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!