Death Duel with the Destroyers

You dared to lay your hands on me? The greatest warrior of two galaxies? General of the star-spanning Zorn Empire? Come out and face the leader of the death-dealing Destroyers!

--Annihilator

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Bill Willingham

Bill Willingham wrote and illustrated this particular adventure, and if the Destroyers seem vaguely familiar, it's because he later re-used those characters in his comic book The Elementals. Anyone who is not familiar with Bill Willingham's comic book work should get familiar with it, because it's classic stuff, beautifully drawn and always entertainingly written.

Death Duel with the Destroyers Plot

Like a lot of Villains and Vigilantes adventures of the time, this is an adventure in 2 parts, but it also has a short, optional prequel you can play through. This prequel actually has the potential of being one of the most enjoyable parts of the scenario, so it's definitely worth including.

The prequel involves a huge hurricane strength storm that's assaulting most of the USA. But this is no ordinary storm. It apparently is somehow affecting the minds and emotions of the populace. The player heroes get to rescue people in the storm, but then they also get the opportunity to have hallucinations. A creative GM can have a lot of fun with this episode. In my mind, I'm imagining my heroes' arch enemies showing up, but being far more powerful than ever before, and having the hero accidentally kill their arch foe by accident, only to realize it's all been a hallucination at the end.

It turns out that this storm has been a demonstration of the mystical might of Dr. Apocalypse, who is going to destroy a city a day until the USA gives him the island of Manhattan. Apocalypse's next step is to demonstrate his technological might by unleashing a super robot in Times Square. This leads to the next chapter of the scenario (or the 1st, if you've decided to fudge through the prequel.)

The Doomsday Robot is basically a huge, almost completely indestructible robot that is going to wreak major havoc on the city and the heroes until the heroes figure out that the robot is basically a huge vehicle being piloted by a team of henchmen. Once the heroes figure out to invade the innards of the robot, it's pretty easy to defeat. Making the robot a superpowered dungeon crawl was a pretty interesting choice, and makes for some fun as the players figure it out.

After defeating the henchmen, the players learn about Doctor Apocalypse's henchmen the Destroyers and their hideout in the top 4 stories of an office building. I thought this was pretty funny, considering that the Crusaders also had a base in the top 4 stories of an office building, and I think it would have been really clever to release several more adventures, all involving superhero or supervillain bases located in the top 4 floors of various skyscrapers throughout the VnV universe.

The gamemaster is encouraged to decide how the villains should be placed in the hideout, but I'd encourage anyone running this scenario to give the players an opportunity to explore the base a bit. Some of the real gold in this adventure involves the unique touches like the huge toilet in the Behemoth's bathroom. If the heroes just burst in and fight the Destroyers in their meeting room all at once, gems like that are going to be unavoidably missed.

Death Duel with the Destroyer Villains

Like Crisis at Crusader Citadel, Death Duel with the Destroyers features really cool, unique supervillains. Each of the villains is featured in a few panels of original comic book art and story drawn and written by Bill Willingham, which serves as a lot of inspiration, IMO, for how a superhero rpg campaign ought to be run.

A neat resource I found online offers stats for the Destroyers. Some of the Destroyers have expanded writeups including conversions into the Hero system here: Villains and Vigilantes characters.

Death Duel with the Destroyers is followed by a sequel, The Island of Dr. Apocalypse.