Super Saturday: Time of Crisis Session 1

 

Well it wasn't exactly a first session of Time of Crisis specifically but the campaign is underway!

Starting off a superhero campaign means a little more character examination and discussion - for me anyway - than say, a D&D type game. So we spent a little time pre-game discussing characters but I didn't get names, concepts, or Hero Lab files for most of them until the night before the game so we did a lot of it after everyone arrived. This ended up being a lot of "Ok what are you thinking here?" type discussions about each character. I have 6 players so 6 characters so ... 

U.S. Patriot conferring with allies

• Paladin Steve is playing "U.S. Patriot", a Superman-with-a-touch-of-Captain-America character whose origin is tied in with Centurion, Freedom City's Superman analogue. This character has shown up in almost every roll-your-own superhero game I've run for the last 20 years and is also his City of Heroes main so I have a pretty good idea of who he is and what he does as does the player. In many ways this is the easiest of the bunch because I know this guy. This character has been around in-game for about two years so is somewhat known as a hero. His big coming out party was The Battle on the Bay Bridge.
• Shootist Will is playing "Red Phoenix", a fire guy with the expected flying/blasting/damage aura/make fire stuff type powers ala Human Torch. It's a little funny because the first super Will made in one of my games was around 20 years ago for a Necessary Evil campaign and was a fire guy ... who died in the first session (the prison breakout) after using all of his bennies for offense. This is a lesson that is revisited every time we start a new Savage Worlds game. Hopefully this fire blaster lives a little longer. He has a secret identity, is independently wealthy, and is new in town.
• Variable Dave is playing "White Out", a frost/ice guy that's somewhere between Frozone and older Bobby Drake. He has the expected ice slide/create/control/blast/armor type powers. He also has a rivalry with Phoenix that is already developing on their first meeting. This is a new character for Dave so it will be fun to see how he shapes up and he is also new in-game and not really known to anyone.
• Battletech Terry is playing  "Onryo" an anime-style Battlesuit with strength, armor, life support, flight, blasting, and a bunch of sensory and comm systems. His character looks a lot like the battlesuit archetype with a few tweaks mechanics-wise but he's going for a more anime-style theme and look. There is the obligatory complicated backstory though she is effectively a new hero in-game and the character is originally from Japan.
• Blaster is playing "Heavy Metal", a traditional Iron Man style battlesuit with protection/flight/strength but his two main weapons are a set of retractable speakers that can blast non-lethal sonic attacks over a wide area and then a set of missile launchers for more lethal situations. He is the son of a rock star who went into engineering and ended up working on a battlesuit project. This was the same project Onryo was working on but it ended up going badly at one point and she was blamed for a disaster that was really caused by a rival company. They ended up making different suits from the same base technologies but neither knows that the other one did that ... which could get interesting later. 
• Grognard Mike is playing "Providence", a witch/wizard/mystic type character is tied in to a lot of modern mythology. She knows some basic magic but has discovered a knack for tapping in to talismans for specific powers. She has flight and protection abilities and then a whole bunch of attacks and senses and a nullify and invisibility and  ... you get the picture. Mike knows the system better than any other player and ends to make characters that don't fit into an easy categorization and has done exactly that here. I can already tell this is going to be boundary-pushing line-stepping challenge of the game. Most of her powers are built into an array where each talisman is one line item in the array and while the cap is about 25 points based on what's there now you can do a ton with a wide set of 25 point powers that you pay 1 point each to have available. I haven't had a character start with quite this much of an array before  - there are about ten powers in it now - and I can see it becoming a problem but I'm going to trust in the system and see how it goes for a while before I declare it one.

Those are my six heroes for this campaign. Let's see if everyone makes it ...

There was a lot of rust to shake off. We've played M&M 3E many times over the years but it has been years since we last played so we all needed a refresher. So we started with a normal spring day in Freedom City ... when a call goes out over police radio about a disturbance at the First National Bank of Freedom City. I had my players start discussing what they would be doing on a typical work day and how they would hear about problems in the city. Soon enough six figures are flying (or ice-sliding) towards the trouble spot.

Inside, a huge humanoid figure is bellowing orders as a pair of costumed types and some normal-looking people with guns herd workers and customers towards the back. "I AM OGRE! I AM STRONGEST! NOW PUT MONEY IN BAGS!" 

 Red Phoenix is first on the scene and he flies through the doors and blasts one of the caped types while scanning the rest of the scene. The caped guy with the star on his chest recovers from the shot and blasts back with his own fiery attack which does little to nothing to phoenix. Soon Patriot zooms in and goes straight for Ogre. White Out doubles up with Phoenix to take out the other fire guy (Starburst). Heavy Metal moves in behind the teller counter and blasts some of the thugs with his sonic attack. Onryo starts zapping thugs while Providence teleports into the bank and begins herding hostages through her portal to safety. 

The fight continues for a bit with the main result being a ton of property damage to the bank as fire and ice blasts, gunshots, and blaster bolts shoot all over the place. The civilians are mostly safe, the thugs are mostly down, and there are various levels of bruises/stuns/dazes to the heroes and villains when everything goes black and our heroes feel very very strange ... which is where we will pick up next week! 

GM Notes

I always like to start off a supers campaign with a bank robbery. It's a classic timeless scenario with a limited scope, a limited physical space, good starting hero dilemmas with the potential for hostage-taking, negotiations, police involvement, confusion between heroes and villains, and a chance for major property damage. You can mix in some normal thugs to let the PC's show off alongside some villains to give them a challenge. Every city has banks so it's not some exotic location and everyone has been inside one so players have some idea what they look like and the general features, layout, and vibe. I've found it to be a great intro session for a game like this.

This particular crew is a nod to the old Champions intro with Ogre robbing a bank. In that example, Starburst and Crusader are new heroes trying to stop him. For this I just made them bad guys and tweaked the energy projector and crime fighter archetypes and went with that. Most of my players had no idea of the connection but it made me happy so it worked for me.

I had 3 villains, 6 thugs, 6 heroes, and a placeholder for hostages so there were a lot of actors in this one. I was using HeroLab to manage the combat and it was just as useful as I remembered - once I started remembering how to use it. You can put the initiative order and some basic stats out into a separate window which helps the players see who is going when. It also tracks conditions so I can see that Starburst is Dazed and has two bruises and I can also hove over "Dazed" to see what it means in game terms. With the amount of powers and conditions flying around in this kind of game I find it useful to have this kind of thing on-hand. I do not normally run my games with a laptop at the table but for a few games I do and this is one of them and the availability and utility of this tool is why.

I also tried a new trick with drawing the scene this time. I am a dyed in the wool battlemat and markers guy but I picked up a projector while we were off for December and I spent some time figuring out how to make it work - and then spent more time pre-game on Saturday fine-tuning it with Blaster. The result was that I used that map graphic up top for our bank map for this session. I had it projecting on to a battlemat so we could draw in AoE's and things  - Phoenix is already walling people off with fire walls - but that's the only drawing we did. I think a modern supers game is a great place to try this out as I don't have to worry about light sources and fog of war too much - I can just show the whole map and it's not a big deal. This was a very basic attempt showing a static image of a common well-known location and it was a little clunky making it all work but I will be playing around with my options as we go forward with the campaign and hopefully getting much smoother with it.

This isn't mine but you get the idea of what you could do

So anyway there was a big learning curve this session, partly self-inflicted, but we had a good time. Everyone seems happy with their character and with each other so it's a good way to start the year and the campaign. I have a ton of homework to do  - like reading a bunch of rulebooks. I felt so slow! I need to work on both Hero Lab and the projector options now that I have tried them in the heat of battle. I also need to think through the table setup more now that I know all the things we will be using. Hell, I don't even have a real name for this campaign yet so I'll be overthinking that too. It's a busy week.

Campaign kickoff accomplished and more to come! Session 2 is tonight!

40K Friday: The Praetorian Adventure Begins

  

Last week I was a little tired of building Tyranids and I was sitting there in my hobby room and I just decided there was no reason not to go ahead and start building my new Imperial Guard army. Sure, there's some splitting of effort n that case but I've been hitting the 'nids pretty hard and I don't want to burn out on them. Plus I want to make sure that my concept is going to work and that it looks good so I needed to see some examples built. So I did ...

Those are modern/current guard infantry models with head swaps to the Wargames Atlantic "Bulldogs" pith helmet heads.  I built a full squad to see how it would all fit together.

Now imagine them with red jackets, white helmets ... like those guys up above.

I was worried that the heads might not look right but after putting a squad together I think they look just fine - the helmets stick up more so they do have a different profile but that's kind of the point, right? I love that they come with backpacks right there in the kit now for everyone but the sergeant as that does add something to the look. I think these new troopers fit the Praetorian look even better than the older plastic Cadians. 

And yes, this is not a new thing for 40K. People have been making custom guard regiments by mixing and matching parts for years, especially head swaps. Hell those original versions up above are just head-swapped Mordian Iron Guard, albeit done at the pre-casting stage. These guys have had a surge of interest in recent years with many options coming out for pith-helmeted-Victorian-looking space troopers. That boxed set and the huge "Battle of Big Toof River" thing back in the late 90's really stuck with some of us. The Wargames Atlantic ones are the ones I like most right now as each sprue comes with multiple head options so I can use the piths for this army and with the rest of this kit I can build some very Mordian looking troopers as well! Circle of life right? 

So my thinking here is a mostly infantry & artillery based gunline army for the core of the force. I have some sentinels and some rough riders to add in for some mobility. I also have 3 ogryn squads I'm leaning towards putting into some custom chimeras just to mix things up as well - and yes, I do have ogre-sized pith helmets for them. I want to get more built before I really start locking in to a certain force org but that's the pencil sketch concept for now.

There will also be tanks...

I have a Leman Russ company + set aside to team up with this army going with the desert-ish paint scheme. I like my red-coated infantry but I like my tanks too and the guard have a lot of cool ones. I'm actually ahead on getting those done - mostly because they're easier to get to this stage. I like the idea of being able to go mostly infantry with some tank support or mostly tanks with some infantry support - it should be fun. 

One thing I had to accept early on is that this army will be very much not a Warhammer store-friendly force. Lots of 3rd party bits, kitbashes, and 3D printed vehicles and bits as well. Now this is not really something I care about a great deal as I don't play in their stores or go to their tournaments but it was a little bit of a weird feeling as it already will have more custom work than even my orks at this stage. I have a lot of old stuff in my orks but most of it is GW - or at least it's made from GW parts. This army is just straight up whatever fits the very specific look I want. 

For now I'm thinking slow and steady progress. 10th edition guard (and presumably later) can deploy as a combined unit of two 10-man squads plus a 5-man command squad plus a leader officer of some type so I'm going to try and get the rest of one of those done this month alongside more tyranids and see how quickly I can get some kind of playable force. I'm not worried about points at all yet, just getting the parts into shape.

More to come!

Online Research for the M&M Campaign

 

So I've been poking around online looking for discussions, inspiration, useful items or documents for M&M this week and it is ... weirdly sparse in my opinion. The Facebook group has been slow for years, Reddit sees a post or two a day typically. RPG.net has some talk but not much in-depth about M&M specifically. The current version of the Atomic Think Tank is just strange - like Discord in some ways - mostly the negative ones. The old Think Tank was amazing for years - campaign ideas, rules discussions and debates, character write-ups ... the new one is just not in the same league. Echoes of the Multiverse is a non-official forum that is the closest thing remaining to the old ATT forums. 

Seeing a lot less than I was hoping for I went to the next level of resources. 

There is some limited activity on YouTube - these two channels have at least been recently active: Weeknight Hero and Power Level 10 but there is a lot of focus on explaining the mechanics more than anything which is cool but not exactly what I'm looking for. Still happy to see some activity though. 

There are a few blogs out there but not one focusing heavily on M&M and many of those not been touched in years. Many of the results are more news-type blogs - again not really what I'm looking for. Heck, this blog is coming up pretty regularly in the first page or two of results which is a little disappointing as I haven' really focused much on the game myself recently.   

Podcasts are not super common either. There were a bunch of actual-plays done in the first 5-10 years or so of 3E but it has really tapered off since then. Maybe it's not new enough anymore, I don't know. 

I also went over to Obsidian Portal to see what kinds of M&M campaigns were happening there and the answer is "not many" - there were 4 that were updated in the last month, 6 in the last year. There are a whole bunch listed, going back most of 20 years, but a high percentage of them never made it to ten sessions, fizzling out in the single digits. This has me wondering if "single digits" is where the majority of RPG campaigns end, not just superheroes and not just on OP, but games that people start in general. I may have a separate post on that coming up now but here, for this particular inquiry, I found some inspiration in some interesting campaign ideas but not much else. 

So what's going on here? Why is it so thin? Is there just not that much to talk about when a game has been out for 15+ years? Rules debates, maybe so, but how about campaigns? Surely people are out there running some games? Where is that chatter? I know it's not D&D but sheesh, it looks really light. Especially heading into a new edition this year!

Well, I'm spinning up the machine here, such as it is. I'll be posting about it a fair amount, both how the campaign goes and how the system and game line are working for us as well. I already know I like the game but it's been a while since we really put it to the test and I am looking forward to doing that. 

Also, if anyone has a good resource that I have missed, please feel free to share it!