This is Throne of Evil (1984), an adventure for the Role Aids line that has nothing to do with the Rowena painting on the cover (originally from the cover of Victor Canning’s The Crimson Chalice, 1978).

This one is a dud, pretty much. An old fashioned cavern crawl to get access to an impregnable castle to kidnap some royal asshat for some other royal asshats in an odd remix of British history circa 1100 AD. The intrigues are petty and utterly unimportant to the primary focus of the module (unlike the last few Role Aids modules, where plot actually drives the exploration without being event-focused). There isn’t anything really wrong with the dungeon crawl, it’s more that there is nothing terribly interesting about it. As with Shadow of Evil, the monster stocking and traps feel generic. Unremarkable. I think I’d rather catastrophically bad to unremarkable. Oh, and the throne isn’t actually evil. What a let-down.

The maps are nice and Teanna Byerts’ interior illustrations are fine.

In 1989 Mayfair released a 2nd edition of their DC Heroes Role-Playing Game (top), and a 2nd ed Batman Sourcebook by Mike Stackpole (middle). The same year they also released a separate Batman Role-Playing Game (bottom) based on the DC Heroes rules, focused on Batman, his allies, and his classic villains.

Summer (?) 1992. The final game supplement for the Mayfair Games DC HEROES ROLE-PLAYING GAME was a loose-leaf WHO'S WHO supplement, intended to complement DC's loose-leaf WHO'S WHO update. Only three of the four planned volumes were released before Mayfair lost the DC license. The first volume includes this entry for Legionnaire Brainiac 5, also covered in 2995: THE LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES SOURCEBOOK, which came out months later.

Brainy's game statistics are mostly the same (although this entry gives him 20 more Hero Points), but the special Psychological Instability rules are unique to this version. This wasn't really a problem anymore in the period when this supplement was published, since it really refers to one particular story from 1979 (a guy loses his shit and creates a universe-destroying super-monster ONE TIME and nobody ever lets him live it down …), but it's an interesting mechanic, so I can see why it was included. The reverse side also has a handy checklist of Brainiac 5 appearances, for completists:

The Personality/Role-playing section on the front side makes some dubious assertions. The first paragraph says:

He might be incredibly intelligent, but Brainiac 5 has a great deal of difficulty when it comes to expressing his emotions. When he first joined the Legion, he tried to concentrate on his feelings to fit in with his teammates, none of whom was Coluan. He even fell in love with Laurel Gand and spent a number of peaceful years with her. But inevitably, he became so overwhelmed with leading the team and protecting the universe that he was forced to forgo the luxury of emotion so that he could use his intelligence to its capacity.

While the 2995 sourcebook was written by Legion scripters Tom and Mary Bierbaum, this supplement was not, and I'm not sure what Winninger was talking about in the final sentence. What had happened in the latter third of the 1984–1989 Levitz series was that Brainy had fomented a conspiracy to avenge the death of Superboy by destroying the Time Trapper, one of the Legion's most powerful enemies, a plan that involved sacrificing Brainy's old friend Jaxon Rugarth. The other Legionnaires then put Brainy on trial for violating the Legion code, and although he was exonerated, he was so annoyed by their attitude that he resigned in a fit of pique and went back to Colu. He returned during the Magic Wars and sort of mended fences, although the team subsequently collapsed and he went on to other things during the five-year gap (principally trying to find a cure for the "Validus plague" afflicting Saturn Girl's kids). Some of the specific circumstances were subsequently retconned in ways not reflected in the actual comics, but that was still basically the gist at the time this supplement was published. It was messy, but it was certainly NOT a matter of his forgoing "the luxury of emotion."

The second paragraph says:

As a Brainiac, Dox has an affinity for pure logic. As time goes on, he seems less and less interested in establishing normal relationships with his teammates in the reformed Legion.

This was not at all true. Indeed, one of the charming aspects of the "Five Years Later" period was that Brainy had actually mellowed quite a bit. He was still a little awkward, and there was unresolved baggage between him and Laurel (who in the interim had had a baby with his best friend!), but he was more at peace with himself, and more patient with the people around him, than he'd ever been in past Legion stories. According to the Bierbaums' sourcebook, he was even writing sweet little haiku about his former teammates in his spare time — hardly the action of a cold-blooded logician.

Front cover (by Geof Darrow) and some interior illustrations from Underground: It's 2021 and the Dream is Dead, the core rulebook for Ray Winninger's satirical gritty superhero role-playing game Underground. It's heavily inspired by cyberpunk fiction, late 80's-early 90's deconstructions of superheroes, and early 90's political unrest.

1984/1985 ad for the DC Heroes Role Playing Game from Mayfair Games.

Friday Night Shots - Catch Up Mechanisms

Friday Night Shots - Catch Up Mechanisms

It’s the last Friday before Christmas and all through the malls, too many creatures were stirring, so much so that I would rather carve Shem Phillips’ initials into my hand with a penknife than go shopping. I think that’s how that old Christmas poem goes. I could be a bit off. Anyway, welcome back to the bar! I’m glad you decided to get cozy and warm here, having some libations (maybe not…

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An audio cue used while one of the heroes was scanning radio frequencies for news during the King of Crime adventure in 2015.

An army of Ghosts.

I think horror podcasts should make cassette tapes of their shows.

Just the thought of pretending to put some "random" cassette into a seemingly old cassette player and listening to the horrors unfold is something I crave.

lucy gray after coriolanus killed mayfair

Mid-1993. The companion piece to the Giffen/Bierbaum v4 LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES series was this sourcebook for the Mayfair Games DC HEROES RPG. Written by Tom & Mary Bierbaum and released shortly after Keith Giffen's departure from the series, it's presented in an epistolary style: Each entry consists of excerpts of personal correspondence between the characters, snippets of in-universe news articles or intelligence reports, and other such ephemera, the most charming of which are a series of (bad) haiku that Brainiac 5 secretly wrote about his teammates over the years.

If you're familiar with the mechanics of the DC HEROES game, the statistics given for the characters are somewhat frustrating. They aren't as useless as the earlier Mayfair Legion sourcebooks co-written by Paul Levitz, who clearly didn't understand the game's exponential point value system, but the stats don't accurately reflect what the values are supposed to mean in game terms. (For instance, the comics show that Laurel Gand can fly interstellar distances under her own power, but Laurel's listed Flight power wouldn't even let her achieve escape velocity.) Also, the game struggles to model the powers of some of the sillier Legion characters in playable ways, and the listed statistics do nothing to address that. If someone wants to play a Legionnaire like Bouncing Boy, whose sole power is the ability to inflate himself like a beach ball and carom off of walls, the rules ought to support them!

All this makes the sourcebook of somewhat dubious utility as an actual gaming reference, but it was clear that Mayfair was hoping to also sell the book to comics readers who didn't necessarily care about the game. It doesn't appear to have worked; Mayfair lost the DC license in 1993, and the last part of their final DC HEROES supplement, the four-part loose-leaf WHO'S WHO series, was never published.

AMNESIA THE DARK DESCENT

"When Hazel turned fifteen she had lived three years longer than doctor Tate had foreseen. Her parents had given up from exhaustion and decided to have her committed for permanent treatment at Canterbury Hospice, but she was still alive. She had embraced him and wished him a grand adventure in Algeria."

Here's the secret project I was talking about!

Yes it's Richard Topping's voice :D I am honoured to have received help from him

And my good friend TeiyusTeki <3

amnesia protags and their various crimes against humanity

🎵one of these things is not like the other🎵

I commonly use music during my games, with audio tracks planned for different scenes. I love using handouts and aids in general, and will record audio clips of monologues, sound effects, and so on. Once in a while I'll even put together some sort of video clip. In 2015 I was running a supers game using the DC Heroes system, and set in Baltimore City. I like to introduce new groups using the module The King of Crime, though modified, not only for Baltimore City, but because my setting is a combined DC/Marvel universe, among other things. The King of Crime is a fun module that can be used to introduce a group of rogues to your new heroes as a modern iteration of the Secret Society of Super Villains. It's a re-playable module, as it has a number of crime scenarios to choose from or randomly select, and sets up a theme that you can run with to create your own criminal plots. Towards the end of the adventure, the new, secret leader of the Secret Society of Super Villains has grown weary of the PCs foiling his plans, and disrupts a news broadcast with a terrorist threat to be carried out if the heroes don't skip town. I really enjoyed making the video, though looking back, I can see mistakes I made, things I should have done better, and the audio levels are really off - the news broadcast is low compared to the villain's monologue, but maybe he wanted it to be really loud and jumpscare his terrified audience. I hope you enjoy, and are inspired to make short video and audio clips of your own to enhance your games!