10/2/2019 Finally completed my set of these guys and just in time because of the prices they are fetching these days.

These came in surprise bags released some time in the 90s or early 2000s.  There are 16 figures based on Greek mythology.  They are about 50mm, and are made of soft plastic.  Only released in Europe as far as I know.  Very rare.  Most people think they were made by Yolanda of Spain, but I do not know for certain.













8 Horrors







8 Heroes






















I found this picture on the net (MXD I think).
This picture is also from MXD I think
This picture is also from some place on the net.
Found this picture on the net a few years ago, I don't remember where.

This is the second in a series of articles for V&V 3.0 focusing on building character archetypes. I want to reiterate that these guides are for players who are already familiar with V&V 3.0, and that my ideas of how each archetype should play are a mix of what I’ve seen in comics, other TTRPGs, and my own opinions and personal play style. Moving on. The Blaster has been around since the dawn of comics in one form or another—Cyclops of the X-Men (1963), and Black Lightning (1977) are great examples. A Blaster’s role is to deal high damage at medium to long range with a high degree of accuracy. Some useful abilities for the Blaster are: Disintegration Ray, Electrical Bolt, Flame Blast, Heightened Expertise, Laser, Power Blast, Repulsion Blast, Sonic Blast, Special Weapon, Telekinesis, and Vibratory Blast. As for Ability Modifiers, I highly recommend the following: Area Effect, Armor Piercing, Autofire, Activation Power, Focused, Increased Duration, Different Damage Type, and Reduced PR.

When most people think of a primary damage dealer, they think of D&D’s Evocation Wizards, Sorcerers, Rogues, Rangers, and terms like Glass Cannon and DPS come up. In V&V combat flows differently than most TTRPGs—they can be over very quickly, or drag on as the offense of one side struggles vs the defensive powers of the other. With so many Abilities, and so many options in combat it’s hard to pin down a target if they play intelligently, and there are plenty of Defensive Abilities that can mitigate or even shut down incoming damage. So how do we make sure our Blaster is good at her job? While you can’t account for everything, you can at least make sure you’re hitting often, dealing consistent damage, and bypassing some of the more common defenses. Unlike the Tank, we’re going to start with our Offensive options.

The Blaster is concerned with Damage Types more than any other archetype. In V&V there are Full, Sub, and Specific Damage Types. For instance, Energy is a Full Damage Type, while its Sub-Types are broken down into Electromagnetic, Energy Beam, High Temperature, Light, and Radiation, which are broken down even further into Specific types like Electrical Shock and Flames. We’re not too concerned with the Sub and Specific types as much as we are Full, because most Protection will mitigate a Full damage type. The most common types of Protection you will run into are vs. Kinetic and Energy damage. Yes—Armor, Ice Armor, and Force Field offer flat damage reduction across four Full Types, but the most potent Protection Abilities like Invulnerability and Absorption Protection usually focus on one or two. In my experience, the least common type of Protection is Psychic. There just aren’t a lot of Abilities that deal Psychic damage, which is where the most potent Ability Modifier for our Blaster comes into play, and that is Different Damage Type.

If you flip to page 89 of your Mighty Protectors manual, you’ll see Different Damage Type on the top right. It states that “This changes an attack Ability’s damage type. There may be an additional charge depending on whether the new damage type is more (or less) expensive. Notice that there is no point cost for changing the damage type of an Attack Ability among Kinetic, Energy, Bio, or Entropy. However, there is a 5 point cost for changing it to Psychic and a 10 point cost for changing it to Other. That’s because these two damage types are hard to defend against. Let’s start by building our “Primary Nuke.”

Power Blast. Has there ever been a simpler and more iconic V&V Ability? I don’t think so. For the paltry cost of 1 Power you can deal double digit damage. In a game where non-superpowered crooks and criminals have an average of 5 Hit Points, this makes dealing with street crime a breeze. Verses other superpowered individuals, it’s still a potent offensive tool, requiring only a couple of well-placed blasts to take down most opponents. We’ll get into the build later, but just so you know, I’m buying Different Damage Type ‘Psychic’ as my first Ability Modifier.

Now we need to make sure we hit often and stay out of trouble. Normally I would go with Heightened Agility because you get the benefit of increased To Hit, Defense, Power, and Hit Points, but a Blaster should be fighting at a distance. This build really doesn’t need that much Power to function, so I’m going to go with Heightened Expertise and Heightened Defense. These powers in combination make her both accurate and evasive. To help her keep her distance, I’m choosing Flight because it’s useful for staying out of harm’s way, and for getting line of sight to targets that are using hard cover. Lastly, I’m going to invest in some Protection as you never know when a lucky roll will overcome her defenses. Armor is a great choice here, and I’m going to apply some modifiers to make it cheaper. Let’s look at our Ability list:

Power Blast – Modifiers: Different Damage Type ‘Psychic’, Body Part (Eyes)

Heightened Expertise

Heightened Defense

Flight

Armor – Modifiers: Gear, Light Partial Coverage

Our core Abilities are in bold. As a Standard Power Level character, we may spend a maximum of 20 CPs in our four Core Abilities. As always, some weaknesses help round out our character, and refund some points so we’ll have enough to finish our build.

Farsighted – Has only Basic Vision within a range of 5″

Now that all the details have been worked out, let’s meet Farsight! *rimshot*

 I’ve engaged in a little min-maxing, but nothing outside of our theme and nothing too overly powerful. I was able to afford 20 Points in Power Blast and change its damage type to Psychic (5 CPs) by applying the “Body Part” Ability Modifier for a 5 CP refund. This does means that a hit to her eyes could potentially disable her Power Blast, but an attacker would suffer a -6 for the Called Shot. Add this to her Physical Defense of 6 and a Called Shot to her eyes would suffer a total of -12 making it highly unlikely. Farsight can use Flight to stay at maximum range (12″ or 60 feet), nullifying the threat of melee opponents, and making her even harder to hit, while suffering little from the reciprocal Range Difficulty penalty. She even has decent Protection in the form of some light armor that I maximized using the Gear and Light Coverage modifiers. I even shuffled some of the Protection points around to afford her some Psychic Protection as that’s her only real blind spot in terms of defenses. Her Farsighted Weakness is flavorful without handicapping her too badly—she is supposed to stay out of close range after all, plus the wordplay was too good to pass up.

Our Blaster is finished! She’s accurate, deals moderate to high damage, she’s very mobile, and hard to hit. There are so many ways to go with this archetype it’s staggering. V&V has no shortage of ranged attack options, mobility powers, and modifiers that help with your damage output.

This is the first of a series of articles for V&V 3.0 focusing on specific archetypal character builds or roles. While V&V has no class roles, that doesn’t stop people from wanting to play Tanks, Healers, DPS, Support, Controllers, Speedsters, etc. This desire might come from the comfort and familiarity that other TTRPGs character classes offer, or it could come from the original inspiration for superhero RPGs themselves—the comic books that introduced us to the genre. No matter where it comes from, it’s worth nurturing because it helps flesh out the identity and motivation of a player’s hero and helps to get them into character. Since it’s not entirely obvious how to mimic all the classic class roles using V&V, I’ll outline some system specific ways we can accomplish our goal.

Enter, the Tank:

When most players think of a Tank, they imagine her being durable—able to take a ton of punishment for her teammates. The problem with TTRPGs is that you will need to force enemies to attack your Tank. If you’re extremely tough, then they will likely turn their attention to softer targets. That’s why every great Tank has a Taunt—an ability that forces enemies to focus on them. In V&V, that ability is Emotion Control.

Emotion Control is a Psychic Save Attack. In V&V terms, this means that targets hit by it get to roll to resist its effects. In TTRPGs this is commonly known as a Save, Saving Throw, or Save Roll. As this will be the ability that defines our Tank build, we need to make sure it hits, and that the target fails their Save. We can do that with other Abilities like Heightened Expertise to gain a bonus To Hit with Emotion Control, and Willpower C) Self-Control which will allow you to Push to impose a greater Save Penalty on your target. Self-Control is also a handy ability in a pinch allowing you to run faster, lift more, and hit harder. Sounds like a great Tank power!

So, we have Emotion Control, Heightened Expertise, and Willpower C) Self-Control. There are many ways to go from here, but now that we have our utility abilities out of the way, we should focus on defensive and offensive abilities. V&V smartly suggest that all characters roll or choose two offensive abilities, two defensive abilities, and two miscellaneous abilities. This makes your hero well rounded—able to deal damage, survive, and perform some other useful tasks. There are dozens of abilities to choose from, but I’m going to narrow it down into three styles of Tanking—the Evasive Tank, Thorn Tank, and The Brick. Let’s start with the Defensive Abilities.

The Evasive Tank aims to avoid being hit. Some useful Abilities for an Evasive Tank are: Glare, Heightened Agility, Heightened Defense, Invulnerability, Non-Corporealness, and Teleportation. The Thorn Tank uses Ability Fields to deal damage back to their attackers when they are hit. Useful Abilities for Thorn Tanks are: Chemical Body, Disintegration Field, Electrical Field, Flame Aura, and Reflection. While the first two types of Tanks can be fun and interactive, I’ll be building The Brick. What can I say, I like the classics. Useful Abilities for The Brick are: Absorption, Armor, Density Change, Durability, Energy, Force Field, Heightened Endurance, Invulnerability, Regeneration, Shield, and Stretching Abilities.

I’m going to go with Armor and Heightened Endurance. Armor provides a flat damage reduction against the most common types of attacks, while Heightened Endurance gives our Hit Points a nice boost while also adding a hefty chunk to our Power score which we’ll need to fuel our Emotion Control, Willpower, Pushing, and to Roll With damage. Now on to our Offensive Abilities. It is very likely that the targets we have goaded into attacking us have some way to attack us from range. Therefore, I’m skipping making a list and I’m going straight for a longtime V&V staple—Power Blast. Its Power cost is low, and it deals respectable damage. Wait. What? You want to punch things? Some useful Close Combat Offensive Abilities for The Brick are: Heightened Expertise, Heightened Attack, Natural Weaponry, Poison, Siphon, and Stretching Abilities. Actually—now that I think of it, Stretching Abilities offers some great utility and defense, while allowing you to punch things at range. Ok—new plan! We’re going with Natural Weaponry and Stretching Abilities, and we’re ditching Armor. This Brick malleable! Let’s look at our creation so far, keeping in mind this is a Standard Power Level hero. That’s 150 CPs (Character Points), eighty of which will go into our Abilities, while the remaining 70 will go into our BCs.

Emotion Control

Heightened Endurance

Heightened Expertise

Natural Weaponry

Stretching Abilities – Elongation, Oozing, Plasticity

Willpower C) Self-Control

I’ve used bold text to indicate which of our Abilities are our Core Abilities. In V&V a new character may have up to four Core Abilities which may start at 10, 20, or 30 CPs for Low, Standard, and High Power Level characters respectively.  The other Abilities must have less than 20 CPs allotted to them. To get some points back, and add some flavor to our hero, we’ll be adding some Weaknesses:

Can’t Feel Pain – “Pain don’t hurt” –Dalton

Compulsion – Our Brick must always challenge the toughest enemy and may not flee.

After some creative use of modifiers and tweaking of numbers and stats, I give you…

THE PLIABLE MAN!

Gaze at his gelatinous glory. To shave some points from his Emotion Control I applied the “Single Emotion” and “Requires Speech” modifiers. I feel like every good Tank should have to shout to get their opponents’ attentions, and he only needs to focus on one emotion, rather than a broad spectrum. After all, he just needs to make enemies focus on himself. As you can see, he has plenty of Power and Hit points, increased accuracy with his Emotion Control and melee attacks, and the ability to punch targets up to 6” (30 feet) away! He has the added utility of being able to ooze through small cracks, and his Plasticity gives him a whopping 9 Kinetic Protection! Finally, his Willpower lets him Push for a -4 to a target’s Save, +4 to his own Saves, +4 damage, x4 Carrying Capacity, or x4 Movement Rate. On the downside, it costs 4 Power, so use it sparingly.

Our Tank is complete. He has a Taunt, he’s extremely durable, and he’s a capable fighter with some added utility. I hope you enjoyed this character build article. Please check back as I will be creating more, specifically: The Blaster, the Controller, the Support, the Speedster, and the Infiltrator.

snagerdragon:

a batch of dragon artist trading cards for open swaps on ATCs for all

my available cards

Artworks found at the Sergei Sharov site.

Painting from Ray Bradbury’s art collection.





Photo from the Saturday Evening Post found here.

Artworks found at Rijks Museum.

The Apparition, 1973

The Hall of Spiders, 1973

The Dark Breakfast, 1973

Swelter Rehearsing, 1973

On the Way to the Doctor, 1974

The Flood, 1974

Steerpike at Bay, 1974

Titus's Tenth Birthday, 1974

The Skeletons, 1974

Frontispiece illustration for Uncle Silas, 1947.

Cover from "Ghost Stories And Other Horrid Tales" 1997.

Illustration from "Ghost Stories And Other Horrid Tales" 1997

Haunted #1 (March 1963)

Most artworks found at The Royal Academy.

Artist previously shared here.

emordnilap-fr:

took a break from comms for a couple days and drew Flechte! a good old favorite <3

These figures are amazing.   I cannot describe how cool they are.  Just look at the pictures.  60mmish.

Watcher of the South East

The Watcher of the North East

The North West Watcher

The Light

South-West Watcher

The Lesser Redoubt


Illustrations for "The Dream of X" written by William Hope Hodgson. The novel was originally released in 1912, these illustrations are from an edition published in 1977.

Artworks originally shared here in 2010.

Most artworks found at the Heritage Auctions site.
There isn't much there but Stephen's website can be found here.

I just found these three guys in an ebay lot from England.  I suspect that they are either bootlegs or a new run for the bags Toy Major sells them in with the pirates.  They seem to be just a little bit smaller than the original figures and the guy with two axes has his head in a slightly different position.  Now that I know they exist I will be obsessing about them until I find more.

galleytrot:

Smaugust 3: Pumpkin Drake

zakeno:

I’ve been drawing some dragons based on Medieval paintings to warm up today. ????

As I said before, the first time I played V&V (2.0) I was thirteen years old. I didn’t understand what made a game system good or bad, difficult or easy—all I knew is whether it was fun or not. V&V was just fun. It ticked a lot of boxes for me—you could play as yourself (stats to be determined by you, your overly critical friends, and the GM), you got a totally random set of super powers, and you got to blast bad guys and send them flying. Many of the Powers were open to interpretation, which was good if your GM was on top of things. A lot of the Powers simply asked you to make something up, which was also good—again, if your GM was helpful and understood balance within their campaign. There were some Powers that were just plain broken, such as: a type of Illusions that allowed you to create a near endless horde of hard-light minions, Teleportation which could potentially allow you to travel several lightyears in an instant, and Gravity Control which could multiply the weight of a target many hundreds of times turning them into jelly. You get the idea. There we no caps, no limits—just your imagination and your GM’s willingness to reign it in, or let it run free destroying all that is good and fair in the world. Despite a solid few years of fun, I stopped playing V&V back in 1989. In high school my friends wanted to distance themselves from gaming and do cool things, like get wasted and drive drunk. Good times? I would always keep my books, but never found another group to play with. Flash forward to 2017 and Mighty Protectors (Villains & Vigilantes 3.0). The game’s original creators, Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, had just won a hard-fought case to get their IP back from Fantasy Games Unlimited head, Scott Bizar. They had been working on V&V 3.0 for about 5 years, and wanted to release it to their fans, but had to get over this last legal hurdle. Hurdle cleared, they launched a Kickstarter for the new book, and I slammed my money down with glee. I followed every update as the game got closer and closer to shipping—watching the Stretch Goals pile on, I would be receiving not only the rulebook, but a few adventures and supplements as well.

I received my copy later that summer—a beautiful hardbound book boasting 150 pages—110 more than its predecessor! I dove in and immediately hit a wall. Stat caps? Damage caps? Character Points? You get…150 CPs for a Standard Level hero…80 for Abilities (no longer Powers), and 70 for BCs (not stats). HELP! Now, it wasn’t and isn’t all bad. You still had the option to base your character on yourself, and once I got my head around the Character Point system, I was brewing up heroes like crazy. The book also boasts a ton of races, backgrounds, origins, and motivations—all meant to add depth and dimension to your hero. There’s a section all about the V&V multiverse: government organizations, superhero groups, powerful cosmic beings, criminal organizations, criminal government organizations—from space! There are vehicle and base creation rules, and vehicle combat rules (I’m still figuring the latter out), rules for inventing new Abilities, Ability Modifiers that allow for a deep level of character customization so your Flame Blast won’t be the same as the other guy’s Flame Bast—ever! The bad: There is a rule about Acquiring Targets that forces you to make a Perception Check any time a target moves, sneaks, becomes invisible, etc. since their last attempt to target it. What?! Combat maneuvers are many, but their mechanics are cumbersome and slow, so most players don’t want to use them. The rules require Task checks to perform specific actions but there’s no Skill system. You get a bonus to any Task check that relates to one of your two Backgrounds (think training or careers), which is hard to determine. What if my Background is business? You must use computers in business, so do I always get a bonus when using computers, or are some computing Tasks too difficult for Captain Business? After you go through the lengthy character creation process, the last thing you want to do is dive into a very granular combat system. They endeavored to make combat resemble what we see in comics books. Big splashy moves that send enemies flying through walls, grapples and throws, diving in front of blasts to defend innocent bystanders—but you must stop, consult the rules, do the math, and then roll. Lastly the technical writing suffered: the book deals in many generalities, lacks a consistent glossary of terms often using several different terms to describe the same thing, and has a sort of shorthand that reveals the lack of an outside editor—one that would have questioned the disparate terminology and lack of specifics.

I come up with at least one new rules question every time I engage with the rules or run a session—which is often these days. Unfortunately, the creators are unresponsive, and their official forum is mostly inactive, having only half a dozen regular posters, myself included. Fortunately, I have a great group of players and a couple of fellow GMs who I bounce ideas off so I can answer these rules questions myself and come up with house rules that don’t bog down the game or detract from it. The very good: Jeff and Jack do understand how to create a campaign setting, and how to run a balanced game, and they share that knowledge with you in this book. Also, this game is a massive sandbox of superpowers. The combinations of Abilities and Ability Modifiers is nearly endless. One of my players asked me if their flying squirrel hero could have “some kind of disorienting sonic chirp” attack. Yes, he can. I have another player that wanted to buff his teammates with songs like a classic D&D bard. Yes! Admittedly, it takes a lot of fooling around with the math, but it’s all addition and subtraction. If you want a superhero roleplaying game that allows for an extreme amount of character customization, this is the game for you. If you recoil at the thought of a very cumbersome combat simulator, this might not be the game for you. That said, you can always skip a lot of those rules, or simplify them, or home-brew your own. I have plans to post a character creation guide, and even some examples of combat and tasks, so stay tuned.

EMCE has released four more boxed sets for the video game Fallout 76.  The figures include more people, mutants, aliens, robots and zombies.   The quality is excellent.  I wish the other Nano Force offerings like the Aliens v. Marines set were done this well.  There are so many figures in this set now that I am giving it its own post.   You can see the original video game figures post here Video Games.

snagerdragon:

everyone pray for Crackers, it belongs to the granddaughter of a 1800s naturalist 

I always wanted to be a superhero.

“The pleasure of reading a story and wondering what will come next for the hero is a pleasure that has lasted for centuries and, I think, will always be with us.” 

— Stan Lee

Back in 1985, when I was 13, my brother and some of his friends started playing a table top role-playing game called Villains & Vigilantes. It was D&D’s heyday and if your game’s title didn’t have an ampersand and alliteration, were you even trying to make an RPG? I usually wasn’t allowed to play with his RPG groups, but I always got to flip through his rulebooks and supplements. When I cracked open the V&V rulebook, I had no idea that I would still be playing this game 34 years later. I couldn’t even imagine graduating high school–at that point it seemed too far away. Minutes seemed hours and years seemed infinite when I was a kid. Inside the book I discovered that you could play as yourself. Instead of creating a secret identity for your character, you were your secret identity! I was immediately hooked and begged my brother to let me make up a character. I remember being nervous about rolling up my Powers at random, hoping they would be really cool or at least similar to those of my favorite heroes: Daredevil and Spider-Man. I ended up with a strange mix of powers that didn’t go together at all. The rules suggested that you find a theme within your Powers and get rid of the rest, but I refused. I don’t remember why. Maybe it was the beginnings of my tendency to “Power Game” or maybe I was afraid of not having the right ability for every situation. My brother was frustrated but allowed Mega Man (even to this day the name embarrasses me) to exist. The flame powers of the Human Torch, the agility of Spider-Man, the telepathy of Professor X, the phasing of Kitty Pride, the intelligence of Reed Richards, and the growth of Giant Man. After some more begging, I got to play in the adventure ‘Crisis at Crusader Citadel’ alongside some of my brother’s friends. It’s a simple two act module meant to introduce the players the the V&V Universe through a group of A-List vigilantes–the Crusaders, and their villainous opponents–the Crushers. It was surprisingly fun and original. Mega Man got to strut his goofy stuff, firing flame blasts, phasing through walls and floors, and acting as a telepathic switchboard for the entire team. All of the villains and heroes we fought against or beside are just as indelible in my memory as my favorite Marvel and DC characters, and it’s still the first adventure my new players go through when I start a campaign. It will always be one of my fondest memories of playing a TTRPG. I played V&V for the next three years straight introducing my small circle of friends to it, and running my own games. Mega Man was on the bench and would always be now that I was the GM. Sadly I would step away from the game for decades. Then something happened in 2015.

My players know me as Grackleflint. I like RPGs. Do you like RPGs? Cool. This blog is going to be the home of my V&V 3.0 campaign–the stories and the characters that populate them. It will have story updates, character portraits and character sheets and stats. I will also delve into the dense thicket of weirdness that is the Villains and Vigilantes 3.0 rules to try and make them more accessible to the new player.