Mutants and Masterminds RPG: Threat Report

The Threat Report is a collection of villains for use with the 3rd Edition Mutants and Masterminds or DC Adventures roleplaying games. All of the villains included in this book are presented in the standard M&M format (the same format used in DC Adventures) and can be dropped into either game with little or no effort.Obviously, the nice thing about having a catalog of ready-made villains at your disposal is that it takes a lot of pressure out of running a game. With superhero games, in particular, sometimes it can be a challenge to create suitable villains with themed powers and personalities fast enough to keep up with your gaming schedule-- for instance, in a fantasy roleplaying game, it's always easy to throw a few more goblins into the mix, but in a superhero game, coming up with that fifth bad guy to complete a team of super villains in time for your Friday night game can be a challenge. And, of course, there are also times when you're feeling inspired, but lack the time to do the actual character builds. This product alleviates both problems.I primarily run the DC Adventures roleplaying game, and I understand that some game masters might be tempted to purchase the DC Adventures Heroes & Villains, Volume 1 and Volume 2 in place of the Threat Report. These books are also fine products, and well worth having if you plan on running DC Adventures-- I certainly don't advocate the Threat Report as a replacement for either volume. However, unless your players are running classic DC heroes as their own player characters (which is great fun!), you'll probably want the characters which they've created to have their own stable of villains and arch-nemeses; their heroes can only borrow villains from Batman or Superman for so long without starting to feel like second stringers!It should be noted that not every bad guy in Threat Report will work in every campaign. For example, the "Looking Glass Gang" presented in this book is modeled after characters from the classic books by Lewis Carroll, which might not be appropriate for a darker game featuring grim crimefighting. Other dark characters in this book might not work in campier, more upbeat games. The character backstories presented in this book are also set in the default Mutants & Masterminds game setting, so if you're playing DC Adventures, you might have to tweak things like "Freedom City" to "Metropolis" and so forth. Some of the villains have unspent power points, because it's within the nature of their powers to have different manifestations from encounter to encounter, but even in these cases their descriptions include solid suggestions on how those additional points might be spent.The artwork in this book is good, but not as good as the artwork in the rest of the DC Adventures line, which uses illustrations from many classic DC comic books. The layout is clean and readable, with characters indexed by power level in the back of the book. Every villain or team of villains is presented with at least one story hook or plot idea-- the majority offer multiple plot suggestions-- making them easy to integrate into your campaign.All in all, the Threat Report is a solid supplement for your Mutants & Masterminds or DC Adventures game. I strongly recommend this book for game masters of either system.

I've been playing M&M since 2nd edition, and one of the hardest jobs I find is finding the right villain to face off aganst your heroes. Treat Report provides a nice assortment of read-made villians and organizations you can fit into any storyline. They also come with their own plot hooks to get your heroes involved in whever nefarious plots your villains are planning. A deffinite must-have!

I give just 4 stars, because %70 of content of this book is for Emerald City. Of course you can change them way you like. Must have for a mastermind GM!

The method upon which this book was made -- publish a series of short PDF products, then put them together into a compiled volume -- needs to be a model for future books.Keep up the good work, Green Ronin.

This book is great for getting unique villains for your campaigns. I really like the fact that all of the villains come with a few plot hooks.

I am happy with this product but its annoying being forced to put down more words than you feel are necessary.

Awesome

Threat Report is a compilation of the "Villain of the Week" from Green Ronin that previously existed only in PDF form. More than a few were intended to go along with the adventure path being set up in the newly created Emerald City as a way of showing off the 3rd Ed. system of M&M. As such there are a number of different bad guys meant to coincide with the default universe represented by both Freedom City and Emerald City. The pdf series was set up as a series of dossiers on various villains that were delivered to the head of the American Elite Government Intervention Service or A.E.G.I.S. for short, think of it as a generic version of Marvel's SHIELD, that was updated in layout for this book. There are a few villains that are brand new and were not sold through Green Ronin's web page and are exclusive to this book.Not every villain in here is useable in every campaign as some will be just too silly, like perhaps the Looking Glass Gang who are all based in one way or another on Alice in Wonderland, others too serious, like the dark and Frankenstein's Monster looking Doctor Shock who has a bad habit of dissecting other supers while they are still alive. For the enterprising GM for M&M you can never have too many villains. Even if there are a few in here that you can't use for some odd reason they can easily be used as inspiration for your own custom villain or just tweak a few things on a given villain and you have the stats done up for you. There are enough villains here that they can be slotted in virtually any campaign with a little or no work from the Game Master and there are some that could even be saved for special occasions when you need something out of left field to throw a group of jaded players.