It’s that time of year again! Sydney will usher in 2016 at the same time as this is being published – but this image is of 9 years ago, when the show was a lot smaller than it is now!
Image by FreeImages.com / Jenny Rollo
Text effects by CoolText.com Logo and Graphics Generator.

Continuing the great character giveaway, here is an interesting (and nasty) villain from the Zenith-3 campaign, which can be easily adapted for use in a wide range of genres. He may not have quite the same impact in any world in which the PCs do not seek to avoid the death and suffering of others, however.

Introducing ‘Mortus’

‘Mortus’ is an homage to a great character from Marvel Comics, ‘Thanos,’ who (as just about everyone should know) figures to loom large in the Marvel Movie universe Real Soon Now. While, in my campaign, he goes by the same name as in that source material, I’ve changed it here for publication purposes.

Mortus behind the curtain

He first appeared in my campaign as a generic Brick in the Paranormal War plot arc (which was my ramped-up version of The Great Supervillain Contest (the Champions module by Dennis Mallonee, available in original printed form from Amazon for close to the original price, or as a PDF from ) in which the name was used purely for shock value – the players hear the name and have their characters show up for the fight loaded for bear and packing death – only to find that he’s a (relative) pushover. They kept waiting “for the other shoe to drop”.

When they defeated him, he was rescued by the villain behind the Paranormal War, and quietly dropped out of sight immediately thereafter. At the time, he couldn’t even tell the PCs why he had happened to choose that particular name – “it just sounded impressive” – which is just a fancy way of saying to the players that I had spent my creative efforts elsewhere at that point.

When the time came for him to reappear in the 2015 adventure, “Mixed Emotions”, leaving that as empty ‘negative space‘ paid off, big-time. This was a different group of PCs, and a different campaign (sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a sequel to the original campaign which was conducted simultaneous with it’s historical prequel, both of which were sequels to the campaign I used to playtest the game system – are you all keeping up, in the back of the room?) Because of these differences in campaign, and the fact that ‘Mortus’ was expected to carry the attention of the whole team (instead of having one-on-one parity with a single member), I needed to ramp him up considerably.

So, once again I trod the familiar philosophic ground of Death (from the original name of the character), and Life, and interesting ways of entwining them. Anyone who has read Assassin’s Amulet will know that this is familiar territory to me, creatively. Fortunately, it’s a creative space with a lot of elbow room, and I was able to find a new idea. What’s presented here is the result.

Doing the artwork (which I can’t show here for copyright reasons) was fairly simple – I only had to take everything that was blue on his existing costume and render it green, then everything gold and render it blue – and Matt instead of high-gloss. I also worked hard at making his face more gray and less purple. Two images were done, based on the work of other creators, so I can’t show them here. One emphasized a more skeletal and ‘deathlike’ face, the other was introspective, almost tender, and rather more sympathetic in tone.

The encounter started off the way I expected it to run and then went wildly off-script, as the PCs decided that ‘Mortus’ was too big a threat for them to simply chase off. This resulted in them undertaking something breathtakingly cosmic – but I’ll get to that in a future installment – that was built into my campaign plan but wasn’t intended to happen until the last third or so of the campaign. Fortunately, I had my rough notes ready – and the outcome’s effect on the character was so extreme that I was able to shuffle the resulting potential ally off into the sunset to reassess his life and come to terms with the new reality of his existence. He was so radically transformed that it’s fair to suggest that this will be the only appearance of the character as described in the campaign.

Mortus: Official (i.e. What the PCs knew, even if the players didn’t):

Mortus emerged during the Paranormal Wars, seemingly just another brick out to make a name for himself. He emerged as something of a conundrum. He is urbane, cultured, civilized, self-effacing, almost humble, sociable, friendly – and profoundly psychotic – in a rather friendly way.

He has no memory of his origins, and seemed to have little purpose beyond examining all the ways life could be lost in meticulous, ruthless, obsessive detail. His heart didn’t seem to be in the contest, but nevertheless he made it a considerable distance into the conflict with sheer physical force and brutality. At some point he appears to have decided that further participation was not of interest to him, and abandoned the contest before it was revealed as a trap; it is not known whether this is a sign of greater intellect, better instincts, or a reflection of his personal obsessions.

Mortus’ Costume:

(Refer description given previously). The colors of Mortus’ costume are the “Blue of Purity” and “The Green Of Life” – his own descriptions.

Mortus: The True Story:

Mid-way through the Paranormal Wars, Mortus discovered an obsessive fascination with life and and how death could be delayed or turned aside. Losing interest in a contest in which he felt he stood little or no chance, he absented himself without notice from the competition and began studies which would make a Nazi “doctor” squeamish.

Mortus doesn’t want personal power. He never uses flunkies or assistants, preferring to do everything himself to ensure that it is done correctly, and he will take as long in his preparations as he feels necessary. His plans are all small and relatively petty, at least on a cosmic scale; easily satisfied by individual deaths and mutilations. This makes it easy to underestimate him. He is far more than a Mere Brick.

Until recently, he thought he was an experimental clone of Behemoth*. His vision is noble: “If we can conquer death, and master the forces of life, all those we have lost can be returned to us. There will be no more suffering the agonies of isolation and grief. How many people were killed in the First World War? How much more difficult would the powers at large have found it to justify such slaughter if the Archduke Ferdinand had been restored to life? It is too late for that conflict, and yet the question lingers: how many more may be saved in the future from a reduction in causus belli? And even if the price proves to be the life of another, how many volunteers would there be for such an operation? It has always been said that the death penalty would not bring back the victim of a murder; what if that were no longer the case? There are those who contribute more than their share to society; how many of those can be maintained by donations of life from those who waste their lives, when the final moment came? How much good might they do?”

Mortus is a villain not because he is a bad guy, but because he is an utterly ruthless and psychopathic good guy – on his own terms.

Mortus: The Truth Within The Truth:

Slowly the truth has been eating at his ignorance like a cancer:

There was once a cosmic entity who decided for reasons of its own to bond with a mortal. In the process, the entity came to love the mortal’s mate as much as the mortal did. In time, the mate was poisoned by the radiations emitted from the cosmic experiments and studies of the duality, and eventually died. Both part of the entity became consumed by insanity of different kinds, growing out of their grief; they decided that they needed to know all about life and death in order to conquer the latter for all time.

For eons he worked, yet still the ultimate secrets eluded him. There was never enough time for a completely comprehensive analysis of the subject, never enough time for the research required. He had long ago run out of willing subjects, but that triviality would never stop him. Now he faced the death of his universe, his work still incomplete, and he decided that this was unacceptable. If only he could be trusted, then what he needed was more of himself. Many more. And so he divided himself, and scattered his facsimiles throughout the spacetimes, where they would linger and grow. Beginning as mere bullies, they would mature in power and knowledge as the inherent obsession manifested, until they had learned all they could – at which time they would be re-merged into the collective consciousness of the original. An infinite number of cosmic entities, all working to their utmost, throughout space and time – surely one of them would discover the secrets of Life?

Even the name “Mortus” is not of the villain’s own choosing, he has come to realize. It was bestowed in another space, another time, for one who committed genocide on an unfathomable scale, and resonated throughout the multiverse, subconsciously infiltrating the psyche of every other “Mortus” analogue.

All of this makes a lot more sense to those familiar with the comics appearances of Thanos if you substitute the original name back into the above and then read between the lines…

* Behemoth was one of the founding PCs in the campaign. A “smart brick” who was a genius at building things and less so about understanding how they worked, the theory behind them, or what the limitations would be that resulted, he ended for several years of the campaign being replaced by an evil clone of himself that he had created in his own efforts to prepare for the accidental death of a member of the team – including himself. After virtually destroying the life and reputation of the original through increasing irrationality and petulance, the clone was killed in a dramatic act of defiance, triggering the automated systems that were supposed to release the clone from its stasis – where the clone had incarcerated the original. Hey folks, guess who’s back from the dead? There’s a lot of irony in ‘Mortus’ thinking that he was another Behemoth Clone, under the circumstances…

Introducing Mortus In-game:

Before Mortus himself makes an appearance, his handiwork should become known. Find a war zone (i.e. where people won’t be missed). Locate a village within that war zone. Depopulate it by abducting the entire population in their sleep – those who are awake are left behind to raise the alert. Over the next 24 hours, have the missing who were in good health reappear – with slices extracted from them, or horrible disfigurements, or missing vital organs, or whatever else you can come up with. Examination will show the time of death to be the exact moment that they reappeared – so everything they experienced took place ante-mortum. At the same time, several of those who were suffering from serious infirmities or incurable diseases/conditions when they were abducted will also be returned – alive and completely cured.

Hypnosis permits a character to posses the brainwaves of sleep (and hence be amongst those abducted) at some future point, while ensuring that the ‘sleeping’ character can awaken instantly to meet the mad surgeon/scientist, Mortus.

I found some of the descriptions of Delgonian “torture” in various Lensman novels to be useful reference in describing the ‘treatments’ inflicted by Mortus.

Mortus: Powers & Abilities:

Again, note the lack of stats. These were whatever I needed them to be for the adventure, depending on what the PCs tried to do – and whether or not I thought it would/should work.

• Immense STR
• Immense Stamina
• Incredible Durability
• Naturally accomplished HTH combatant
• * Genius in all known fields of science and engineering
• * Can absorb & release vast amounts of cosmic energy, enough to destroy most mortals
• * TK
• * Telepathy
• * Matter Manipulation
• * Master Strategist

Mortus also possesses a teleport chair of his own design, named “Sanctuary” which is capable of:

• Space Flight / FTL
• Teleport
• Force Field Projection
• Weapons creation and automated firing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Telepathic Link to ‘Mortus’
• * Time Travel
• * Extra-Dimensional Movement (EDM)

* Denotes a power that Mortus is only slowly becoming aware that he has, and which he has limited control over.

GM’s Notes: Defeating Mortus:

To drive Mortus off, all that needs to be done is to disrupt whatever experiment he is currently running. He will then go elsewhere and start over. Defeating Mortus is another question – it’s almost impossible. At best he can be captured and temporarily detained.

But, as I mentioned earlier, the PCs found a way to go beyond that “at best”. Full marks to them.

The Philosophy Behind Mortus:

Mortus exemplifies a couple of simple philosophies taken to the ultimate extreme: “The End Justifies The Means”, and “Being Cruel To Be Kind”. In order to perform any sort of experimental surgery or practice any sort of experimental or risky medical procedure, you have to be able to justify it in terms of the lives that will be saved from what you will learn, regardless of the outcome of this one attempt. By definition, that means that procedures more likely not to be harmful will almost certainly not be successful.

Science tends to be very sure of itself, very affirmative in its predictions. Medicine is often thought of as a science, but the reality – as exemplified over many seasons by the TV series “House” (now available in a single box set containing all 8 seasons) – is that it remains as much of an art as a diagnostic science. Individuals are just too different, one to another, and the biology and chemistry and psychology of the individual is too complicated for simple analysis.

Mortus, as a concept, pushes those facts to the extreme. Any pain or loss he causes can be justified if it advances his cause, the elimination of sickness, pain, and death. The key to his self-justification is to learn as much as he possible can from his experiments. Intervention by others merely changes the scope of what he can possibly learn. One of the stratagems proposed by the PCs (and quickly rejected, I might add) was to threaten his database of collected results; I was prepared for this option, with a canned response from Mortus: “Then you will be the ones who will rob their sacrifice of any meaning, not I; I will simply have to start again. Who will be the true villains if you do this? On whose head will fall the suffering of those who might otherwise have been saved?”

By deliberately making Mortus an urbane, calm, and even warm individual, it only highlights the barbarity of most choices of possible response. This villain’s very existence makes the PCs – and the players – feel like philistines, out of their moral depth, children throwing stones at the glasshouse. Finding a response that the players can live with requires them to get to the nitty-gritty of what both they, and their characters, really believe – if there is any doubt whatsoever, Mortus will (metaphorically) crawl through it and get under their skin. His demeanor and philosophy accomplishes that, while ensuring that they have enough time to fully explore that territory.

Comparing Mortus and Lon Than:

Lon Than was presented in the previous episode of Pieces Of Creation. He explores the moral ambiguity if “War for the prevention of War”, in the context of the imminent Second World War, and the fears that many felt heading into that conflict. This ambiguity is at the heart of the Pulp genre; violence to prevent violence is justifiable and even heroic, when done in the name of a worthwhile cause, and by those standards, Lon Than is a hero.

And yet, the character and the debate that his existence creates never feels as deep or as personal as the debate that Mortus inspires, even though there are many thematic similarities between the two. They both explore the concept of villainy being a line that cannot be crossed, no matter how morally justifiable such a crossing appear, and in the process, investigate the question of “what is a hero and what is a villain?”. I once suggested that the scariest villain was the twisted might-have-been, because they “play with the primal forces of why the character is who they are.” Lon Than and Mortus are the sort of characters I had in mind when I was writing it…

I was originally going to present another character as well, a not-especially civil gentleman now going by the name Énorme Force. At the last minute, I decided that either his presence (especially last on the bill) would either overshadow that of Mortus, or Mortus would overshadow his – and so pulled his appearance for a subsequent article, when the Great Character Giveaway continues. Until then, I wish everyone a safe, happy, and prosperous New Year.