figure.
• John Dean's character, Ebony, discovered that his teleport skill also worked for time travel. Note to other GMs: I was a lot younger and lot stupider and had never really given unlimited time travel to players before. The 'dick' moments came when the player characters, after traveling into the past and modifying the future just....couldn't....stop.....going....back to tweak things to their preference. Jade Dragon lost his restaurant, then got it back. Wraith discovered he was dating and co-habiting with Malice but had no memory of their many-month relationship. I think they all deserved to be 'dicks' but the biggest dick of the lot was the GM. Oops.

In the more recent WatchTower game, they all had their fair share of dickery though Paul's character, Balance (the priest with uncanny matter shaping abilities) probably had more moments which, though caused for the most part by the possession and emotion control powers of the villain, were roleplayed brilliantly. Like when he completely blasted the whole team and caused their flesh to slough off. That was beautiful. Or when he sealed mind-controlled proto vampires in an underground tunnel (rather than seeing if they could be cured). He was decisive, let's be honest.

I like flawed characters, especially in superhero games because they can be flawed in much more effective ways. If you're a dick in a Zombi game, then no-one cares because you could just be left outside at some point and that would really ruin your picnic. If you're a dick in The 23rd Letter, again, there's a damage limitation as even psychics don't get an easy break. It ain't all fun being an Esper.

But in a Superhero game, you're often the possessor of a unique ability (at least within your team) and that means you've pretty special. When you're pissed off and do something about it, people notice.

We (Aidan and I) going to try playing a Superhero game online in the next couple of weeks. One player, one GM (for a while at any rate). I've asked Aidan to think of a character and some of the things he wants to do, or components of the world we will be playing in. I'd have asked him to do it in Wild Talents colour codes but, frankly, I'm not very keen on them and also he doesn't have the book so it would be impenetrable to him. (It does make me want to create a 'world builder' for superhero games. I have it in my head how to do it (and it could be done in software too - a simple web form, oh yeah!))

I wonder about the playability of a world where there is one superbeing. And he's the player character. Who are you foes? Do we spend more time looking at interpersonals? Do we add 'reality' while accepting that there is one guy in the world who can chew through steel? How does he live? How does he pay his way? Handouts?

I don't know what Aidan will bring to the table but I'm excited about the opportunity to play a bit more.