The most important thing to remember about crime in Bedlam is that the Mafia ultimately runs it all. The street gangs of Wolverton and Hardwick Park are free to shoot it out with one another, but even the Jigsaw Man answers to the Mob. Only the Country Club is beyond the Mafia’s reach.

There are two mob families in Bedlam—the Scarpias, run by the fat, obnoxious and slovenly “Dapper Donnie” Scarpia and the smaller Gorganzua family, run by mean and shriveled old Leo “Little Junior” Gorganzua (but managed day-to-day by his homicidal 400-pound niece, Tiny Tina).

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Shades of Gray

Telling the White Hats from the Black Hats in the Iron Age is tricky. The heroes abandoned the hopefulness and positive attitude (some would say naïveté) of the heroes of the past in order to adopt a harder-edged approach to heroism that was harsher and more practical.

This change was particularly obvious in regard to heroic motivations. Once upon a time, heroes were motivated by the desire to right wrongs and make the world a better place because it was the right thing to do, or to protect innocents from being victimized like the hero had been. In the Iron Age, heroes are driven by revenge and the desire to mete out justice…or, at least, what they consider justice.

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They say the Jigsaw Man has magical powers. Even if he doesn’t, he’s plenty scary enough. He leads the street-gang/blood-cult they call the Mara, which holds Hardwick Park in its iron grip. Born in the steaming jungles of Honduras, the Mara are a gang, a religion and a way of life. They practice witchcraft, it is said, and their leaders are immune to bullets. The Jigsaw Man rose to be their Rey de Brujas some time within the past five years. He’s unusually savage and obsessed with the Mara’s strange religion. No one knows his name. There are no photographs of him. They say his face does not come out in pictures.

Eentsy Z hates the Mara worse than anyone. He’s the fifteen year-old leader of a coalition of African-American street gangs in Wolverton, organized to defend their neighborhood against the Mara next door. Even united they don’t have the same muscle, let alone whatever sinister occult powers the Mara might wield, so for now they’re focused on holding their own territory rather than wiping the Mara out.

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Plain Brown Wrapper Games’ new adventure supplement “Bedlam in Bedlam” comes with its own campaign setting–the City of Bedlam. Of course, one section of a single 201 page book might not be enough to answer every last question a GM might have about a campaign setting, so if anyone has any questions about Bedlam, stuff we didn’t have the space to include in the book, ask here and we’ll answer it.

For those of you who don’t own a copy of the book, here are the basic elements of the setting.

Bedlam is the shabby, sordid, run-down Gotham City next door to your campaign’s shining Metropolis. We designed it specifically as the smaller, meaner town adjacent to a four-color superville like Freedom City–the place your PCs would go to have gritty, street-level adventures for a change of pace. The Jersey City to your Manhattan. The Gary Indiana to your Chicago.

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Publisher: Green Ronin Publishing | Line: Mutants & Masterminds | Author: Steve Kenson | Pages: 32 | Year: 2007
Style: 4 (Classy & Well Done) | Substance: 3 (Average)

Although not specifically designed for the day, the Mutants & Masterminds Beginner’s Guide: Quick-Start was made available on Free RPG Day in the UK. It is designed to introduce the prospective player to one of the hobby’s best superhero RPGs and certainly the best superhero RPG to be derived from the d20 System, Green Ronin Publishing’s Mutants & Masterminds. It does this through programmed learning, taking a single hero to be as he enrolls in the Claremont Academy and faces challenges and tests in the school’s Doom Room.

Read the rest of the review on RPGNet.com. 

The Hospital District – the one unguarded district in Centennial City. Some of the city’s surviving doctors have gathered at Lutheran Central – the hospital that was least damaged in the quake. Here they provide medical care to anyone from any faction who comes for help.

The Ultra-Mob - A gang of super-powered thugs and criminals. Before the quake, the Ultra-Mob was the dominant organized crime faction in the city with a finger is just about every illegal operation from drug trafficking to extortion and protection rackets. The Ultra-Mob’s territory is centered on the wreckage of Jame’s Mark Hotel near the airport – formerly a posh 4 star operation. The Mob has been using the hotel’s large kitchen to keep themselves supplied with food and water as other resources in the city have become depleted. They are led by a charismatic super-powered thug called the Midnight Bombardier. Although not the most powerful of supervillains, the Bombardier is smarter than most and has a skill for leadership.

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After the quake, power is out, water lines are down, and most roads are effectively impassable. Shortages of food, fuel and the collapse of infrastructure are the facts the define life in North America. Although there are silos full of grain in the rural areas, with most roads unusable, there’s no way to get it to people in the cities who are starving. Official estimates have the US military repairing major highways within 8 to 12 months. Until that time, city residents can count on only sporadic food air-drops from the military or international sources. They will have to mainly rely on their own food supplies to survive. Scavenging is the rule of the day. Packs of survivors roam the streets of the cities, fighting for whatever scraps they can find.

The US military makes the occasional food drop to cities and towns with airplanes or helicopters. These are few and far between as their food and fuel supplies are limited because the broken transportation infrastructure limits their ability to restock. The international community has attempted to help. Naval vessels from various nations anchor off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to stage UN aid deliveries. Despite the generosity of the international community, the resources devoted to disaster relief for North America are dwarfed by the size of the need. The US government has initiated negotiations with the UN and EU to increase their contributions

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Go to YouTube Video

In this episode your host Chris Pramas takes advantage of Gen Con to bring on some special guests. First up is Russ Morrissey of EN World and EN Publishing. He and Chris talk about Gen Con, the ENnies, the EN World community, and the announcement of 4th edition D&D. Then Chris hosts a roundtable discussion with Nicole Lindroos, Christopher McGlothlin, and Steve Kenson. Many Mutants & Masterminds books are discussed, including Paragons, Golden Age, Worlds of Freedom, Iron Age, Hero High, and Freedom’s Most Wanted.The show is 50 minutes, 28 seconds long, and is a 47.3 MB download.

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The Sixth Seal, written by Mike Lafferty, is a supplement for M&M Superlink that focuses on how heroes deal with a disaster of epic proportions and its apocalyptic aftermath. It contains several adventures that can be played together as a story arc or individually, at the GM’s discretion.

Section 1 sets the scene and has adventure scenarios that take place in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.
Section 2 gives background information on life in the wake of the disaster.
Section 3 provides adventure scenarios that take place a few weeks or even months after the quake strikes, when civilization has effectively collapsed.

In addition, The Sixth Seal provides several additional “seasoning encounters” - straightforward, quick-play adventure scenarios that provide additional depth or flavor, and an alternate plotline in which the earthquake only impacts the heroes’ home city, rather than the nation as a whole.

“This is Sasha Pendleton with the British Broadcasting Network.. If you’re just tuning in, approximately 1 hour ago, a massive continent-wide earth quake struck North America - wreaking destruction from Quebec to Mexico City.

Geologists are at a loss to explain this previously unknown phenomenon - but they confirm that monitoring stations across the continent have reported a series of seismic events with magnitudes ranging between 7 and 9. The most severe activity has been on the Eastern Seaboard. Severe aftershocks have been erupting intermittently.

We go now to Hugh Donaldson in Centennial City….Hugh, can you tell us what’s going on where you are? “

“Sasha, it’s chaos here. If you can see the orange glow against the night sky behind me - you can tell that entire blocks of the city are on fire. The source is presumably ruptured gas lines although there have been reports of arson. Fire crews are responding as best they can - but many roads are impassable and water lines are simply down in many areas. Its sheer pandemonium, the dead and dying are everywhere - I haven’t seen carnage on this scale outside of a war zone. It’s horrific. From the patchy reports we’ve received from other cities - this scene of devastation is being echoed all across the continent.

Sasha - the only explanation scientists have offered is that an eruption of a dormant faultline running through the New England states triggered a sort of seismic chain reaction - causing every fault line in North America to erupt. I can’t emphasize enough the scale of the disaster here. Every city in North America has been severely damaged. Millions are feared dead. Power is down from coast to coast. The Mississippi River is flowing backwards as a result of the quake. The only word that adequately describes the scale of this disaster is biblical.”

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