M&M: The Big Game

So I started what I hope will be the "ultimate game" the day after Thanksgiving. I ended up with 5 players - two of my regulars, two of my Apprentices, and a friend of Apprentice Red's. We ran for about 8 hours which is a good long session for us. It was not quite as productive as I had hoped so we came nowhere close to finishing the adventure but it was a good start. People ran late, people had to finish making characters, we had to make some introductions of those characters, and we had to have a quick run-through of the rules but I didn't mind - those are all part of kicking off a new campaign.

So what did we play? Time of Crisis! Originally written for 1E M&M, updated for 2E in the GM screen for that edition, and updated to 3E by ... me. There are almost zero published adventures for superhero games that I think are worth running (except for ICONS!) but ToC is one of them. It's very much an "event" type adventure and I have wanted to run it for a group that would appreciate it for years. Being somewhat heavily structured, it's good for a new group too as they can focus on accomplishing a series of tasks to SAVE THE UNIVERSE under circumstances that mean even heroes who might not get along normally have a reason to work together.

I'm not going to get into all of the details as we only got through part of the adventure. The short version is that after Omega finally manages to shatter the cosmos a random group of heroes is rescued by a powerful entity and sent on a series of "missions" to undo the damage and save reality. Each of these takes place on an alternate universe and the first one is one where Nazi's won WW2. Right away the heroes are getting to punch Nazis and throw tanks at airplanes in a much-worse-off version of Freedom City. There is more fun to be had in subsequent parts but that's as far as we made it this time. The players were all pretty excited during the game and liked what they saw so things are looking really positive.

Our Heroes:

• US Patriot - super-strong, super-tough, flying symbol of patriotism
  (known hero in Freedom City)
• The Descendant - heir to an ancient legacy tied to artifacts of elemental power
  (new hero)
• Dark Justice - lurking, menacing, bringing justice to the streets - dark justice
  (known hero is Freedom City)
• Heavy Metal - builder and wearer of a hi-tech armored battlesuit to defend the defenseless and make a difference in the world
  (new hero)
• Barry Allen, the fastest man alive, aka The Flash - yep, that guy. This whole flashpoint thing is way out of control
  (errr...)

(Red's friend really likes Flash, especially the show, and wanted to play him. With the DC Adventures books as a reference how could I say no? It's not like Barry isn't getting into this kind of thing all the time anyway. We down-powered him to PL10 and went with it.)

The only downer was that schedules were not compatible for December, smashing my hopes of wrapping it up this month. January 2nd we gather again to hopefully resolve the Crisis. It's a big gap but I'm going to try and work in an M&M game during the holiday break with a different set of heroes to keep it somewhat fresh for most of the players.

So, the game is started. For 2017 I have decided to run an ongoing M&M game monthly. That will be the Freedom City game taking off from this kickoff adventure. I have 12 adventure ideas sketched out and will run one of them each month for whoever can make it. Other sessions will use FC or work in Emerald City or Atomic City depending on who's playing and what makes sense. I'll talk about how its going and what is or isn't working here.