How a Street Thug Killed a God is the retelling of a Mutants & Masterminds game where the "heroes" turned out to be worse than the villains, and how the ordinary street thug named Solomon brought down a Superman Expy named Olympian, a Martian Manhunter Expy named Adept, and a Batman/Rorschach Expy named Protocol, with some help from his Mad Scientist friend, called Doktor.
Can be read here.
Narrated here.
How a Street Thug Killed a God provides examples of:
- Adaptive Ability: Adept's power involves changing his body to gain new physical traits to solve problems, taking the quickest and simplest route possible. It ends up being horribly, horribly deconstructed, as a psychic trap incapacitating him with pain causes his power to destroy his brain in order to immunize him to the attack, reducing him to a drooling vegetable.
- Almighty Janitor: Solomon is, for all intents and purposes, a faceless Mook who exists to be hired help for the actual supervillains. He's also a brilliant Chessmaster who takes down three superheroes by himself.
- And I Must Scream:
- The limitations of Adept's Adaptive Ability are exploited to turn him into a brainless vegetable. Since his power must be consciously activated, it's suggested that Adept will remain in this state for the rest of his life.
- The ultimate fate of Olympian. The superhero organization that brings him down locks Olympian away in a super-prison located on a dense, high gravity world that leaves even his incredible strength the equivalent of a toddler, to serve out a life-long sentence with no hope of parole.
- Anti-Villain: Solomon doesn't display any overtly villainous qualities, and the worst of his deeds are targeted at utterly vile "heroes" who have it coming. Only during his endgame does he resort to threatening innocent lives, and it turns out to be a bluff.
- Asshole Victim: Olympian, Adept and Protocol are ruthless and sadistic Smug Supers, and their players are little better. Of the three, only Protocol's player deigns to apologize for his terrible behavior after Solomon humbles them, while Olympian's player Rage Quits mid-RP and both him and Adept leave the group completely.
- Avenging the Villain: Solomon's motive is to expose the fundamentally evil behaviour of the "heroes" after they all-but-murdered his helpless, surrendering friend, the supervillain Doktor.
- Badass Normal: Solomon is a normal but highly intelligent and extremely stealthy criminal who manages to take apart his friend's near-murderers. It's explained that, unlike everyone else who created typical superheroes/villains, Solomon put his points exclusively into Boring, but Practical skills like lockpicking and bomb-making, and eschewed a costume of any sort.
- Batman Gambit: Solomon's final play against Olympian hinges on him knowing that the hero is too vain and infuriated to play along with a Sadistic Choice, or pay much attention to the exact details of the situation.
- Beneath Notice: Stated to be a side effect of Solomon min-maxing his Stealth skill, combined with his extremely mundane appearance — He's so preturnaturally unremarkable that he's impossible to pick out in a crowd.
- Beware the Superman: The "heroes" are quite chilling, casually torturing and murdering villains and street thugs alike with hardly more than a charming smile. Protocol in particular lines his pockets by stealing money from criminals' wallets after he beats them to a bloody pulp.
- Bittersweet Ending: Olympian, Adept and Protocol are revealed as the monsters they are and defeated for good, but Solomon has to sacrifice his own life to do it, the Doktor can't revive him, and the city is said to have undergone a bloody upheaval as public opinion turns against vigilante heroes in general. Still, Solomon's player hopes that, eventually, real superheroes will emerge to make everything better.
- Brain in a Jar: Doktor barely survives getting tossed around like a football by Adept and Olympian, and Solomon has to sneak his body back to the lab so he can become one of these attached to a robotic body. He later upgrades the jar to a detachable helicopter drone, allowing him to abandon his body and flee danger faster than Olympian can fly, which comes in handy when the hero targets him as Solomon's only known associate.
- The Chessmaster: Solomon perfectly orchestrates the downfall of each hero, one by one, in the most karmic ways imaginable.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- The three superheroes dish one out to the villain Doktor early on, giving their inferior foe such a thorough and sadistic beating that the only way he survives is by becoming a Brain in a Jar. This event - and the callousness displayed by the victors - serves as the inspiration for Solomon's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- In the end, Olympian runs afoul of the setting's Heroes "R" Us, and the ensuing battle is unceremoniously described as "brief" due to the other superheroes having sheer numbers on their side.
- Don't Create a Martyr: At the very end, Solomon's player gives an explanation like this when asked why he didn't try to kill Olympian, despite directly or indirectly offing Adept and Protocol:Solomon's Player: When someone sees a hero, they don't care about the man; they care about the faith they have in him, his records. Killing Olympian still left him a hero. So, I did the next best: I killed the city's faith in him.
- Engineered Public Confession: Solomon's final act is to goad Olympian into disregarding a Sadistic Choice and killing him on live camera, to demonstrate to the entire city that Olympian would chose to protect himself and save his ego rather than save thousands of people he genuinely believed were at risk. The scandal gets the local Heroes "R" Us involved, and leads directly to Olympian's arrest.
- Failed a Spot Check: During the final confrontation, Olympian's player neglects to roll Perception on the "toxin" Solomon wanted him to drink. This comes back to bite him during the League's investigation, when they inspect the traces on Olympian's hand and discover it was merely lemonade.
- Fallen Hero: Olympian, Adept and Protocol (as well as their players) started out as relatively noble heroes, but as they grew in power and fame, they became complacent in their victories and developed sadistic streaks a mile wide.
- Finger Poke of Doom: At the end of the heroes' beatdown of poor Doktor, Olympian finishes him off with a superpowered finger-flick to the chin.
- First-Person Peripheral Narrator: The story was written by the player of Doktor, not Solomon, and Doktor himself doesn't have much bearing on the story other than being the Sacrificial Lamb that inspires Solomon to go on his crusade.
- Forgot About His Powers: When the League shows up to confront Olympian, before they even examine Solomon's toxin and learn it's just lemonade, they make a point of asking the invincible Flying Brick if he can even be hurt by toxin at all, let alone such a small amount of it.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Solomon starts as a hired thug for the Doktor without any notable qualities... Until he witnesses the brutality of the city's heroes firsthand. Then he rebuilds himself into an impossibly elusive terrorist, singlehandedly bringing down the city's three most overpowered superheroes one-by-one.
- Glad He's On Our Side: At the very end, Doktor's player admits that, following Solomon's chilling bout as The Chessmaster, he has no intention of ever playing against Solomon's player in any context.
- Heel Realization: Protocol's player suffers one when he is faced with scene-for-scene retellings of his character's naked sadism and greed, and the consequences of his actions catch up to him. It shakes him enough that he becomes the only one of the three antagonistic players to apologize for his terrible behavior and stick around. Adept's player may have had one as well, as he just stopped talking entirely before eventually leaving the chat, possibly indicating he felt ashamed of himself, though it could just as easily have been a Rage Quit.
- Heroes "R" Us: In the final stretch of the story, the setting's Justice League expy catches wind of what's been going on and launches an investigation, quickly revealing that Solomon's "toxin" was nothing of the sort and that Olympian's actions during their final confrontation were unjustified. When Olympian fails to charm his way out, he resorts to trying to fight them all, and a veritable army of superheroes apprehends him after a Curb-Stomp Battle.
- Herr Doktor: Doktor, a German Mad Scientist.
- He's Got a Weapon!: Protocol is killed when cops attempt to arrest him in his civilian identity, and he makes to activate an electrical device to defend himself. The police shoot first.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Protocol's reputation is destroyed when Solomon sneaks into his secret base and uses his own supercomputer to broadcast his misdeeds to the city, while Adept is lobotomized by his own Adaptive Ability trying to protect him from harm.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Olympian kills Solomon this way, shoving his entire arm through the man's gut.
- Logical Weakness: Adept's Adaptive Ability deals exclusively in biological changes. Solomon exploits this by attacking the hero with a psychic weapon, and Adept's reflexive attempt to evolve an immunity to psychic damage causes his power to destroy his higher brain functions.
- Mad Scientist: Doktor, implicitly designed to be the most stereotypical example of the trope possible, possessing a bald head, thick German accent and a habit of cackling.
- Munchkin: Adept's player, described as the "power-gamer" of the group, dedicates his character's build to an overpowered Adaptive Ability that allows him to perfectly mimic any physical trait - such as Olympian's Super-Strength - with just a few stat tests. According to the narrator, Adept was infamous for his flawless track record in solving crimes or defeating villains-of-the-week.
- Never Trust a Title: Solomon doesn't actually kill any of the three; Adept is left a vegetable, Protocol is killed by cops, and Olympian is tricked into publicly disgracing himself and arrested by other superheroes. Although, one could argue that Solomon makes good on the title by destroying the public's faith in the three "heroes". After all, what is a god without the faith of his worshippers?
- Police Brutality: After Protocol and Adept are dealt with, Olympian uses his influence to put the city under martial law during his hunt for Solomon. Combined with the growing backlash against heroes in general after Protocol's crimes, this leads to the police gunning down vigilantes left and right, while every superhero other than Olympian himself goes into hiding.
- Politically Incorrect Hero: At some point, Olympian started using racial slurs against Doktor, a German character.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Given what Olympian devolves into.
- Press X to Die: When Adept's player declares that he intends to use his character's Adaptive Ability (which can only cause physical changes to his body and will always go for the quickest and simplest solution to the problem) to develop an immunity to psychic damage, the GM asks if he's absolutely sure he wants to do that. The player says yes, and the ill-advised power use gives him the immunity he wants... by lobotomizing him and destroying all brain function other than the bare minimum necessary to keep him alive. Since he needs to consciously activate his power in order to use it, he's stuck like this forever.
- Rage Quit: Olympian's player leaves the chat after his character is overpowered by an army of other superheroes, leaving the GM to describe Olympian's fate without the player's input. Adept's player also quits, belatedly, becoming very quiet and reclusive before leaving the roleplaying group altogether.
- Sadistic Choice: Solomon confronts Olympian with a Dead Man's Switch that will set off a bunch of bombs and destroy the city, and threatens to activate it unless Olympian kills himself by drinking a vial of toxin, sacrificing himself for the good of the people. Subverted when it turns out to be a massive bluff on Solomon's part. There aren't any bombs, and the "toxin" is actually lemonade; the real trap is an Engineered Public Confession that banks on Olympian making the selfish choice while on camera.
- Slasher Smile: Olympian, just before he splatters Doktor with a Finger Poke of Doom, pauses for a moment and "smiles heroically" at the horrified Solomon.
- Stealth Expert: Solomon the street thug min-maxes his Stealth skill until he becomes this trope mixed with Beneath Notice, allowing him to act with total impunity while the heroes struggle to even find him. Olympian only learns where he is because Solomon specifically wanted to be found. He becomes so stealthy that he not only manages to stalk and secretly film Protocol — the local Batman-expy — for an unknown amount of time without ever getting spotted, but then broadcasts all of the footage and a picture of Protocol without his mask from Protocol's own home computer.
- Tautological Templar: The superheroes. As Olympian's player puts it; so long as the bad guys are defeated, they're the heroes, and therefore they're always in the right.
- Toxic Friend Influence: Olympian is said to have turned rotten first, letting his levels and in-universe fame get to his head, and that Adept and Protocol were more-or-less following his example. The author even describes Olympian's increasingly poor behavior as being an "icebreaker" for the other two.
- The Unmasking: On top of making his sadism public, Solomon reveals Protocol's unmasked face on a public broadcast. This indirectly leads to his demise, as the police are easily able to figure out his identity from his photo and show up at his house to arrest him. He tries activating his defenses but the police are quicker on the draw and shoot him dead.
- Villainous Friendship: Doktor and Solomon's relationship started out as a standard relationship between a supervillain and one of his many hired goons, but as they continued to work together it grew into genuine friendship and they became full partners in (literal) crime. After Solomon's death, Doktor tries his hardest to revive him, but cannot, and builds a memorial to him in his lab.
- Villain with Good Publicity: More or less what the "Heroes" became.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- The brutal killing of Doktor is so disturbing that Solomon's player asks for a brief time out so he can chew out the hero players for their sadism. They don't understand why he's so alarmed.
- Solomon the character issues a quiet, downplayed version of this to Olympian, when Solomon lays out his Sadistic Choice and Olympian refuses to play along:Olympian: I'm not going to kill myself.
Solomon: It's for the city, hero. - And again, when Olympian mocks Solomon for thinking he can kill him:Olympian: You can't kill heroes; you're a villain!
Solomon: It's a good thing you're not a hero, you bastard.
- Who Even Needs a Brain?: When Adept gets trapped in a psychic stun net that causes intense psychic pain, he uses his adaptation powers to work his way out of it. Unfortunately, because his powers take the quickest route out of the predicament and can only be physical changes, his powers opt to destroy his brain to make him immune to psychic effects, leaving Adept a drooling vegetable.
