Foxbat for President: Sacred Cows and Hamburger

Sacred cows make the best hamburger, or so the saying goes.  When it comes to RPGs, they tend to provide grist for the mill.

There are sacred cows aplenty in rules systems, of course.  That’s one of the reasons why we have edition wars:  change anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it might be, or how much better you think the new version is, and there’s sure to be someone loudly decrying the change and lamenting that the new version just isn’t the same game any more.  No more assassins or cavaliers in 2e?  Sacrilege.  No more THAC0 in 3e?  A travesty.  No more Vancian casting in 4e?  Well, that’s fine, but not for any game whose title includes the words dungeon and dragon.

That’s not the sort I’m thinking about today, though.  I’m interested in the sacred cows within the settings.  The characters, locations, and other elements that are always present, if only lurking somewhere in the background.  The ones that define that setting, that — in a sense — make it what it is.  The ones that are iconic — not Tordek and Mialee, but the real icons.  The ones with names like Bigby, Mordenkainen, Raistlin, Elminster, Vecna.  (There tends to be a good share of wizards among them.  I don’t believe this is a coincidence.)  The guys you know and love.  Or hate.  Sometimes both.

A campaign set in one of these published settings must acknowledge its sacred cows at one point.  Either it kowtows to them, making use of the pre-existing body of lore that surrounds them (however nebulous it might be in some cases — how much do most D&D players really know about Bigby, other than that he’s the guy with the hand spells?), or it slaughters them, creating some explanation for why they’re no longer present or have no impact.  The former option limits the GM somewhat; the latter often infuriates players who have a fondness for that setting.  Witness the reaction of Greyhawk fans to Greyhawk Wars, or the more recent reaction of Forgotten Realms fans to the 4e redesign of that world.

Which brings us to Foxbat.

Foxbat, as he will appear in the Champions Online MMORPG to be released later this year.

Foxbat, Freddy Foswell, is a classic supervillain of the Champions universe.  Foxbat is a very particular type of supervillain:  the total loony.  He’s the sort of villain who goes about armed with a ping-pong ball gun, committing bizarre and random crimes, never (at least not intentionally) physically hurting anyone.  Mechanically, he’s got what it would take to be a credible threat as a villain, albeit a fairly low-powered one; Mechanon or Dr. Destroyer, he is not.  But his character is such that he’s rather ineffectual.

If you’re not familiar with the Champions universe, think of Batman from the TV series of the 60s.  Make him a villain instead of a hero, and give him the metafictional twist of believing that he’s a comic-book character.  That’s Foxbat in a nutshell.  He’s a lighthearted comic-relief sort of villain, to fit a four-color superhero game.  He’s the sort of villain meant to have players facepalming and groaning when his name comes up:  Foxbat again?  What nonsensical scheme is he up to this time?

Well, in Foxbat for President, by Michael Satran, published by BlackWyrm Games… Foxbat is running for President.  That’s the premise and the main hook of this 100-page HERO system adventure module for characters of 350-450 points.  That’s a broad range, which covers characters ranging from the 350-point standard starting hero to an experienced hero with 100 extra points under his belt — only the higher-powered cosmic-level heroes are excluded.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of this adventure is going to hinge on how you like to treat this particular sacred cow.  If you feel a deep affection for the Foxbat character and his lore, chances are you’ll enjoy seeing his audacity on center stage here.  If the character annoys you the GM as much as he annoys the players’ characters, you probably won’t care for the adventure.  There’s more to it than Foxbat, naturally, but Foxbat is integral to it.  Replacing Foxbat in the adventure would require quite a bit of rewriting, even if you were to use a similar “weird schemes that really don’t hurt people” villain, such as my Enigma.  Foxbat just has a style all his own, and this adventure is angled toward it.

Running for President, it turns out, isn’t Foxbat’s scheme after all.  Oh, he still jumps on it the minute he gets the chance — and he proves surprisingly popular, with his “Make America Fun Again!” slogan.  It’s not his idea, though.  See, it turns out that DEMON, an organization of evil magical cultists, has realized that Foxbat is a symbol of one of the ancient enemies of the Aztec god of darkness, Tezcatlipoca.  They want to build him up in order to be able to sacrifice him for great power, so, with the help of a little mind control, they circulate petitions in all 50 states, gathering voters’ signatures until Foxbat is eligible to run.  The scheme also includes conjuring up the spirits of dead Presidents and sticking them into dead bodies.  And there’s the additional complication of the Undead Skull, a villain who might as well be twin to Acererak, the demilich of the Tomb of Horrors.

I’m not including this as spoiler information.  It’s basically all from page 2 of the adventure.  That’s right, this thing opens with demiliches, zombie Presidents Nixon, Taft, Harrison, etc., skulking cultists, nefarious uses of mind control… and of course Foxbat for President.  To Make America Fun Again.

On the face of it, this is a pretty silly adventure.  And it’s true that the opening provides for a lot of comic potential.  You can string along the Foxbat candidacy for a long time, if you so desire, and Satran goes so far as to provide 26 plot seeds (one for each letter of the alphabet!) outlining events that might occur during Foxbat’s run.  It does get a lot darker and more serious toward the end, though:  human sacrifices, Aztec gods, and a rather disturbing villain all make their appearances.  This may not be to everyone’s taste.

Foxbat for President!

The adventure itself includes a loose skeleton structure of plot seeds and incidents, as well as several more-detailed “encounter areas,” including keyed maps of such locations as a prison yard, a downtown street, a hospital, several homes, and a large cavern.  All told, it takes up 46 pages, including some notes about the ending, including the hilarious “Foxbat WINS?”  The remaining 50-plus pages are character sheets of Foxbat’s minions and some of the new villains the adventure introduces, including multiple plot seeds for further adventures involving each of them.

The major down side is what’s not included.  For one, there are no stats, even in capsule form, for Foxbat, nor for another Champions villain, Mechassassin, who shows up during the adventure.  There are also no stats for the various DEMON operatives.  This adventure therefore requires not only the basic rulebook — which is a reasonable assumption — but also the Conquerors, Killers, and Crooks and DEMON: Servants of Darkness supplements, which are not.  To its credit, it’s up-front about this, disclosing the requirement on its covers.  However, a stand-alone adventure would be much more useful.  I imagine there might have been some copyright concerns over reprinting these character sheets wholesale, but surely a capsule statblock covering the important parts wouldn’t be too much to ask?  It’s easy enough to make up stats for the DEMON contingent, and to use a different mercenary-assassin character in place of Mechassassin, but Foxbat is pretty central to the thing.  Not having stats for him is sort of like buying Tomb of Horrors and finding that to get Acererak’s stats, you need to also buy Monster Manual 3.

It is, in short, extremely user-unfriendly to those whose library does not include those particular HERO books.  Such as me.  (I generally make up my own villains, so I purchase “villain books” rarely, and mainly for inspiration.)

I can’t recommend Foxbat for President unless you have access to those other books.  I think it’s a shame that the module limits its audience in that way, because it’s generally pretty well-designed, competent, and shows real affection for the Foxbat character.  It’s classic, and it’s often funny.  It’s dependent on those non-core sources, though, and to use it without them, you’ll need to do quite a bit of work.  And probably slaughter a sacred cow or two, not that that’s a bad thing.

Foxbat for President is available in print ($19.95 US) or PDF ($9.95 US) from BlackWyrm Games.  The PDF is also available from DriveThruRPG.com for $9.95.

Want to learn more about Foxbat for President? Read on…

• Atomic Array: Foxbat for President (Atomic Array 025)
• Foxbat for President: Official Campaign Brochure
• Game Cryer: Review by Chris Perrin
• Vulcan Stev: What if that annoying geek from high school took over
• Uncle Bear: Foxbat Read Through
• A Butterfly Dreaming: Sacred Cows and Hamburger

Drop by BlackWyrm Games and order Foxbat for President today!

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