What it is
Church & State is a Superlink adventure/campaign for Green Ronin Publishing’s Mutants & Masterminds d20 superhero game. For those who don’t know about Green Ronin’s Superlink, which allows third parties to create (and publish!) supplements and what not for their d20-based Mutants & Masterminds, go to their “it’s all very above board” explanation at http://www.mutantsandmasterminds.com/superlink/. For those who do, you can skip the remedial course and get a head start on the head-scratchers that just clicked that link, especially when they try to find their way back…
(Oops, here they come!)
Church & State was put together by Bradley Robins and Co. at Brand’s Brand Publications. It’s billed as a Bronze Age campaign but don’t make the same mistake I did thinking it would be all Achilles meets Jason and the Argonauts. It’s referring to the “Bronze Age of Comics” which it explains fairly early on in the introduction but obviously not early enough for me to catch on. Apparently, the Bronze Age of Comics is characterized by gritty, conflicted and terribly post-modern heroes like those found in The Authority and Marvel’s line of Ultimate comics.
Church & State can be purchased and (then) downloaded at RPGnow for the backbreaking price of 8 bucks. (Here’s a direct link). What you get is a little over 70 pages of teeth-clenching adventure with a 23 page Rogue’s Gallery and then a brief appendix with a couple of rules add-ons, should you be the type to want to tinker with your M&Ms. But that’s not all… As a bonus, Brad & Co. have added on a Combat Booklet with maps, mugshots and NPC sheets too!
How it looks
Overall, the adventure looks pretty good. The art reminds me of old Champions or Villains & Vigilantes adventure supplements and there seems to be plenty of it, more than I’m used to from PDF downloads. Everything is logically laid out and easy to read. I had a bit of a problem finding the section on “Verdict Points” but, beyond that, I found it easy to read, re-read, scroll through and otherwise navigate. Pages are in two-column format with WHING-ZOW blue boxes serving as sidebars. No, I’m not saying the sidebars are in Chinese, I’m just saying they have this quirky little lightning bolt action going on. In any case, the sidebars are clearly delineated, easy to find and more often than not contain useful information that make the game both more fun and more, um, tweakable.
My one complaint (layout-wise) is that there isn’t a “printer-friendly” version. A lot of RPG downloads offer nice black-and-white optimized files to allow customers to print them off at home without using up all their fancy (and therefore expensive) colored ink. That would’ve been nice but, in my opinion, this doesn’t detract too much from Church & State because most people can click a “Print in Greyscale” option. Not too big of an inconvenience, but this could be an issue to those who want it to be.
Church & State’s Combat Booklet is a great addition, though. I caught myself asking why more adventure supplements don’t have something like this. All the maps and ready-for-the-tabletop NPC sheets (2 NPCs per sheet usually) have been bundled with mugshots (again 2 per sheet) to use at the table. The maps put me through quivering fits of nostalgia as the graphics reminded me of the old TSR Classic Marvel adventures and maps. Included in the Combat Booklet are maps of a subway station, a speakeasy, a courtroom, a city area called Central Square, two superhero headquarters and a law office. Sound reusable? You betcha!
A brief summary
Okay, so this is an adventure. Which means it’s bought to be played. Which means if I let all the goodies out of the bag then there’ll be nothing left to find razorblades and spider eggs in when my GM brings it on home. So, without giving away too much, here’s a trailer.
A group of crazed super-villains are wreaking havoc on The City (and it’s really just called The City) and our heroes come into at least tangential contact with two of The City’s heavy hitters, Mikhael Archangel and Rock-N-Roll. Mikhael is a battle Angel (HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILERS) but the adventure leaves the true status of his divinity up to the GM. And Rock is a political activist-cum-superhero-cum-former-rock-star who has quite a following of his own. Someone dies and someone gets blamed which puts these two oversized egos at odds. The heroes can smooth things out to find out who’s really behind all this (and, yes, those crazed super-villains are still out there somewhere). Or the heroes can shove it all and start blowing things to hell when the tanks come rolling in, which is really a thing of beauty.
How it reads
The main book starts out with an Introduction, which explains better than I did what the Bronze Age of Comics is. The Introduction also gives some great advice on how to use and abuse this adventure in every way imaginable from lowering the PL (the game recommends characters of PL 10-12 but who wants COMPETENT PCs??) to changing the tone and feel to even changing the location. The introduction also gives a rundown of the “plot.” Most importantly, though, the introduction explains how to use this adventure supplement as compared to what most of us are used to with adventures.
Church & State is built modularly. What this means is that each chapter or “scene” is pretty well self-contained or encapsulated, as my thesaurus tells me, and that no particular chapter follows in any sort of linear timeline. The campaign could be played from chapter 1 to chapter 2 to chapter 6 to chapter 4 to… ah, you get the picture!
This hit me, like, WOW, even after I sobered up. The downside is that all that time a GM spent boning up on the investigation chapter could be (HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILERS) completely wasted if the players decided just to let the two boneheaded big-daddy superheroes duke it out. The upside is the campaign is a lot more, well, flexible and, chances are, it would never play out the same way twice due to factors other than crappy dice rolling or character mortality.
Beyond the introduction, the book follows in a series of chapters outlining each episode in the adventure. The themes and conflicts of the individual chapters are put up front rather than left “between the lines” as in most other (implying lesser) adventure supplements that I’ve read. It’s nice to know the highpoints going into the thing, in my opinion.
Chapters then go over in detail (and I mean detail) everything about a particular scene. Everything from what NPCs are likely to do (from the lowly commuter to the high-flying super-brick) to Feng Shui-style suggestions for stunts and random environmental damage (which no super-hero adventure should be without, in my opinion). No stone is left unturned. Want to know what to do when your players “wreck” the scene? It’s in there. It’s like the Prego of adventures, flowing its warm, steamy redness over every nook and cranny of the wet, clumpy noodles of your imagination. There wasn’t anything that occurred to me while reading the scene chapters that could wreck the “plot” that wasn’t addressed either in the text or in a WHING-ZOW sidebar. And that’s saying a lot considering I’ve GM’ed for the Anti-Christ.
The end of each episode/scene chapters is punctuated by a section called “What’s Next” that basically points the adventure to the next most logical chapter based upon what the players decided to do and how well they did it. This is a great framework for an adventure to follow. It sets the storyline up in a flexible, modular fashion rather than in a linear “Chapter 2 follows Chapter 1” manner that most adventure supplements I’ve read adopt. Church & State reads like a toolkit for the GM. There’s no information that’s obscured from the GM’s view. There’s no nuance that isn’t put right out there in the open. In my opinion, this is a great way to structure any adventure supplement. I hope that more aspiring adventure-makers give this paradigm a spin. It would certainly rekindle my interest in buying new adventures. Gygax knows, I’ve got enough settings and system books!
How it plays
This will, undoubtedly, be the weakest portion of my review. So, if you’ve hated it thus far, brace yourself.
Recently, I’ve relocated to a new area. Unfortunately, my wife and I didn’t have room in the U-Haul for my gaggle of gamer buddies, much to their dismay. So, at present, I’m in gamer group limbo. Hold the sympathy cards. No need for flowers, really. The whole point of this is to point out the effect that my gamer-group limbo will have on this review. Simply put, there’s no way for me to playtest it, except for playing with myself (which no one should want to read about) or playing it with my imaginary friends who, at this time, are only interested in playing Rolemaster.
As an experienced player and GM, however, I think Church & State has significantly fewer hang-ups than I experienced with, say, Time of Crisis. And I did play through that one. I personally found it fairly easy to derail Time of Crisis, as my last group did on occasion. Not only did we put the GM into a position to practically give us the disarming of the reality bombs a couple of times in order to keep the Time of Crisis plotline going but we also wiped out big bad Omega in not ten, not five, but TWO rounds of combat. Two. The GM practically wept. And I don’t blame him.
Church & State would be much harder to derail, in my opinion, because of the encapsulation of its elements (Thank you, Mr. Roget). If your players completely blow off the scenario, which is possible, you’d just skip to the chapter titled: “War!” Easy as that. There’s no bleedingly obvious plotwagon to lock the players into in Church & State and, thus, no plot-train to get on or get off.
My one difficulty with the plot, however, is with the number of minor NPCs and the relationships between them. There is a handy dandy “Relationship Web” in the “Hints, Allegations and Things Left Unsaid” chapter that outlines all the NPCs and their involvement to the initial conflict that gets all this underway. By my count, there are 10-11 NPCs that are either directly involved or tangentially related to the crime that starts the big brawl between our two big super-chumps. My experience as a GM sets off a red flag at this. I prefer to keep my supporting casts to a sweet spot of 7 or so nefarious individuals. It just seems to be easier for players to keep them all straight in my opinion. But, then again, there’s no way for me to test this out so the complaint is all conjecture.
Beyond just a great, modular framework that enhances flexibility and playability. Church & State also has a couple of rule addendums which I think are just spiffy. These are Genre Points and Investigation Montages.
Genre Points are a tweaking of the Mutants & Masterminds’ Hero Point system so as to encourage groups to play more, well, in genre. I only wish I had these rules during my last Mutants & Masterminds session where a group of supposedly four-color heroes tortured, maimed and killed with impunity. It was very Justice League meets, um, Slipknot. In my mind, Genre Points are what Mutants & Masterminds is missing. They’re that big simple rule fix that would make it all better. What’s more, Genre Points are not tied to any particular genre. They are flexible and portable across a number of different styles of play, meaning that they would work differently in a four-color Freedom City game than they would in, say, a Nocturnals game or the Bronze-Age Church & State.
Investigation Montages are also way cool. Essentially, they add a functionality to Mutants & Masterminds that makes those boring, information gathering scenes fun and competitive while giving players a chance to show off their characters’ abilities. Remember in the Batman comics where Batman would be shown in a series of panels roughing up an informant, looking through a microscope and other Detective-ish things only to end up with big, wide, white eyes and light-bulb over his head as he realizes who the villain really was. Well, investigation montages add that to Mutants & Masterminds.
Through a series of relevant skill rolls, players can accumulate points to get to the bottom of whatever the heck is going on in the GM’s head. The resulting scenes are glossed over quickly with either the GM or the player essentially describing what happens to achieve the rolled result. Quick, easy, fun and as applicable to gathering clues as it is to researching a spell. So, that Gathering Information roll is no longer a roll against a difficulty and then the GM reading text out of a notebook. With these montage thingies, it would have action and, best of all, it could make you look cool - without katanae.
Earlier I also mentioned something called Verdict Points. Wanting to be thorough, I’ll address those here as well. Verdict Points are outlined in the chapter “Murder is the Case That They Gave Me.” I had a hard time finding them, as I mentioned before because they are explained throughout the chapter.
What Verdict Points do is make the verdict of a trial a bit more competitive, interesting, and relevant. I like these rules better than the Trial Checks in Crooks but they would seem to require a bit more preparation by the GM to use in an adventure outside of Church & State.
Final Comments
In my opinion, the rules for Genre Points and Investigation Montages are easily worth 8 bucks alone and they only account for three pages of Church & State. The supplement is not without its flaws, however.
For those lacking the wherewithal or option to print the document in grayscale, Church & State will use up a lot of ink. Some of the art won’t print too well in grayscale as some of it plays towards a dark, film noir-ish style. But the text and all the relevant adventure stuff will print fine in greyscale, so the functionality doesn’t suffer here, just the shiny artwork.
Also, my experience as a GM gives me pause at the number of NPCs involved in the main flashpoint of the adventure. The way the relationships are set up, too, may cause some problems. My suggestion would be to just have everyone sleeping with somebody or owing somebody some money. That’s usually enough to warrant a good bit of the old ultraviolence and, believe it or not, it’ll make this motley supporting cast even more memorable.
The highpoints of the supplement are its modular design and its rule additions. A lot of adventures say that there’s no plotwagon. They promise that they’re not linear drudgery. This one actually follows through on that promise. For that, the author deserves a medal. If I were to write an adventure, I would model it on this approach. It really is that good.
The additions of Genre Points and Investigation Montages also go a long way towards making Mutants & Masterminds better at doing what it was intended to do. The best news is that these rules can be easily ported over to pretty much any d20 campaign with minimal fuss.
So, it’s an adventure supplement that’s a far sight better than the average adventure that comes with reusable maps and a couple of “house” rules that will have the authors of M&M Annual #1 waking up with cold sweats. The final verdict, I must say, is that this is one adventure supplement that makes Church & State okay in my book. Just don’t try to put the Ten Commandments on the bookmark…
