Time of Crisis Completed!

 

Well we wrapped up our jump into Mutants and Masterminds last weekend and it went pretty well. I had one last minute miss (Providence's player) but Heavy Metal finally made it back after missing an entire arc.  To recap the structure of Time of Crisis:

• There is a kickoff involving a robbery by a team of villains at a casino. It's well done but I replaced it with a bank robbery involving fewer villains and more mooks since some of my players were new to the system and the rest of us were shaking off some rust. 
• Then most of the omniverse is destroyed but the characters are pulled into a surviving fragment by a powerful entity and given the task of saving it all by hunting down and disabling a set of cosmic bombs created by Omega, Lord of the Terminus. This involves traveling to various parallel earths and dealing with the inhabitants while searching for this larger goal. 
• One setting is the classic scenario where America lost WW2 and is now occupied. It's a chance to punch Nazis and fight various villains, robot tanks, and help the Resistance, and possibly set up a brighter future. Special guest star: Dr. Tomorrow. 
• Another setting is Earth-Ape which ... you knowwhat's coming, right? Another comic book trope where the world is inhabited by intelligent apes instead of humans and yes you do eventually get to save the world here. Special guest star: The Primate Patrol
• The third setting is pretty much a Mirror Universe where the good guys are all bad guys and run things for their own personal benefit. It's "The Tyranny Syndicate" in place of the Freedom League and one man, a villain in the normal Freedom-verse, is the lone superhero. You have a chance to change some things up here too. Special guest star: Mind-Master.
• The final chapter is back at home on Earth Prime, home of Freedom City and the League and the other heroes and villains of the Freedomverse. This is also a showdown with Omega himself, coming to make sure his final bomb completes its mission. Being a Power Level 19 character facing a bunch of Power Level 10 characters it could be pretty one-sided but their prior experiences give the team some tools that give them a fighting chance.

  It was a lot of fun and all of my players liked it. We spent 10 sessions working through it and after having tried to run it multiple times over many years we actually managed to finish it this time, and with an appropriately climactic battle against Omega. People were battered, bad guys were beaten, and in the end the Lord of the Terminus went down to concentrated efforts and smart thinking by my players. Some high points:

• Our first parallel world was Earth-Ape and everyone got a kick out of the inhabitants, the heroes, and the terrible, terrible puns scattered throughout this adventure. Boom Gun Brandon was back in town for this and got to play a Glitter Boy from Rifts which made him happy even if the "boom" effect that happened to everyone around him every time he fired made everyone else less happy. Definitely a feature to be worked on in the future. After the main villain went down an attack by an Omega drone - part of how the GB ended up here - gave everyone one more chance to show off their combat skills and to team up with the recovering Primate Patrol. This is also where our two tech-genius heroes figured out how to defuse the bomb for the first time.

• We went to Occupied America next and this part gave U.S. Patriot a chance to make a -lot- of speeches about America ... to everyone within earshot, accompanied by various renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner courtesy of Heavy Metal. It was cracking all of us up so it was a fun run.

• Next-to-last was Evil Earth which opened with a fight against their own evil selves. Heavy Metal was not present for this one - but his evil doppelganger was! Taking down the team's toughest member was an interesting exercise and White-Out was very on-board with razzing him for a) not being at this fight and b) letting him know who it was that finally took him out (it was White-Out). While fighting the evil Freedom League Thunderbolt (evil Captain Thunder) was tanking almost the entire team and frustrating them more than a little bit. Later, the team made a really good effort to reform Mind-Master who was ready to blow his own world away regardless of whether Omega was the source of it or not. This was probably the most interesting run of all.

• In the finale they tracked down the bomb fairly quickly so we spent most of the session's game-time working through the fight. The whole thing happens in a park where there is a giant statue of Centurion and with Patriot having a personal connection with Centurion it was a great location for drama. Once they figured out Omega's weakness ... well the fight did not last long. He hurt some of them in the process but they had multiple rods (IYKYK) and were not afraid to use them. Soon enough the city, the world, and the omniverse were saved, thanks were exchanged, missing heroes reappeared, and the movie was over. 

Since we had some time left, I started the discussion on how they felt about the system and if they wanted to continue the game as a more traditional superhero game. We went around the table and while they liked it, I would phrase it as they didn't love it. One comment was that it dragged a fair amount in combat. As we talked through things it became apparent that there were some other options that interested them more than "more" M&M. 

I had pretty much expected this as I felt like I was probably the most excited person at the table for most of this campaign. There were bursts of excitement here and there as the game went on but I never felt that next level of interest coming from my crew. That tipping point where they are consistently talking about the system amongst themselves away from the table just never quite ignited. It's interesting because I was feeling overwhelmed when we started but by the last few sessions I was finally feeling it and seeing the possibilities for a real, ongoing campaign. Not this time though.

As for me I was happy to make some kind of run with this game again as it has been a long time. M&M is a hugely important game to me and to anyone who loves supers campaigns - even if they don't play it or like it - as it has become "the standard" IMO for most players - especially if they've never played Champions. It's been a consistent long-term presence with a lot of stability as far as rules and availability. I know that I could have done a better job in several ways - mainly rules mastery and keeping things flowing during the game. It would have had more impact if we had spent more time getting to know Freedom City before blowing up the multiverse but I wasn't going to risk not getting to do it. That said I'm not kicking myself over anything in particular. I do really like the game and I especially like the level of support it has for actually running the game. From NPCs to creatures to equipment to locations there is a large set of pre-built things to throw into your game and with a supers game that is especially important.

That said I'm probably not quite as in love with it myself as I was ten years ago. I think it's a great game but one does have to guard against some "sameyness" leaking in when you have a bunch of characters at the same power level. The trappings and descriptors matter. The combat can drag a bit as the team stacks bruises on a villain and hopes for failed saves on other effects. Some of the powers, particularly Afflictions, can be tricky to decipher and distill into "what does this look like when it's fired off?" I think with more in the system this would be less of a problem but there is a definite curve to get through to where the mechanics take less processing power and more can be devoted to "style." I doubt I have run my last game of M&M, probably not even my last game of 3rd edition, but I'm OK setting it aside for now. 

So what did we decide to do? Well the siren's call of D&D did not take hold but the siren's call of Savage Worlds and the prospect of a complete run of Necessary Evil did make it through. I'm happy with it as it's a)more supers-action and b) a chance to complete yet another thing we have started before but never finished! With some schedule choppiness ahead Variable Dave is going to run some Dungeon Crawl Classics for a session or 3 - so I actually get to play something - and then in June we will head back to Star City and kick off Necessary Evil: The Third Attempt!

Yep, right over there ...

Super Saturday: Time of Crisis Session 2 - Where We Really Get the Party Started

 

I ended up with two players out last week, out of my usual six, but it's a superhero game so we pushed on with Plan A. Well, sort of.

As our heroes awaken from the fade to black they sense a lot of nothingness ... and then some rocks ...

They realize something serious has happened while they help each other recover, knowing more is probably coming and that the Terminus is involved. Then something new appears ...

A huge, glowy, floating face (ala original series Star Trek) appears in front of them and introduces herself as the Norn, the Guardian of Life. The Omniverse has been destroyed but she has saved them, now the only remaining superheroes, and intends to undo the end of the Omniverse. To do this they will have to travel to 4 different parallel earths and stop an interdimensional bomb set up there by Omega.  

I am amazed at how different players react to things sometimes and there is a paragraph of notes here about what to do if the players don't get it and throw rocks at the Norn etc. I've had players do stupid things before but once it's been explained to you that EVERYTHING ELSE IS GONE I have a hard time believing that people aren't going to get on board. Yes, it's kind of a railroad but this kind of thing is a definite superhero plot so shake it off and get ready to fix the universe!

My players, knowing they signed up to be superheroes, jump on board and our heroes say "let's go!" and so the Norn sends them to ...

This was another conversation. I have two players out, I have another player coming back for a week who wants to join in and I think we can all agree that fighting Nazis on a parallel earth is about the most fun one can have in a game like this. It's presented as the first stop in the tour and that makes sense as it is the most straightforward one of the bunch. But I wanted to save it until we had full turnout (or more turnout at least) so I opted to run ... well ...

Monkey Planet is another strong entry in "things you will see in superhero comics" so we went with that for this one. Of course I had done absolutely zero prep on this segment so I was winging it in a big way. Fortunately I did have everything in Hero Lab so I at least had 3E stats for everything ready to go. 

As things come back into view our heroes look around and see a fairly normal-looking world. In fact it looks a whole lot like the Freedom City they know and love. That is until they look a little closer  ...

... and see that all of the people around them are some kind of ape! The local cops gather, crowds of passers-by are terrified, and tensions are rising despite the team's efforts until Dr. Simian and the Primate Patrol arrive on the scene. There is a hurried discussion between the team and the Doctor about where they are, why they are here, and what is known of Omega and the Terminus. Immediate violence is averted and all agree to meet at city hall (nearby) to discuss safety measures with the mayor and the chief of police. 

Though the entire place is both fascinated and terrified by our heroes the conversation proceeds efficiently. Early on there are inquiries about where they are from and what it's like there - "does everyone look like you?" is a complicated question when you have two battlesuits, a flaming guy, a frost guy, and two sort-of-normal-looking humans in the mix. Eventually though Dr. Simian announces that he has the Omega bomb in his lab where it is being extensively tested since he is the foremost scientist on the planet and has unmatched facilities and staff. Now that the dangerous nature of the object has been confirmed he wants to take the party to his lab to disarm the bomb. 

Our heroes agree of course but there is some side conversation along the way as Patriot has recognized this Dr. Simian as a total twin of their own Earth's Dr. Simian - a genius villain who in the past has tried to turn all humans into apes. This is an alternate earth, and he has formed a team of superheroes here, but still ... there are suspicions within the party about what he's really up to. 

Soon enough the traveling party arrives at the local Anthropoid Scientific and Technical Research Organization (ASTRO) Labs facility. Beneath this is Dr. Simian's giant underground laboratory which means the group passes through various tunnels, oversized elevators, giant sealed vault-like doors and ends up miles underground in a giant room which contains a giant glowing sphere ...

As the team surveys the lab, the equipment, the lab-coated monkeys working on the equipment, and most importantly the bomb ... from the adventure itself:

Dominating the building’s interior is a huge, red spherical object connected via cables to the various scientific instruments along the walls. The sphere pulses with a weird, crimson energy and makes the air itself crackle.

It is clearly not any normal kind of technology anyone in the room is familiar with but now that the Terminus connection is known some conclusions can be drawn. More machines are activated around the room and our two technical experts offer to toss in their two cents. As they move to examine the thing up close the up til now chatty Primate Patrol members quiet down and begin moving awkwardly towards our heroes all around the room ... "You must not interfere" ...

This of course begins the sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Yes, still trying out the projector. A published adventure usually means maps, so all I have to do is cut them out and then drop them in.

The confrontation starts with MetaMorph shifting to a Bear form and trying to grapple Heavy Metal. This goes about as well as expected and things escalate from there. Brainape attempts to mind-control various characters in turn, Chimpanzoom speed-rushes an area and pummels all within, Elastigibbon uses stretching and spinning punches, Iron Monkey locks in on Red Phoenix with his force beams, and Dr. Simian blazes away with his chair-mounted blasters. 

For our heroes, outnumbered but undaunted, Patriot flies right up to the doctor and starts punching but that forcefield around his flying chair is strong! Heavy Metal blasts Brainape, Red Phoenix returns fire on Iron Monkey, and Onryo starts blasting 'Morph. 

This goes on for a bit with Morph and Brainape dropping fairly quickly. Iron Monkey eventually goes down to combined fire from Red Phoenix and Onryo while Patriot and Metal deal with the others.  As the tide turns Dr. Simian shakes off his feigned confusion and sighs ... "Oh enough of this" and presses a big red button on his chair ...

...the overhead lights immediately change from incandescent white to a pulsing deep purple, and a loud humming sound fills the room. Everyone in the room blacks out under the influence of the inescapable purple light ...

GM Notes

The theme of the night was "rust". I've run this game before, many times. I've run this adventure before, a couple of times. I've run this specific part of this adventure before. Yet I felt like an almost-noob trying to keep this thing moving. It's rare for me to feel this clueless with a game I have chosen to run but it was challenging for the entire session. I have realized since that I have not really run M&M 3E since 2019 and my longer runs were years prior to that so I may have had it in my head that I know how to run this without really considering how much that layoff was going to impact me. It's as if 90% of what I knew about the system just drained away in that time. I felt some of this after the first session and I spent the intervening time reading back thorough the rulebook but once we hit the table it was not easy. 

Some of this was due to the last minute change-up to Earth-Ape. I had not refreshed myself on the scenario or especially on the Primate Patrol's powers ... wow was that a mistake. It's one of the difficulties running a supers game vs. running a D&D type game: I know what a troll or an ogre or a red dragon does in a D&D game. Every hero/villain in a superhero game could (maybe even should) have their own unique set of powers. There are archetypes, of course, but the specifics of each character are often where the fun and the signature moves lie. I was reading some of these statblocks for the first time as the game got started and trying to nail down tactics for six different super-powered characters in real time was just not a great experience - especially for our second game in years. 

Now the good news is that I did know my way around Hero Lab and its tactical console this time which helped immensely. But having easy access to the words and numbers does not equal knowing what to do on a given round with those words and numbers. So it helped, but it did not solve the main problem. 

I also learned that I probably need to look pretty closely at opposition character builds as the Patrol, as-written, was having a very hard time doing anything to my heroes. I think Heavy Metal had a bruise and was dazed thanks to a crit but that was about it. With a bit of tweaking I could have both made the standard expected attacks better and also worked out some creative uses of their powers instead of scrambling just to figure out the basics. For example, in this particular scenario just restraining the heroes in some way is as good as knocking them out and I'm sure between a stretcher, a speedster, and a shapeshifter there was potential there, but I wasn't seeing it. There was also the barely-tapped potential of the mind-controller which should be a big concern to a bunch of non-mentalists but to be fair they did take him down first. Ah well - next time will be better.

The program and the projector did work well, so with actual (and extra!) time to prepare for the next part of the adventure it should roll much more smoothly. Of course I may have 7 players show up next time so I'll have to think of something extra to deal with them all. 

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!