About Mutants & Masterminds and movie The Spirit

The Spirit - Quick Review

Movie what is close to Sin City and 300 movies both in comic style and people behind it. Cool comic style superhero adventure with stylished black and white contrast in some parts. Even though The Spirit is visually awesome it left me a bit cold. I think I must see it again, because I really did not know what to expect. I bet, that the second view it will rock harder.

Spirit has this 50's feel in it. It is a superhero story where superhero doesn't wear bright spandex and shoot lazer from his eyes, but more gritty. The Spirit is a superhero who can fight and endure a lot of damage. Basically that is his superpower. Super-stamina. Also as he is "the spirit of the city" he uses the city as his weapon and says and performs it in one really cool scene. That I call abusing environment to fight.

Main bad guy is Octopus, mad professor who created spirit. He shares the similar power with spirit, enduring lots of beating. And he is batshit insane changing his appearance in every scene from samurai theme to even nazi theme. Samuel L. Jackson rocks here! Plot was simple and there was nothing extra in it. Everything what happened had a reason and was securily tied to the plot. Actually, I liked this movie a lot.

I would give it 4 stars. Or maybe even 4½ stars after re-watch.


Mutants & Masterminds Problem Solved

I have had two problems with M&M. First player didn't know what kind of character she would like to play and second I didn't know what kind of setting I would like to run. We already decided that we'd take the line where superheroes wear bright colors. Really Marvel style actually. I have read a lot Marvel comics when I was a kid and early teen, but today I am not that interested in that kind of superhero action. We thought anyways that we should try something different and go with bright colors and comic like plot.

Neither of us were that excited. Well, excited yes because it would have been different but there was a problem that would we enjoy it? Sometimes different is good, but why risk it? Neither of us are superhero fans today, so planning to play M&M is something different we would usually play, so why put extra pressure of risk in it?

Anyways, I have liked the movie and comics Sin City. I've wanted to play a gritty city adventure with strange NPC's, corruption and violence and always thought that World of Darkness with mortal characters would be great for it. But after seeing The Spirit all the parts got together. The Spirit + Sin City = Mutants & Masterminds adventure. That felt right time right when me and my player thought and discussed about M&M. So now we found our style what kind of Mutants & Masterminds game we want.

Warming Up

First step is that my player tells me her character concept. I told her that she can imagine basically what kind of character she ever wants. M&M character creation rules most probably will perform it. So, I am waiting for her character concept. When I know her character concept, I create a couple of NPC character. Possibly some ordinary human to interact with and who maybe even can help in smaller scale. After it I will create a couple of bad guys. Those you can beat and then I will create main bad guy. Most important things creating a main bad guy are:

a) Why is he a bad guy? What happened that he turned out to be evil?
b) What is his goal and motive? What does he want that makes him a bad guy?
c) How will he make hero's life hard?
d) How can he be beat? Captured and sent to high security prison or destroyed?

Then I'd just fill the holes. Write down a couple of cool scenes I'd like to run. Start for the adventure and loose ending conditions. Fill few spots in between but leave enough space so course of play can change things. Thanks to The Spirit I am now excited about Mutants & Masterminds! And I really am waiting for character creation so I can create the other things for the adventure. It will propably last for... 5 to 20 sessions approx. Like CoC adventure did.