Necessary Evil: Third Time's the Charm - Session 4: Cult of the Space Gods

 

Our Villains:

• MEGASTRIKE - Strong, radioactive Russian mobster brick. Played by Paladin Steve. A returning character from the prior attempts at this campaign.
• LEGION - Demonic leader of a criminal organization. Face with a sidekick and a lot of resources. Played by Grognard Mike.
• NIGHT BLADE - Sword-for-hire, a mix of melee offense and melee defense. Played by Shootist Will, another returning character.
• NIGHT TERROR - Intangible assassin, stealthy with a side order of ranged combat capability. Played by Variable Dave and yet another returning character.
• Y2K BUG - AI in a stolen robot body. Tech-guy and mainly good at ranged combat, not terribly strong or tough - for now. Played by Battletech Terry.
• THE MIGHTY XYZZIFAX -  Wizard who traveled here from another world. Ranged combatant, heavy defense, and a lot of flexibility. Played by Blaster - a character returning from a completely different game!
• PHANTOM BLADE EDGELORD - Yet another sword-guy who eventually broke out of the same prison camp and followed them to the warehouse. Whole bunch of melee offense, not a ton of defense - but he can self-heal. Played by Invisible Paddy.

Mike and Blaster were both out this session so the Wizard was still on the internet and Legion was tending to her criminal network.

Between missions we find MegaStrike making dinner reservations for a date with Valarie the Undergrounder leader. Bug is working on Terron's robots attempting to hack them into something he could control. Night Blade is doing katas, training, etc. Edgelord is looking for his house. Night Terror is touching base with the league of assassins, which he has just decided is a thing via a mention in his background. Then the comms chime ...

Dr. Destruction has been tracking a new group on the scene, calling themselves "The Children of the Space Gods" who has been terrorizing humans around the city - he doesn't particularly care about this - but they are also be infiltrating and disrupting local Omega cells and that's a problem. They have caused enough trouble that the boss wants them eliminated. He points the team to where he believes the cult is located and turns them loose. "It's time to send a message."

The HQ is in what's left of the First National Bank of Star City downtown, in an area that was wrecked during the invasion and has never been rebuilt. 

Taking the minivans the team quickly locates the ruins of the bank (and the surrounding area) and jumps out to scout the neighborhood. Night Terror and Night Blade spot 4 guards outside and Team Night-Night quickly dispatches them without raising an alarm.

Stealth cases to matter when MegaStrike saunters up to what's left of the front doors. shoves his way in, backed by Edgelord and a flying Y2K Bug. A veritable swarm of cultists comes at them but there is zero doubt as to the outcome, especially as the Nights join in. They all move down a set of stairs leading underground to a several smaller rooms including the vault and the safety deposit box area where they encounter more cultists and their leader, a V'Sori -looking mutant with mental powers named Davaros * who cannot stop the tide of devastation coming his way.

*At least that's what they gathered from what the cultists were chanting - briefly.

Poking around the vault and the deposit boxes - these are villains after all - they discover some financial documents that with some "alteration" work could be used to generate quite a bit of cash. These are gathered up and the whole team heads back to the warehouse.

GM Notes

This is a pretty straight-up assault scenario and lets the villains embrace villainy as much as they want as they go wipe out a potential rival organization. It was fairly easy to run as well which is nice sometimes. I will point out though that like most of the plot points in this campaign there is no map of either the area or the cult HQ, no artwork for any of it, and no read-aloud text (if you're coming from D&D adventures it's worth noting). You're going to work all that up yourself. For this one it could likely be done on the fly but I made some notes beforehand and it all went fine. These adventure nuggets are not really "no-prep", but they can certainly be "low-prep" if you want to run them pretty much as-is. Tying in specific NPCs, elements of your characters' backstories or schemes, or other parts of the campaign plot is probably something you want to sketch out in advance to get the most out of it.

 There was no way a bunch of normals, even with alien weaponry, and one powered enemy were going to even slow down 5 super-powered characters so I just embraced the absolute steamrollering and let the players enjoy it. It's another thing I have noticed in running this one - the opposition is rarely any kind of a challenge. I've added in more mooks, added leader-types, upped the damage on some of the weapons, and none of that made any real difference. For outdoor scenarios adding in some vehicles like M'bunas with their bigger guns can make things a little more dangerous, but it's still not life-threatening most of the time. Some of this is superpowered characters running with bennies to soak and adventure cards to do  random things but I think a lot of it comes from how this edition of the campaign changed in one way without changing in any others.

The current version of Necessary Evil has the players build characters with their full allowance of 45 super-power points. Prior editions had characters start with 10-15 power points and work their way into greater power over time. Power costs in the newer version are about the same, with many being less expensive and a few being more. So characters in this version are dramatically more powerful from the get-go. My players did notice this by this point. I flat-out killed Shootist Will's character in the first session of our many-years-ago NE campaign and I don't think that could happen now. The p[layers are just ridiculously more capable now. The opposition has not been terribly beefed-up either, with roughly a 50% boost on defenses :

• Old V'Sori Battle Master Toughness 10(4)
• New version Toughness 15 (6) and there's a fair amount of AP flying around so that's effectively 6 and 9 Toughness much of the time.

Weapons have barely been improved at all  - most of the alien blasters are 3d6 damage, AP4 - so just shaking a character with any substantial defense can be challenging.

Now that said I am enjoying it and so are my players but this is where I started to get concerned about the threat levels in the campaign. We have a pretty dramatic change to PC power levels without any consideration of that impact on the bad guys. More to come on that.