Zodiac-themed supervillains and supervillain teams are a comic-book staple. In this adventure/supplement, Darren Tenor provides another take on this trope. “Signs of the Zodiac” includes Villains & Vigilantes stats for all twelve villains, two brief adventures which each pit the heroes against six of the Zodiac Syndicate, two adventure outlines, additional adventure seeds, a detailed and fully keyed map of Zodiac Syndicate headquarters, and information about the team’s structure and strategies. This Zodiac Syndicate would make decent recurring villains for any superhero team. Of course, twelve villains vs. four heroes would be awkward, but never fear: Tenor anticipates this problem, and divides the overall Zodiac Syndicate into smaller teams suitable for use against smaller hero teams. Tenor achieves this in a way that doesn’t seem artificial, too. A lot of what makes these villains interesting is the interplay between them and their interpersonal relationships with each other; however, it will take a fairly skilled GM (or players who don’t mind interruptions from Captain Exposition) to share this information with the players. In terms of their stats and powers, the villains are a bit less interesting than their plots, and than the team as a whole—and, in a way, the adventure outline “The Replacements” acknowledges this in-game. If you’re running a continuing V&V campaign, you’ve got a ready-made source of villains and plots here. If you’re running a different supers game in campaign mode, you might find this material worth converting; it’s kind of hard to say. If you’re looking for a one-shot adventure, this isn’t it. One complaint about the production values: a 56-page PDF needs bookmarks.

Signs of the Zodiac presents the Zodiac Syndicate, a group of diverse supervillain who have banded together for their mutual benefit, not world domination, but profit. Each of the Zodiac members is fully written out and has an android assistant as 12 members are a bit unwieldy, they often function as 3-person teams built around the elements tied to the various Zodiac symbols, each team’s basic dynamics and tactics are covered. Two full scenarios, along with additional superpowered characters, are included along with several scenario ideas.

As V&V is a fairly direct system, conversion to another superhero system should not be that difficult for any of these works. Each of the V&V books comes with a set of full color counters of the characters and bystanders (and sometime more) that can be printed out for game use.

Disclosure: As a featured reviewer for RPGNow/DriveThroughRPG, I received my copy of this product for free from the publisher for the purpose of this review.