 Goto [ Index ] |
The book is another slim Hero paperback with a plain white-with-black-trim cover, but it gets the point across: A couple of guards in riot gear are escorting long-time joke villain Bulldozer (you know he's Bulldozer because he has the letters "BULLDOZER" tattooed down the length of his right arm) while he wears power-negation cuffs and an orange prison uniform. The interior has fairly good layouts (by co-author John Lees) and art, and several of the sections are prefaced by diary entries from Stronghold inmate "Requiem", another veteran Champions character previously known as Deathsinger from the group Deathstroke. (Most of Deathstroke, except for Requiem's beloved brother Frost, got killed in what co-author Steve Long admits was a purge of characters he thought were useless.)
Chapter One: Supervillains In The Hands Of The Law answers the question, "So, how do you get INTO Stronghold, anyway?"
In the game universe, "superlaw" detailing the handling of accused super-beings has its precedent in the 1968 James "Smasher" Aronson vs. United States case, in which the Supreme Court established a so-called "different strokes" standard for dealing with super-powered defendants who require special methods to be dealt with under law. In a sidebar on page 6, the book explains that the legal standards in the setting are based on three unrealistic premises made necessary by the fact that comicbook heroes can operate legally under secret identities: one, that society in general tolerates supers, two, that the law allows superheroes to help enforce the law despite not having public IDs, and three, for some reason super-individuals do not get sued every time they do something some lawyer regards as actionable.
With Aronson, the USA in the Champions Universe created distinctions between normal humans, "paranormals" who get their powers by intense training or gadgets (like the Champions' Defender and Nightwing) and true superhumans (like Sapphire) who have "capabilities or powers that exceed those a normal human being could ever possess." There are also "antimask" laws aggravating the penalties for criminal acts committed while masked (based on real-world laws against concealing one's identity in the commission of a crime). In 1980, the Federal government passed a superhuman registration act, and while this is difficult to enforce, it makes a difference in whether a hero is "state sanctioned" or not. A sanctioned hero operates with full powers of the law and cooperation with agencies, but has to register his identity and other information. A non-sanctioned hero is a vigilante who is usually wanted by the law- but in the precedent of Burdeau v. McDowell (1921), the courts established that search-and-seizure rules do NOT apply to private citizens... so it is possible for a vigilante to commit breaking and entering to get information on a criminal and turn it in to the police, and the law can act on that information- but it can also prosecute the vigilante for B&E, if it catches him.
The book then spends several pages reviewing real criminal law with some regard to how it is applied to superhumans. For instance, using ANY superpower on an individual- even a non-lethal one like EGO Attack- is aggravated assault in all 50 states and Federal law. Likewise threatening to use a superpower on someone counts as "reckless endangerment." The law considers powers like Mind Scan to be tracking devices, and these require a search warrant to be used in gathering information for arrest.
After arrest a subject is booked. He is fingerprinted and searched but can't be forced to reveal anything (which means that a defendant might get a criminal record without revealing his Secret ID, if it wasn't already known and prints weren't already on file). Usually a probable-cause hearing is combined with a pre-trial arraignment (called 'first appearance' here) where the court may appoint an attorney for a defendant who can't afford one, and set terms of bail. Most supervillains are denied bail on grounds of being a "flight risk." If the court determines grounds for a case, it usually sends the case to a grand jury to determine whether a trial is warranted.
After this stage, Chapter One focuses on the trial phase, which as a dramatic event frequently portrayed in movies and TV shows, is given a lot of options for GM plot development. The judge could be on the take, mind controlled, or crazed and senile (especially if your GM is David E. Kelley). The defense attorney could be overworked or in over his head (which is often the case in reality). One of the PCs might be called into jury duty in his Secret ID for the same trial where his superhero ID is called as a prosecution witness. And so on. The most common complication in a superhero game is that a fight breaks out between heroes and villains ('Neil Gaiman once described fight scenes in comic books as having the same importance as musical numbers in a musical or sex scenes in a porn film'). This could be anything from a straightforward attempt of the supervillain's teammates to rescue him to an infiltration-specialist villain pretending to be an attorney or the judge and getting discovered. Pages 27-29 have a set of random trial elements and a set of ten possible trial scenarios for Champions.
Assuming the defendant is convicted, in the Champions Universe, the aforementioned Aronson case established the government's right to use power-suppressing drugs on a prisoner if there was no other method of containing him, leading to precedents that allow the authorities to use more advanced power suppression equipment. Precedents also establish that a prisoner is only eligible for Stronghold if the defendant's capabilities have shown that only Stronghold is capable of imprisoning him (the gadget villain Utility has proven so adept at escaping regular facilities that he's currently held in Stronghold, despite being a 'paranormal' with no innate powers). In a few extreme cases the government is given the power to put a prisoner in "Hot Sleep" or monitored induced coma; the request is usually granted when the prisoner in question is a master villain or monster who is so threatening that no other method will suffice to contain him.
After brief review of other American legal standards (such as which superbeings count as 'persons' under the 14th Amendment) there's an "After The Trial" section with writeups of the portable power-suppression equipment, including a courtroom version of a power negation collar designed to look less "prejudicial" to jurors, as well as the armored transport vehicles Stronghold uses to transport prisoners from various states. This leads directly to... Chapter Two: Welcome to Stronghold, which is the writeup of the super-prison itself. It is built into the "Devil's Head" mesa in New Mexico, and although there's a nearby town that helps supply the facility, the remote location itself enhances security- some inmates who escaped collapsed in the desert from exposure.
The first part of this chapter goes over the game history of the facility, which mostly corresponds to earlier editions of the Champions game: Charles Wildman, who first proposed the idea of using power suppressors to deal with super-criminals, was approved by Congress as Stronghold's first warden in 1978. The first decade of the prison was mostly quiet and successful, and the staff developed the portable restraint tech that made it easier to transport prisoners from other parts of the country to New Mexico. But in 1990, the "Great Stronghold Breakout" happened after a combination of a flu bug and a heavy thunderstorm incapacitated the guards and killed the power grid of the suppression field. Wildman was kicked out in disgrace, and while his more hardline replacement, Warden Kennedy, served several years, he was in turn forced to resign after a disgruntled guard helped the monster villain Grond escape. This time, Wildman's son, Arthur Wildman, applied for the job as warden, and was approved by Congress, and since then Wildman has tried to redeem his father's reputation while incorporating the security reforms Kennedy instituted after the Great Stronghold Breakout.
After that history there's a review of the site layout. There is a ground-level operation where new prisoners are processed, and where the administrative and medical wards are. Automated security towers are set up against break-ins, and the power suppression fields begin at above ground level, although most prisoners won't get to see the ground level after entry except on special occasions when the auditoriums are used.
The underground prison has ten levels on the Greek alphabet scale (although Alpha and Beta have two levels each, because these are where the bulk of the relatively less dangerous prisoners are housed). The inmates are classified and housed on a two-tier ratings system (described in Chapter 3) where a 1 to 5 scale ranks how likely the inmate is to escape and a terror-alert style color code ranks how much danger he poses to everyone else. Thus the likes of Pulsar are on Yellow-2 at the upper levels of the cellblocks, while Menton, the world's most powerful psionic, is Red-5 and kept in hot sleep at the lowest level of the prison, where the capital punishment chamber is also kept, and occasionally used.
Since the power suppression devices can act against every special effect at once (against both common sense and the rule system, which normally applies 'Adjustment' Powers against powers of one given effect at most) the technology behind them is arcane even by the "rubber science" standards of a supers universe. The book says that the devices seem to act against whatever metaphysical principle allows powers to exist in the first place, and they also act neurologically by preventing an inmate from triggering powers. Of course some natural traits like claws and horns cannot be suppressed this way, so the staff puts caps on natural weapons and the like. It's also theorized that magic can override the suppression, that the generators can be overloaded (although this is less likely now that they're on a network) or that a prisoner might get "acclimated" to the suppression field.
Finally this chapter gives a brief review of how other countries house their supercriminals. The Canadian setup is very similar to America's (it's actually called 'Stronghold North' and uses the same tech), and the EU super-prison likewise uses high-tech power negation but is more focused on rehabilitation than Stronghold and has banned "hot sleep" as inhumane. On the other hand, China and Russia don't bother with expensive power negation systems, instead relying on powered-armor guards and "more brutal" methods to keep prisoners in line, such as drugs.
Chapter Three: Life Behind Bars describes how a prisoner is processed (including psychological review, analysis of powers, and assignment of uniform and cellblock according to the two-tier system). Then it goes over the daily Stronghold prison schedule, where everything is timed on a tight security schedule. There are three 8-hour guard shifts (1 am-9 am, 9 to 5 and then 5 to 1) and prisoners are let out for breakfast on rotating shifts from 7 am to 8:30 pm, with similar routines for lunch and dinner. Between these periods, prisoners get free time either in their cells or in their cell level's "quad" (common area). "Lights out" is 11 pm.
The prison is more strict than most real prisons, but this is actually required by the higher level of security, which along with a higher than normal guards-to-inmates ratio means that abuse of prisoners is also less likely. Prisoners are not allowed to take jobs in the facility, and Stronghold does not tolerate sexual "fraternization" between inmates or with guards. It also does not allow smoking, which is the main source of prisoner complaints. Thus cigarettes are a major component of Stronghold's black market, which leads to a discussion of prison etiquette, and of gangs. Etiquette is similar to other prisons: don't be a "rat," don't rely on the staff to handle your beef with another prisoner, and always refer to a prisoner by his villain name unless he tells you otherwise. The gangs that exist in Stronghold organize for mutual protection, and usually make business off the black market. Whereas most non-super prisons have gangs organized on racial lines, that isn't possible at Stronghold, because most of the prisoners are white (because for some reason most supers in this setting are white). In the gang setting, "paranormals" like Utility and Mechassassin often end up being the leaders because they're highly capable without powers or even gadgets.
Chapter Four: Personnel gives brief writeups of the "firm but fair" administrators of Stronghold, and a few support characters like the chaplain and the guy who runs the pushcart selling grocery items to staff and inmates. There is also a package deal for a Stronghold guard, which is separate from the personal gear and anti-super technology a guard carries as equipment, which is also written up separately and includes "everyday" gear as well as the full riot gear and high-powered tasers they can get access to in emergencies. This "personnel" section also includes the writeups of Requiem and Frost, a low-powered villainess named Alchemica, and a couple of mega-villains who are currently in hot sleep.
Running the Joint: Gamematering Stronghold (sic) is Chapter Five, the GM's advice chapter. Unlike some other Hero books, this section doesn't contain a secret "GM's Vault" of info because it's assumed that PCs shouldn't be going to Stronghold in the first place- except for a few scenarios that are discussed here.
In adapting Stronghold to other Hero genres, the book reinforces the conception of Stronghold as something specialized for supervillain containment. The "realistic" genres of Pulp HERO and Dark Champions have their roots in real prisons, with all their overcrowding and corruption. The Fantasy version is basically an anti-magic prison for powerful wizards, while Star HERO posits the idea of an actual prison planet, which (much like Escape From New York) basically means dumping the convicts on a world without stardrive technology and letting them fight it out amongst themselves.
The book goes over other options for changing Stronghold for a campaign, such as reducing the overall level of security, which of course will make escapes more likely and make the prison more of a regular feature. Another option is to have actual superhumans as guards, or guards in powered armor, although that also means the power suppression systems will have to be limited. These ideas give the potential for building a foriegn prison along a different model, or adapting the information given for Stronghold to one's own campaign setting.
The remainder of the chapter discusses scenarios for using PCs in Stronghold, either as heroes who there on business (at which point a riot breaks out or someone tries to escape) or as wrongly-convicted prisoners who have to deal with prison life (or possibly as undercover agents whose convictions were set up). As the book puts it, in the real world, the purpose of a prison is to keep dangerous people in. But in RPGs and in other media, the dramatic purpose of a prison is for characters to break out, or sometimes break in. And while the descriptions of Stronghold security make it highly unlikely that prisoners could regain their powers or escape even if they did, this section reviews those possibilities, in particular outside assault, infiltrating the security staff, or overloading the generators. The two main possibilities in such cases are prisoner riots or attempts to take hostages, and the book gives descriptions for how the GM can run these incidents.
And in addition to the idea of heroes infiltrating the prison for various reasons there's also a brief idea for a campaign where the PCs are super-criminals sentenced to Stronghold- called "The SH."
SUMMARY
Of course this sourcebook is not realistic in terms of what real prisons look like or how they operate, especially in terms of how much technology is used, the high ratio of guard staff to inmates, and the enhanced level of security, which generally prevents most of the "fraternizing" and other aspects of American prison life. It is however "realist" in the sense that if powers existed (which has to be the case in a supers game) and the technology existed to control them, then this is likely what the government would do to deal with convicted villains. So Stronghold is a very good model for how an existing "four-color comicbook" universe deals with supercrime, and presents how prosecution and punishment would work with an eye for the dramatic possibilities of a story. Style: 3
Stronghold doesn't just describe the subject, it does a lot to make the prison environment work for adventures.
Substance: 4
The book presents good basic layouts for the prison environment and goes into a lot of detail on how real law could be adapted to a supers setting.
