Necessary Evil - Session One - Prologue

The Old-School D&D campaign has been derailed lately due to conflicting kid schedules, birthdays, and a wedding anniversary but another campaign has managed to fire off - The Savage Worlds plot-point campaign. You can see more if you scroll down on this page. I have had the book for years and always wanted to run it with my group but never saw an opening. With the recent splitting of my regular group we had the chance to break away from our strong D&D 3.5 focus and try something new, and this is it.

I have 4 players for now and they had a few weeks to make characters after we decided to play NE. The concept in NE is that the Superheroes of the world have been nearly wiped out by an alien invasion. Earth is now occupied by these aliens and the villains are tired of it, so they begin to strike back. The PC's are Supervillains, a nice twist from traditional supers games. They came up with the following:

• Nissa, teenage female vampire (similar to Jessica from True Blood)
• FireStrike, a fire projector/blaster (looks a lot like the Human Torch)
• MegaStrike a radioactive brick (think a glowing green colossus/thing looking guy)
• NightTerror/NightStrike a dark stalker type character with insubstantiality powers.

(I dubbed the dark stalker character "NightStrike" after hearing the other two names and threatened to call the vampire girl "BloodStrike" just to keep the theme alive. )

Since we had not played the system before I decided to run a test combat - a bank robbery. This would also give the PC's a connection, as we set the robbery 5 years before the campaign start and decreed that this was the only time the characters had all worked together.

The fight opened with the characters already in the bank taking money. As they emerged, 2 cops step out of the donut shop across the street and yell "Freeze dirtbags!".

They last all of 1 round as FireStrike takes one down and MegaStrike takes out the other one. Firestrike burns a bennie making sure he takes the cop down in one shot.

Another cop comes out of another shop and is promptly dropped by NightStrike while Nissa feeds on one of the downed cops.

The group rests for a round and heads for their getaway vehicle feeling pretty pleased with themselves. Then, with a whoosh and a resounding CLANK! the well-known armored villain Red Menace lands in the middle of the street and in a bad Russian accent demands the cash.

The fight lasts 2 rounds as Red is clearly not up to taking fire from 4 super opponents (I used the armored hero sample character straight from the NE book and decided he kind of sucks after this - he will have upgrades before his next appearance.) He doesn't go down though. Nissa saunters over to the villain as he goes toe to toe with MegaStrike and glamours him, telling him that the money is "in that bar over there". Red heads toward the bar and the group heads out, though they do see Champion flying by in the distant sky.

Notably, FireStrike has used all of his bennies by the end of this fight.

Notes from our first combat:

1. The WIld Die is working as advertised. It made a difference in this fight.
2. Bennies are important but my players don't totally get them yet.
3. Heavy Armor is important but not as critical as I thought it might be - all super attacks are automatically considered heavy.