Etapa IV: Caracterización de los territorios

Val Char Cost Roll Notes

40 STR 30 17- Lift 6,400 kg; 8d6 HTH damage [4]

20 DEX 20 13-

25 CON 15 14-

18 INT 8 13- PER Roll 13-

15 EGO 5 12-

20 PRE 10 13- PRE Attack: 4d6

8 OCV 25 7 DCV 20 3 OMCV 0 5 DMCV 6 5 SPD 30 Phases: 3, 5, 8, 10, 12 12 PD 10 Total: 24 PD (22 rPD) 10 ED 8 Total: 22 ED (22 rED) 10 REC 6 50 END 6 18 BODY 8

50 STUN 15 Total Characteristics Cost: 222

Movement: Running: 18m

Cost Powers END

160 Superior Roin’esh Shapeshifting Pool:

Variable Power Pool, 80 Pool + 80 Control Cost var

Cosmic (+2); Only For Multiform, Shape Shift, And Related Abilities (-½)

10 Tough: Resistant (+½) for 10 PD/10 ED 0

24 Force-Field Belt: Resistant Protect (12 PD/12 ED) 0

OIF (-½)

6 Swift: Running +6m (18m total) 1

3 Roin’esh Senses: +1 to PER Rolls with all Sense Groups

Perks

10 Money: Well Off

Talents

3 Lightsleep

Skills

20 +2 with All Combat

24 +3 HTH

3 Bribery 13-

3 Conversation 13-

1 Electronics 8-

2 Gambling (Card Games) 13-

3 Interrogation 13-

3 KS: Malvan Gladiatorial Games 13-

3 Persuasion 13-

3 Security Systems 13-

3 Stealth 13-

2 Systems Operation 10-

2 TF: Roin’esh Space Vehicles

8 WF: Common Melee Weapons, Small Arms, Beam

Weapons, Energy Weapons Total Powers & Skills Cost: 296 Total Cost: 518

400 Matching Complications (75)

10 Enraged: in combat (Common), go 8-, recover 14-

15 Psychological Complication: Ruthless And Cruel; Enjoys

Victimizing Those Weaker Than Himself (Common, Strong)

Total Complications Points: 25 Experience Points: 168

Champions Beyond n Chapter Three 75

his word, Kovarl listened to his offer: instead of just paying him off, Tateklys would give him a high-paying job and use Malvan technology to grant him superpowers (in addition to his natural shapechanging powers). It was too good a deal for Kovarl to pass up, and he became the Fashion- able One’s “Master of Gladiators” (i.e., head of security).

Personality/Motivation: Tateklys’s job offer was too good for Kovarl to pass up because Kovarl is a cruel, heartless bully. He loves intimidating and hurting people weaker than himself, and being Master of Gladiators means he essentially gets to do just those things for a living.

Quote: “Move, scum! The Games aren’t going to be delayed for the likes of you.”

Powers/Tactics: As far as most people know, Kovarl is a superhumanly strong and tough Roin’esh with the basic shapechanging powers available to his species (i.e., he can assume a few different humanoid forms). He doesn’t advertise the fact that he actually possesses the full suite of Roin’esh shapechanging abilities, allowing him to change his shape into nearly anything. He can transform himself into alien animals, any sort of humanoid being, or even flawlessly imitate other humanoids.

If forced to fight superhuman opponents, Kovarl often changes shape into a larger, more intimidating version of himself with more STR (60), higher defenses (add another 10-12 points of Resistant Protection in both categories), and natural weapons like claws. If he has time to prepare he’ll also equip himself with some of the Forum’s weaponry and restraining devices so he has an even greater edge against his foe.

In combat Kovarl has no restraint. As far as he’s concerned there are no rules in battle and no trick that’s too underhanded or vicious to use — his aim is to win, and win as quickly as possible. He doesn’t exactly go berserk, but there are times when he gets angry enough at whoever he’s fighting that he disregards his personal safety entirely for the chance to hurt his opponent as much as possible.

Campaign Use: Kovarl is a fairly one-dimensional character in most respects — the cruel overseer whom the PCs will quickly love to hate — but he has a few tricks up his sleeve. The full extent of his shapechanging powers isn’t well-known (though Tateklys knows what Kovarl can do) and should come as a real surprise to the PCs the first time they encounter him.

If you want to make Kovarl tougher to begin with, increase his superhuman STR, defenses, and possibly DEX so he can more easily handle multiple foes at once (perhaps a little Damage Reduction or Damage Negation would also help). To weaken him, reduce his STR to 30 and his defenses to 15-20. To really weaken him, reduce his Roin’esh shapechanging abilities so he can only change into other humanoid shapes (including imitating other peoples’ forms).

Appearance: As a Roin’esh, Kovarl is a natural shapechanger who can look like nearly anyone or anything, but he typically adopts the appearance of a tall, beefy Malvan whose skintone is on the yellowish side of golden. He makes his hair red and keeps it long and pulled back in a ponytail; his eyebrows are also red, and he makes them particu- larly long and luxurious as a point of distinction. He gives his skin the appearance that he’s tattooed his left arm, upper chest, and left side of his face with flowing geometrical patterns that are simul- taneously swirling and angular, like a maelstrom of curved claws and blades. (The tattoos are blue, deep orange, and a red that matches his hair.) He has a “glove” of similar tattoos on his right hand and lower arm. He typically wears nothing but pants and boots so that his body art is displayed to best effect.

Background/History: There was a time, years ago, when Terala Shain was just about the biggest devotee of the Malvan gladiatorial games you could imagine. Even as a child she watched the fights on holoscope as long as her nanny-bots would let her, and as an adult she went to the Phazarian Arena nearly every day and kept an elaborate personal logbook of statistics on her favorite (and not-so-favorite) gladiators.

Shain’s interest in the games was so intense that she did something most Malvans could never imagine: she became a gladiator. She decided that just watching the fights wasn’t enough; she wanted to be a part of the action. Using Malvan hyper-science she made herself stronger and tougher, with the power to kick her body into “overdrive” to move at blindingly fast speeds. Then she spent months training, developing a personal fighting style to complement her new superhuman abilities.

Shain won her debut match in the arena, and soon worked her way up to regular bouts in the Phazarian Arena itself. The gladiatorial fights were everything she thought they would be: exciting, challenging, a true test for body, mind, and spirit. But after several years she realized there was a corruption at the heart of the arena. Instead of adhering to a gladiatorial code and striving to make the games the best they could, most gladi- ators preferred to cut corners and even cheat to obtain victory. She looked into the problem further, hoping to find a solution, and soon discovered that the problem went as high as the Phazor himself. He wanted exciting, fast-paced, deadly fights to amuse himself and the Malvan people, and he didn’t seem to care how he got them.

Shain went on fighting for a year or two after that, but her heart wasn’t in it. Eventually she retired from the arena and began a one-woman crusade to clean up the games. She attracted some interest, and eventually a small but devoted following... but also the unwanted attention of

76 n The Moon Hero System 6th Edition

Val Char Cost Roll Notes

30 STR 20 15- Lift 1,600 kg; 6d6 HTH damage [3]

25 DEX 30 14-

22 CON 12 13-

15 INT 5 12- PER Roll 12-

14 EGO 4 12-

15 PRE 5 12- PRE Attack: 3d6

12 OCV 45 10 DCV 35 3 OMCV 0 5 DMCV 6 7 SPD 50 Phases: 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12 15 PD 13 Total: 18 PD (3 rPD) 15 ED 13 Total: 18 ED (3 rED) 15 REC 11 80 END 12 13 BODY 3

60 STUN 20 Total Characteristics Cost: 284

Movement: Running: 20m

Cost Powers END

Martial Arts: Overdrive Fighting

Maneuver OCV DCV Notes

4 Block +2 +2 Block, Abort 4 Disarm -1 +1 Disarm, 50 STR 4 Dodge +0 +5 Dodge all attacks, Abort 5 Kick -2 +1 12d6 Strike

4 Knife Hand -2 +0 HKA 1d6+1 (3d6+1 with STR) 3 Legsweep +2 -1 9d6 Strike, Target Falls 4 Nerve Strike -1 +1 3d6 NND (1) 4 Punch +0 +2 10d6 Strike 8 +2 Damage Classes (already added in)

10 Overdrive: +2 SPD 4

Costs Endurance (-½), Increased Endurance Cost (x2 END; -½)

8 Fast On Her Feet: Running +8m (20m total) 1

10 Overdrive Running: Running +20m (40m total) 6

Increased Endurance Cost (x3 END; -1)

Perks

5 Money: Well Off

Talents

6 Combat Luck (3 PD/3 ED)

2 Overdrive: Lightning Reflexes: +10 DEX to act first with

All HTH Attacks 4

Costs Endurance (-½), Increased Endurance Cost (x4 END; -1½)

Skills

32 +4 HTH

12 Targeting Skill Levels: +4 versus Hit Location penalties

with All Attacks

3 Bureaucratics 13-

5 KS: Malvan Gladiatorial Games 14-

3 Oratory 12-

3 Persuasion 12-

1 Security Systems 8-

3 Stealth 14-

Total Powers & Skills Cost: 143 Total Cost: 427

400 Matching Complications (75)

10 Hunted: the Phazor (Infrequently, Mo Pow, NCI, Watching)

10 Hunted: Tateklys (Frequently, As Pow, NCI, Watching)

15 Psychological Complication: Wants To Protect The

“Purity” Of The Games (Common, Strong) Total Complications Points: 35

Experience Points: 67

Champions Beyond n Chapter Three 77

the Phazor and his Shadow Guard. The ruler of Malva is a tolerant man, but his tolerance has its limits, and Shain was pushing against them. Life on Malva soon become difficult for her — too difficult to tolerate.

She needed a victory of some sort, some way to prove she was right so the people would demand the Phazor purify the games. Then she thought of the Forum Malvanum. With a man like Tateklys running it, it had to be just as corrupt as the arenas on Malva. She left Malva for the Moon, and has been making the Fashionable One’s life difficult ever since.

Personality/Motivation: Terala Shain has devoted herself to “cleaning up” the Malvan gladiatorial games with the same fervor that once drove her to mutate her own body and become a gladiator. She’s the sort of person who gets an idea in her head and simply won’t let go until she makes it work, no matter how dangerous making it work might be to her personally. Although her inten- sity (even fanaticism) may be off-putting in some respects, she’d be a valuable ally to anyone who wanted to get rid of the crime and corruption at the Forum Malvanum... such as the PCs.

Quote: “The Malvan gladiatorial games are a wonderful thing at heart — but the actions of those who control them have corrupted them. It’s time to clean them up and return them to the glory they once were.”

Powers/Tactics: Thanks to the treatments provided her by Malvan hyper-science, Terala Shain possesses superhuman powers, mostly related to speed and reflexes. She’s much stronger and tougher than most Malvans (or Humans), but swiftness and agility are where she shines. Shain is already one of the fastest gladiators ever to grace the Malvan arenas, but when she kicks herself into “overdrive state” she becomes really fast, gaining +10 DEX Lightning Reflexes, +2 SPD, and +20m Running (though this comes at the cost of 14 END per Phase, so even with her 80 END she can’t stay in overdrive for long). Couple that speed with her phenomenal accuracy and you’ve got a HTH Combat fighter that other gladiators were right- fully wary of.

Shain’s primary weakness is that her defenses are fairly weak compared to many gladiators’ attacks. She has to rely on her speed and agility to keep out of the way of attacks. When she fought regularly she wore a force-field belt that offered some added protection (in game terms, it made her 15 PD/15 ED Resistant), but she doesn’t usually have it with her any more.

Campaign Use: Terala Shain is a potential ally for the PCs... assuming they can get past the fact that she’s likely to look upon them as backwater barbarians. (Just because she’s a progressive on issues pertaining to the arena doesn’t mean she’s not still a typical Malvan in many respects.) Like them she wants to clean up the Forum Malvanum, though her reasons for doing so are different than their’s. Sometimes crimefighting makes strange bedfellows!

To make Shain more powerful, increase her defenses (or give her a standard force-field belt she can wear at all times). You could perhaps also give her some “speedster trick” abilities (see Champions

Powers for examples), though she’s not a typical

speedster at all (in fact she’s as much martial artist as speedster, if not more). To weaken her, reduce her DEX to 20-22 and SPD to 5-6, forcing her to rely on her overdrive powers a lot more. Reducing her END also weakens her, since it prevents her from keeping her overdrive powers functioning for more than a couple of Phases.

Appearance: Terala Shain is a beautiful Malvan woman with lustrous golden skin, hair and eyebrows the color of leaping flame, and violet eyes. Since coming to the Moon she’s taken to wearing ostentatious gowns in traditional Malvan style in defiance of Tateklys’s fad for “Roman” garb.

The card at the Forum Malvanum is new with every week’s matches since superhumans kidnapped from Earth make up such a large part of the “stable” of fighters. But there are a few regulars — gladiators who’ve moved to the Moon from Malva for whatever reasons, new fighters that Tateklys “discovered” and is shepherding to greater gladiatorial glory, and so on. Here are a few of those noteworthy gladiators that kidnapped PCs might find themselves fighting.

Background/History: Most Malvans are gestated (and raised) via Malvan medical technology rather than in the traditional biological way. But every now and then a fad for live gestation and birth occurs on Malva, and Toronec Surl was born during one such time. Raised by two loving (by Malvan standards) parents who actually interacted with him once or twice a week, he grew up even happier and more contented than other Malvan children.

Then came adolescence... and things began to go wrong. He experienced strange “cold flashes” and other problems regulating his body tempera- ture. Even more disturbingly, his skin began turning blue. His parents took him to Malva’s best medical computers. The computers tested him and eventually determined that he was something that hadn’t been recorded in centuries: a mutant Malvan, with the power to lower the temperature around him in various ways.

This caused quite a sensation on Malva and made Surl a celebrity for a few years. As he got older, everyone wondered what he’d do with his powers, and public pressure mounted for him to become a gladiator and “represent Malva’s honor in the arena.” The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea, and when he was old enough that was exactly what he did, taking the fighting name Frostbite.

78 n The Moon Hero System 6th Edition

Unfortunately for Frostbite, his powers weren’t strong enough or flashy enough to make him a really good gladiator, and public interest in him and his career waned somewhat. But he kept at it, determined to be the best gladiator he could be, and resisting all efforts to get him to submit to Malvan hyper-scientific processes that would augment his powers. That just didn’t seem right to him; neither did using drugs, which it was rumored some other gladiators did.

Over the years Surl developed a particularly intense rivalry with another gladiator named Ariax Thone, who had fire powers. Partly this was a result of the natural clash of their powers (which caused the arena’s overseers to pit them against one another in fights frequently), but partly the two men simply didn’t get along. To Surl, Thone was an insufferable, arrogant blowhard who deserved a good humbling as often as possible. Unfortunately he was also more powerful than Surl, as their record — 13 wins for Thone, 5 for Surl as of Thone’s transformation to Firewing — showed. Surl’s hatred of Thone deepened when it was revealed he’d used combat drugs to enhance his performance in the arena.

When Thone became Firewing and left Malva, seemingly for good, Surl was content at first, thinking he’d proved who was not only the better gladiator, but the better Malvan. But he soon found that gladiatorial combat had lost some of its savor without rematches with Thone to look forward to.

Then Tateklys announced the founding of the Forum Malvanum. Frostbite knew that Thone had gone to this planet Earth to challenge its warriors in combat. Well, he could do the same, but in a different way. He was one of the first established gladiators to “sign” with the Fashionable One, and he hasn’t regretted it for a moment. The popularity of the Forum has really given his career a boost, and he knows somehow he’s going to get a rematch with Thone and show him once and for all who’s the better gladiator.

Personality/Motivation: For the most part Frost- bite is a pretty normal guy, for a Malvan — it’s just that instead of devoting himself to art, sex, visual entertainments, partying, exploration, or some other pursuit, he chose to become a gladiator. He wants for nothing, and if something came along that interested him more he’d quit fighting and pursue that. Fortunately for gladiatorial fans, the thrill of the arena battle is his passion and he has no intention of leaving the games behind anytime soon.

Frostbite desperately wants a chance to fight Ariax Thone — Firewing — again and decisively defeat him. He’s aware that Firewing’s power dwarfs his own, and has been seeking a way to even the odds. If push comes to shove, his longstanding resistance to using Malvan hyper- technology to augment his powers may crumble in the face of his desire to triumph over Thone.

Quote: “The fires in your blood may burn strong — but I can cool them and cast you down in defeat!”

Powers/Tactics: Frostbite is a Malvan mutant with the power to reduce the temperature. Unlike many Human superhumans such as Winter Dragon or Freon, he cannot create ice out of ambient mois- ture (and even if he could, that wouldn’t do him much good in the arid lunar environment). He can simply freeze whatever liquids or other materials exist in the environment. Depending on the effect he wants to have, this can stun and weaken an opponent, or he can literally freeze their bodily fluids, causing horrific internal injuries that few gladiators can resist.

Like many super-gladiators, Frostbite’s defenses are relatively low compared to the power of his (and his opponents’) attacks. Sometimes this suits Kovarl well, since he wants a fight with a lot of blood and injuries; at other times the Master of Gladiators issues Frostbite a force-field device so the fight lasts longer.

Frostbite has developed a reputation for being a skilled member of gladiator teams (such as in two-versus-two or three-versus-three matches). This allows his teammates to protect him while he uses his often-irresistible attacks to weaken the foe.

Campaign Use: Plots involving Frostbite as a main character typically center around his desire to defeat Firewing and what he might do to achieve it. He could team up to help the PCs (provided they agree to let him tackle Firewing one-on-one), secretly provide them with advice to help them humble his old rival, or go to extremes to get the power to stand toe-to-toe with Thone once more.

If Frostbite having a rivalry with Firewing won’t work well in your campaign, make a PC his rival instead. Arrange a battle between them early in the campaign that the PC wins (possibly in some way that’s humiliating to Frostbite). Then just wind Surl up and let him go.

To make Frostbite more powerful, consider giving him more “traditional” ice and cold powers