Green Ronin’s own Steve Kenson is interviewed in the latest episode of The Groovecast, a podcast dedicated to RPGs online. The episode is all about Mutants & Masterminds with regard to play-by-post gaming.

Get thee to thy podcatching device of choice.

The print version of Hero High, a teen heroes sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds, is now available in the Green Ronin Online Store.”The Crime League is on a rampage downtown, but the prom is tonight and, worse yet, you’ve got a make-up test tomorrow! But then nobody said life was easy at Hero High!”

Hero High

Little Girl Lost, the first book in the on-going Autumn Arbor: City of Legends series by Lee F. Szczepanik, Jr., is now available at Amazon.com, and will be available through all major book-chains in the U.S. Canada, and U.K. in Fall 2007!

Arbor Productions sat down with Lee F. Szczepanik, Jr. to discuss the first book, and his plans for the on-going series.

Read the Full Release

View on YouTube

Go to YouTube Video

Okay, what a find this was! I’ve got the luxury of knowing Portuguese as a second language, but for those of you who don’t rest assured this hero generator will be a piece of cake to learn after fiddling around for a few minutes. This generator is called the RPGQuest Hero-O’Matic designed by a Brazilian guy (sorry couldn’t find a name!) based on the art of Ronaldo Barata and Pietro Antognioni, the official designers of RPG Quest.

The artwork is quite amazing, and even though it’s purely fantasy based, I’m sure there are more then enough Superlinkers out there that can find a great use for these babies! So get out there and make some fantasy-based supers for your next campaign!

Visit Website to Generate Hero (might be temporary)
ECORE Mirror (Download in case it goes down) 1.36 Megs

The book doesn’t actually contain a section on the history of Bedlam. This is intentional—we wanted to make it easier to fit into your broader campaign world and we didn’t want to tie it too closely to any one particular part of the country. However, the point of this thread is to fill in things that were left out of the book, so here, for the first time, is something like a history of Beldam. Some of it is assembled from hints that are already in the book, the rest we’ve made up to fill in the gaps.

1780
Beldam is founded by the semi-literate explorer, evangelist and opium fiend Zebediah Scarlett. He hopes to lead a group of like-minded religious maniacs into the woods to found a perfect Christian republic where he can fondle as many underage girls as possible, far from the world’s unforgiving gaze. He calls the town “Beldam” because he’s confused the name with “Bethlehem.” Within three years, Scarlett is murdered by his friend and confidante Rule Hardwick, who subsequently hogs both the opium and the girls for himself. Scarlett’s vengeful ghost plagues the community for a while, until offered up a sacrifice of girls and opium. It is rumored that he still demands this tithe today, once every few years.

Note: If Bedlam is anywhere but the East Coast, move this date up to 1830.
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The Meadows
An unincorporated zone out near the airport, the Meadows is the only one of Bedlam’s neighborhoods that seems to be growing, rather than shrinking. The airport’s relative success has spawned a whole nest of other businesses—warehouses, machine shops, building suppliers and so forth, and this has in turn brought in workers, who need restaurants to eat at, gas stations to fill up their cars and more recently, places to live. Poorly zoned and loosely controlled, the whole place has sprung up at random, outside the city’s jurisdiction.

Not very heavily built-up, the Meadows looks like sprawl, which it is—all strip malls and gas stations with lots of empty space in between. Almost no buildings here are more than two stories tall. All the streets are named for letters or numbers. There is a vague plan to name them after presidents or famous people at some point, but no one has gotten around to it yet.

For the most part this is still a commercial district. Only a few actual residents have moved in, most of them in apartments above storefronts. But as the population of the Meadows grows, so will its problems. Local police services are provided by the county sheriff’s office—the Bedlam police occasionally come over here, but not often. Nor does the overworked Bedlam Fire Department make a priority out of calls from the Meadows. It is unclear at the moment where children from the Meadows are supposed to go to school.

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Stark Hill
Once Bedlam’s toughest neighborhood, Stark Hill has now long since been surpassed by places like Wolverton and Hardwick Park. A mixed Irish, Italian and Polish community, it sprawls over the hills behind downtown, a maze of twisting narrow streets where it’s hard to find your way around unless you’ve lived here all your life. Someone keeps taking down the street signs, which makes it even harder.

Stark Hill is full of cheap bungalows, ancient rowhouses, pizza joints and corner bars. A working-class place, it has always been the kind of drab, dreary neighborhood that ambitious kids try to escape. Now that hard times have come to Bedlam, it’s gotten worse. Most of Stark Hill’s residents are over fifty. The few young people who stay in town could wind up as dock workers or bartenders or running errands for the Mafia. There aren’t a lot of other options. An atmosphere of shabby decay hangs over the whole neighborhood, many of the shops have closed. Yet there is almost no street crime here, no muggings or burglaries or stick-ups. For this is the stronghold of the Bedlam Mafia. Many eyes watch the street. Outsiders are instantly noticed and quickly made to feel unwelcome. Local residents know better than to report things to the cops, who in any case are likely to owe more loyalty to the Scarpia family than to the Municipal Council. Their grip may be weakening elsewhere, but in Stark Hill the Mafia still controls absolutely everything.

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Ash Street
Ash Street was dying even before the new shipping terminal opened and choked it with diesel exhaust. It’s not as polluted as the Country Club, because it’s at the base of the hill rather than up on top. Still, the failure of the beach to attract business and the overall economic decline have shuttered most of the stores on Ash Street. There are a few shabby resale and thrift shops, a storefront church or two but for the most part Ash Street is utterly desolate. Even criminals avoid this place, for the most part, since no one here has anything worth stealing.

The low level of street crime and abundance of abandoned buildings have made Ash Street Bedlam’s Skid Row.

Most of the buildings along Ash Street itself are two-story shop fronts, in a style best described as “ugly”. Everything here seems to be made out of brown brick, smudged with smoke. It smells of exhaust, like most of the neighborhoods near the shipping terminal. The horns from the giant ships are very loud here, and can be heard at all hours of the night (although not quite so much, now that Bedlam’s port is failing). Trash collection isn’t very good –papers and old plastic bags blow through the desolate streets. No aluminum cans, though. Collecting discarded cans is the only form of ready employment this neighborhood offers.

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