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.

Necessary Evil: Third Time's the Charm - Session 3: The Hammer of Justice

 

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.

For this Episode both Xyz and Phantom Blade/Edgelord are otherwise occupied. Speculation is that the Wizard has discovered the internet and Edge is busy arguing with someone on that same internet ... possibly Xyzzifax. Also, we are using the Adventure Deck for the first time in any of my games. Before I felt it would be too disruptive and random to make sense in those campaigns but here in a supers campaign and an alien invasion on top of that I figured "why not"? As it turned out it would indeed prove fairly disruptive. 

Legion's "safehouse" is a four-plex with two bedrooms in each unit so there is enough room for everyone (and her sidekick) to stay there, especially with MegaStrike off at the warehouse. They looted 3 of Terron's robots from the prior expedition which are also stored at the warehouse for now. 

• Bug keeps himself busy beginning to take one of those bots apart while also planning out how to hack into a bank - he's going to need some funds.
• Legion is making calls looking for a tech expert resource to help analyze the bots
• Nightblade is doing katas and training etc.
• Night Terror is searching for rumors about his arch-rival Red Death and ends up working over a detective to get some information.
• MegaStrike is decorating the warehouse
• Edgelord is plotting and brooding.

Dr. Destruction sends a message informing them that an old hero, The Hammer of Justice,  has returned and is stalking Omega cells. He wants them to track the rogue down and either convince him to join the resistance or - if he will not - kill him. He directs them to where he thinks Hammer's old sidekick can be found and signs off.

It turns out most of the team had at least heard of the Hammer. Megastrike has no idea who he is. Nightblade fought him many times. He disappeared years ago. 'Strike goes to Valerie and asks her what her Undergrounders know about him and between that, Dr. D's information, and some legwork by the team they have a pretty good idea of where Hammer and his sidekick are. They decide to go visit American Anvil, Hammer's old sidekick, first. 

American Anvil was badly injured and retired around the time Hammer disappeared but the team figures he might be able to help turn the old hero around into joining the resistance. Meeting him at his penthouse apartment downtown they establish communications* and Anvil is amenable so they sit down to figure out a plan. It turns out Anvil has been in contact with him and knows the neighborhood where he's been hiding out and agrees to accompany the team. Anvil sees this as getting Hammer some help while the teams sees it as getting the movement some help so it should be good for everyone. Anvil does warn them though that Hammer is not quite his old self, mentally and he may have to be subdued. 

*By this I mean Night Terror sneak-phases into his place and manages to not get punched through a wall when he surprises Anvil in his place. 

Hammer has been hiding out under a bridge in Northpoint with a group of malcontents he has picked up. He shows up pretty quickly when the team and his old sidekick step out of their minivans and start looking around. Words are exchanged and it is clear that Hammer was sent into some other dimension by Dr. D years ago and had a lot of time to think and work up a big 'ol hate for villains. Coming back to find Earth conquered by aliens he blames the villains for not helping to stop it and is ready to murder them all, so a fight breaks out almost immediately.

Rhino as minivan, old school bennies drafted in, and the clear thing is a flying stand when we need one. 

Multiple Adventure Deck cards are played so this one gets interesting quickly. Nightstrike's player drops "Arch Rival" on The Hammer, MegaStrike's player drops "To the Rescue" (this one places civilians or innocents in immediate danger, rewarding heroes with a Benny each time they spend an entire turn rescuing or protecting them) so now there are a bunch of civilians in the area. Nightblade and Legion and her bodyguard start dropping gang members as MegaStrike goes straight for the Hammer. Bug and Night Terror start rescuing the innocent bystanders. 

The fight goes on with Bug and Night Terror zipping all over the map grabbing people and carrying them out of danger, gunfire and swordplay dropping Hammer's gang followers, and at the center Hammer and MegaStrike whaling away on each other with little actual damage. Night Terror's player drops "The Last Stand" to keep Mega upright after a lucky set of rolls by Hammer, and then later Y2K Bug's player plays "Desperate Times" to get "The Last Stand" going again. 

In round 3 Hammer stumbles and takes 3 wounds as Night Blade joins in and stabs him in the back then the Hammer falls in round 4 as Night Terror hits him with a darkness blast. The gangers are down, the citizens are safe, and Destruction sends a transport to carry off the downed hero, accompanied by American Anvil. The team gets a simple "Good Work" and then everyone heads back to the safehouse and warehouse to recover and reflect on their experiences.

It leaves a lot up to the GM. Also Variable Dave ended the session with 10 bennies after this was played.

GM Notes:

This was a lot of fun. I made some mistakes and it also started to expose some issues with Super Savage Worlds but it was a lot of fun. 

• The structure of this campaign is pretty limited. Call comes in from Dr. Destruction, party goes and does whatever. Nothing in the book really deviates from this pattern. Now I am trying to give the PCs some room to pursue their own ideas and I am getting some action there but it's not as active as I had hoped. They know the next big thing is a call from the resistance leader and so everything else feels like smaller potatoes. The prior times I have run this I didn't mind it so much but it is starting to grate a little bit. 
• The adventures themselves. individually, are extremely limited. You get a concept outline, an idea on location, and some NPC stats in most cases. For a few of them you get a map. Now I don't mind this to a point but most of them are written with no connections to anything else in the campaign other than Resistance and Invaders. I know it gives maximum flexibility but the campaign would benefit from way more interconnections like 'if you have run plot point x use NPC Y as the bad guy here". There are a couple of these scattered through the book but not many. 
• Some of this is on my players too - they could be more proactive about some things, whether following up on their own agenda or going after alien targets on their own. I might be expecting too much of people playing up their supervillain backgrounds here but they are not particularly furious about the invasion and repelling the invaders. They are quite happy to wait for the next mission drop. Heck, maybe that's pretty in-character for what they are. 
• I should have use the knockback rules in this fight. MegaStrike is built as a brick/tank by someone who has been playing tanks for decades. Hammer is pretty solid on offense and defense. They basically stood there in the street trading blows with little impact for 3 rounds +. Now sometimes this is just how Savage Worlds goes but with 20-30 point impacts being the norm for them and with Knockback kicking in at 20 points of damage it could have made for a more dynamic fight with the potential for someone going through a wall. I spelled out the rules in the campaign doc and then completely forgot to use them here. I did start trying to work them in after this. 
• Adventure cards ... <sigh> ... people talk them up online anytime you bring them up but I have resisted them until this campaign as they looked like absolute chaos to me. This time, considering it's supers and considering I have a nice clean deck of them and it's hard not to play with toys when they're right there in front of you I decided to use them - and they are absolute chaos. It's an entire deck of buffs for the PC's, barring a few debuffs for whatever opponent you are facing at the time.  I thought since it was a super campaign I would give it try as things would be fairly over the top already but ... wow, it is way more than I expected. I have enough to say here it's probably worth a separate post so I'll leave it at that for now. 

So anyway I am writing this up weeks after this session and it was a lot of fun but I can see cracks starting to form already. I'll talk about it more in future summaries. 

Necessary Evil: Third Time's the Charm - Session 2: Why is it Always the Sewers?

 

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 - 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.

We begin with MegaStrike stealing a house. Half-jokingly. He's not really strong enough to carry a house - at least not very far. He's the only one staying in the warehouse at the moment as everyone else relocated to Legion's much cushier safehouse. He decides a mostly empty place is not good and so starts stealing furniture and decor (and possibly a house) to brighten the place up. 

At the safehouse Legion is busy analyzing and judging the other escapees and reaching out to various contacts to figure out how badly damaged her organization is after she was arrested. Night Blade is doing katas or some other sword guy thing, Bug is checking out the internet connections, Night Mist is calling some contacts as well while Xyzzifax starts trying to figure out how this world works.

Dr. Destruction soon calls with a "request" - he needs the team to grab that heavy box in the warehouse (guess who will be carrying that) and head down into the sewers to find another villain's secret lair and plug it in to a power source there. Looking for a suitable entrance - the box won't fit through a regular manhole - they believe one can be found in Miner's Hill a neighborhood a short distance away. The group makes some preparations, gathers again at the warehouse, appreciated the new decor, and heads out. 

Getting into the sewers is a simple enough task but finding a secret entrance to a villain's lair is not and so it takes a couple of hours of sloshing around to find a likely passage and it happens to be full of G'roks! These are an alien creature, sort of a gator-hound monster, that the V'Sori dumped into the sewers recently to thin out the resistance that keeps using the sewers to move around. 

These things are fairly tough and Phantom Blade, leading the attack, is chomped-on pretty well by several of the beasts. Then the strange wizard demonstrates the power of fireball in any universe and blows most of them away with a massive detonation. Phantom Blade uses his mystical meditation powers to recover from his brief experience as a chew-toy and the party begins examining the dead-end passage.

They soon discover that a) there is a concealed door here and b) they have been followed for some time by members of the Underground. There is a brief conversation in person between the resistance members and the villains and via radio with their leaders but it all works out and they then travel through a maze of caverns and tunnels that are not part of the sewer to make their way to an Undergrounder outpost. 

The leader they meet is ... Valerie Ramirez, the woman they helped bring out from the prison. Nightmist had been thinking they might have a bit of a thing before she left that day so he especially is thrilled to reconnect with her. After some discussion about what they are trying to accomplish Valerie agrees to have her people guide them to Terron's old base. Yes, they do know where it is but no, they are not going to enter it - they lost people when they found it and she's not interested in losing more. 

Two of the Undergrounders lead the party through a maze of yet more tunnels to a passage that ramps up into a lighted room. The guides will go no further so it's time for the villains to take the lead. Phantom Blade leaps on up, Legion (and bodyguard) fly up, as do Megastrike and Bug. The space is limited to a single room and not a huge one so they spot the power generator right away. They also spot the mean-looking robots spaced around the room, plugged into the walls - especially when their eyes light up and they begin moving towards the group!

The visual on these is "metallic robot with swords instead of hands so I'm going with some Necrons here.

Phantom Blade once again takes a serious beating (4 wounds!) and the bodyguard is injured as well but the villains are no pushovers themselves and while it does take more time than the g'rok fight - and they suffer more injuries - the villains do eventually wreck Terron's robot guardians with magic, swords, and guns. MegaStrike manages to do little during this, missing his swings, and this earns him some grief from the others. PB also takes some grief for both his performance in the fights and his attitude in general and decides to change his name to "Edge Lord" - might as well own it.

After the fight MegaStrike and Y2K Bug connect the device to the generator and call it in to Dr. D who congratulates them on getting it done.   

GM Notes

This was a good run with the players settling into their characters more and more and everyone getting more comfortable with the rules - including me. During the session (for any game) I jot down any rules questions that come up and then look them up before the next session so I knew where our rough spots had been in Session 1. We all know Savage Worlds pretty well but it can still take a session or three before it's instinctive again.

Structure-wise I'm starting off every session with some time for the players to do what they want. It's been an indeterminate number of days since the prior run, what has your character been doing, what are you doing today, is there a project you are working on, etc. I feel it's especially important here because this campaign is very much built as "NPC gives missions and PC's go do them" and I want them to feel like they have options. They are, after all, super-powered individuals of some capability living in a modern high-tech city. Even though it's living under alien occupation they can pursue or investigate ideas or schemes of their own so I'm trying to ensure there is room for it every session. Now some of my players don't care that much about it but some do and I'm hoping they pull the others along. I'd like them to develop enough contacts, rivalries, and familiar locations to make it feel like a living place - we shall see. 

Necessary Evil Session Zero Coming Up

 

This weekend we will wrap up or expedition to deal with The Emerald Enchanter in Variable Dave's Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign. It's been a lot of fun and since the 0-level funnel we've only lost one character. It happened to be the guy with the possessed sword so that initiated an immediate debate on who was going to pick it up to be the new unpredictable combat monster - right as we head in to the final confrontation (we think) with the Enchanter himself. Hopefully it all goes well.

Once we finish that we will put DCC on the shelf for a while and have our Session Zero conversation for Necessary Evil. I don't worry about this kind of thing before every campaign kicks off but I do like to have an official one with a supers campaign to a) work out technical power details and make sure everyone understands how their characters work and what some of the limits might be and b) to work out everyone's connections to the setting. For example, here are the ten questions I am hitting my players with for this one:

Questions about your character:

1. Origin Story – how did you get your powers?

2. Why did you become a villain?

3. What did you do before the invasion? What kind of villain were you? What kind of jobs did you do or what kind of schemes did you plan?

4. Were you part of a team or mostly solo?

5. Who did you work with? 

6. Did you have any villainous rivals?

7. Did you have a nemesis or archenemy hero?

8. Were you ever caught and imprisoned?

9. What did you do during the invasion?

10. What have you been doing since the invasion?

I don't expect everyone to have ready answers to all of these. Some may not want to commit to everything and others will just not have thought about it all but I want to get the wheels turning and start making some connections between the PCs, other villains in the setting, and the heroes who may or may not have survived. Also, with the game starting after a lot of big events I want them to think about how their character reacted to them and how it changed their life.

I don't think we will be rolling dice on Saturday but I'll be ready just in case. There has been some chatter in the group this week as people start figuring out their character but there is some work yet to be done and that's my priority. 

Longer-term  It looks like I have 7 players lined up and we have 20 weekends left (after this one) so I think we should get 12-15 sessions done in what's left of 2026. Being a supers campaign I won't be cancelling if even half the group is out - you're supers, deal with it - but the holidays will interfere down the road so we will see how far we get. Once I get a feel for how quickly the various plot points move with this group I'll be able to figure it more accurately but the main thing is let's get rolling and see where it goes!

I also need a good name for the campaign that isn't "Necessary Evil" again. Still working on that. Open to ideas if anyone has any.

It's a cool adventure

Laying Some Groundwork for Necessary Evil

 

As much as I am enjoying the DCC campaign - and being a player for a change - I did commit to running NE as the next big game so it's time to start digging into it. I have tried to run it twice before - my notes say 2010 and 2014 - though we did not finish it either time. 

The first one we made it maybe halfway through. It was a lot of fun with an interesting mix of characters and encounters. The concept is glorious and everyone was enthusiastically on board with it with the brutes going around bashing objects and aliens and the vampire charming everything in sight. Most of them went into City of Heroes and made character portraits . This was one of our earlier runs with Savage Worlds for a longer term campaign and it worked really well. We eventually had too many schedule interruptions and had to put it on hold.

The second run was shorter and I was distracted trying to adapt it to Paragon City, the City of Heroes MMORPG setting, as we had all played it and had a ton of screenshots and would give us a reason to revisit something we all loved after its shutdown in 2012. Most of the players were the same and we carried over a few of the same characters but generally treated it as a reboot of the campaign. Looking back through my notes had me tempted to try the same thing for this new run but I'm going to hold off, run this one in its original setting, and see how it goes. If I get a chance to run this another time with a different mix of players then I might give that option a try. Plus with the game back online screenshots would be easy to work in as needed.

For this run though I am going to focus mainly on the adventure in the book and in the setting as it is written. Now the core of the campaign is the set of 11 Plot Point adventures that form the links that connect the whole thing together. You need to work them in as they are the spine of the game. Beyond that there are 25 other "Savage Tales" that can be worked in during the campaign to really flesh it out. Then of course there are whatever side adventures or shenanigans you cook up for your players or that they cook up for themselves. I don't feel the need to use all of them so I will pick out 10-12 that I like and start figuring out how to work them in - some might fit better in a certain sequence, others might be useful as a reaction to something else in the campaign. Assuming we're looking at each of these taking around one session then I'd like to start with around 25 sessions worth of material reviewed and ready - a rough outline for how the game might go. If the players are really into it then I can always work in more and if it starts to drag I can drop some side chapters and focus in on the main event. 

Action-wise the PCs start off being "recruited" to join a resistance movement against alien invaders in Star City, an island city with some unusual qualities off the east coast of the U.S. As things progress they get more deeply involved, make some friends and some enemies, and become more and more of a concern to the local alien warlord. There is a lot of freedom in that middle part of the campaign. They are super-villains so things can get pretty ridiculous but trying not to pull down the entire alien invasion force gives an incentive to keep some of it quiet at least. Eventually things come together and a confrontation is inevitable. 

I'm going to be running low on "generic superhero art" before I even start this campaign ...

Now I will say here that I do not like the official finale of the campaign. I never have and part of what I will be noodling on is coming up with some other options for it that I like better - we will just have to see how that goes.

So as I finish up reading back through the material I need to put together an initial outline, get the bad guy stats printed out, look at my cheat-sheet options, review my properly themed Savage Worlds assets*, get the players minds rolling on their characters, and think about how I want to kick things off. Also have to think about doing an online recap or not like Obsidian Poral. 

Anyway, more to come here. 

*I'm not a big "props" guy with my RPGs but Savage Worlds does draw me in a bit with the trappings built into the game system itself just begging to be themed for a campaign. Plus cards and bennie-type trinkets are cheap and widely available. 

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 ...

Mutants & Masterminds Campaign Catch-Up

 

The M&M campaign is still going, I have just been slow to post about it here. We have six sessions in the books and are about halfway through the Time of Crisis. I will say the system familiarity does start to come back faster as we play more so I'm feeling way less rusty in sessions 5 & 6 than I was in the first few. I am really enjoying it and I think my players are too.

I am also feeling way more proficient with Hero Lab. This has been helpful with both running the game and with helping my players tune up their characters and spend their power points. This is the only game where I use Hero Lab since the demise of our Pathfinder campaigns years ago so if we are not playing M&M the rust accumulates. Coming at it with fresher eyes I do see where some of the complaints about it come from as it is not a modern "app" - the way powers are listed is not really intuitive in-play and sussing out what a power actually does can be a little tricky if you have no descriptive text. I will also say the tool tips help in some circumstances yet add very little in others. A lot of these issues come from them presenting generic, standard game information not a customized description based on the powers and modifiers particular to this character, but I suspect that kind of dynamic information would have been tough to do when this version of Hero Lab was created. Regardless, I can work with it and it does help me run the game better than if I did not have it.

We have had to miss a few weekends so beyond a massive 40K effort (I'll discuss it in a separate post) I have been trying to catch up on other RPG books that have piled up over the last six months or so. It's a weird habit but I do tend to pick up multiple large rulebooks at once and then let them sit on the shelf for months while I read other things. Then I look at the shelf full of unread rules for different systems and decide I need to read them all at once. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I do not as the drive to dive into a game I am not running, especially a dedicated rulebook and not an adventure, dwindles. I've added the Tales of the Valiant Player Core 2, some of the D&D 5.5 books, a couple of Pathfinder 2E books, some stuff from Savage Worlds, and then various Kickstarter tomes. What I need to be doing is going back through some of my M&M 3E books to brush up on those - since that's what we are actually playing - and I have been ... some. At times I do feel pulled in so many directions that it's tough to focus in on something long enough to knock it out but I am working on them. 

On a final note the M&M 4th Edition Kickstarter did wrap up with over $300,000 taken in. I'd say that's an encouraging number. It is a reminder of how niche the whole superhero RPG market is - the million dollar kickstarters are big D&D-related projects or have a well-known author behind them. The Deadlands kickstarter running at the same time took in a similar amount so I suppose I like the niche games. M&M had twice as many backers for a very similar amount of money which is interesting. Maybe I can take a look at that in a future post. I'm happy these both funded. The downside is that I don't want to look at any more 4th edition M&M rules stuff as it causes edition bleed for me as I try to "expert up" on 3rd edition. When the physical books come out months from now and we are well into our campaign then it might be time to look again. 

Campaign reports will resume soon ...

Mutants & Masterminds - Converting Between Editions

 

A lot of the stretch goals with the new M&M Kickstarter are 4th edition conversions of 3rd edition adventures. I get why they are doing this - it's easy to do and they're already written so, sure, and you're getting them for free but they're only 6$ PDFs anyway so ... I don't know. 

Back to that "easy" part - how easy is it to convert something between editions of this game? Well ... most of the time it's pretty straightforward. One key item: the difficulty chart is the same for every edition of the game!

This one is taken from the 4th edition playtest document but it is the same for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and now 4th edition:

• 1st edition: Page 147
• 2nd edition: Page 7
• 3rd edition: Page 13 (Deluxe Hero's Handbook)
• 4th edition: Page 15 (Playtest Origin Edition)

Outside of combat and individual character powers that chart up there has the numbers you need and the amazing thing is that regardless of edition you don't have to update them! 

So you might go through the text, find anywhere that "DC" is mentioned, and check what it's referring to - typically a skill, possibly an ability. These do change from edition to edition but most of the time it's pretty obvious what you need to change to. A DC25 "Computers" check in a 2E adventure becomes a DC 25 "Technology" check in 3E or 4E. In 1E it would likely have been a Computers or Repair. In some editions the right "Expertise" skill is a good substitute, at least when I'm running. 

The abilities do change with every edition but they are always centered around the six D&D type abilities and they are on the standard d20 scale that we've been using for the last 25+ years, sometimes with a score, sometimes with just the modifier, but an 18 in 1st edition is still a +4 in 4th. 

Attacks and Damage work pretty consistently across editions so there's not usually much to worry about there.  

The area with the most effort required should be translating characters. Assuming we are talking about the NPCs from an adventure or some setting guide then it's not really that bad. The biggest thing here is the Powers - those change every edition, sometimes dramatically, from how they are built to how they work in-game. You might get a character with a complicated build that relies on mechanical tricks that don't translate to a different edition. If you want to stay consistent with what the character used to do then you may have to rebuild it from the ground up, possibly using a completely different power to achieve a similar effect. If you run into this a lot it could eat up some time but there are alternatives:

• Assuming it's an NPC villain of some kind, well, despite the edition change this guy's powers work like they did in the other version - here's his hit bonus with it, here's the target # to resist it, have at it! It's not the most elegant solution but sometimes it's the best solution and since the mechanics of the game system are so similar across editions it can still work. 
• Look at the general effect of what the character does in that edition - don't worry about all the tricky details and add-ons, just look at the main impact it has on the game. Find a power in your edition of choice that does something similar - it may not be as complicated, it may not be as flashy as the old version, but if it let's Think Tank mind control innocent bystanders then you're good even if it doesn't specifically account for some of those details. As you work through it in the new version you might find some new tricks that are still cool and fun for the GM to impose.
• Archetypes: I see Chimpanzoom has a writeup in 1st edition Time of Crisis. I see he has one in 2nd edition ToC. To run it in 3rd I could go back through one or both of those and try to re-create him as closely as possible ... or I could just grab the Speedster Archetype, maybe tweak it a little in some way to make him a little different, and run that instead. Remember that the mechanics give you the numbers but the way the character acts, speaks, and reacts are largely outside of those. You were going to have to decide on those anyway regardless of edition. Whether he has a 14 or a 15 Dodge isn't nearly as important as the personality and the look. 

These guys know ...

When translating also keep in mind that the points don't matter. It's good to have a Power Level in mind for your character - maybe it's the same as the other version, maybe it's not depending on what you want to do - but the points are more for PC's than NPCs. Archetypes are an incredibly useful tool for anything like this. 

So yes, it's not difficult to modify things to work in different editions with this game. That's part of why I'm a little disappointed with this part of the Kickstarter. The first four were all this kind of thing and there are two more down the road if it keeps going. The latest achieved goal is the Earth Prime Gazetteer which is at least not a simple update of an existing thing ... wait ...

Ah ... right. Now Steve Kenson has said they are revising the setting with this edition - the Freedom City setting specifically. That's probably smart after 20+ years of building it out and advancing the timeline so I don't have a problem with that plan and I'm looking forward to seeing what they do. Buuuut ... this is still an intro type document for the world, not a new version of the complete thing. So it's better than the adventures at least, to me, because it is going to cover some new ground. 

The next goal is a new character record folio. It's a big character sheet. Once a new builder is out these won't see much use and let's be honest here, "Character Sheet" as a crowdfunding stretch goal is ... well it might be a new low as far as effort required. These are things that are typically a free download on the company website or at DTRPG. No one should be particularly excited about this.

The final other type of stretch goal that we know about right now are Alternate Archetypes. Now I was excited about this when I saw the name as I was a huge fan of the Archetype Archives and Instant Superheroes in 2nd Edition that added new archetypes and more options to the existing ones. They were great for GMs and for players too. Well, it's not that. It's the archetypes in the game at PL8 and the other one is at PL12. I am assuming there will not be radical re-conceptualizing of each concept and that this will mainly be a math exercise. Well ... OK. I mean I can use them - the PL12 versions will make for handy drop-in villains but in Hero Lab for 3rd edition that's two clicks on "Scale Up" or "Scale Down" for the basics and then some tweaking on what else I want to enhance or downgrade. It's not a whole lot of effort if that's all that it is. 

So yeah, I love Mutants & Masterminds - I'm running it right now! I think the people working on it are good at what they do and I hope the KS hits a million dollars. I know there are constraints on what they can do right now with the Diamond situation. I'm just a little disappointed at the low effort on the stretch goals for this one. That said I am looking forward to the new edition even if I'm not going to run it until next year at least, after we get through a nice long run with 3rd which will no doubt end with another Crisis of some kind and turn things upside down for a new era and edition.

Mutants & Masterminds - New Edition Ups and Downs

 The Kickstarter appears to be going very well (over 1,000 backers, over 100K $ as I write this) which is a good thing for the game and its future and I am glad for that. 

It's a little weird that there are a fair number of questions that are asking if one can do various things in the game or will be included in the game that are already in 3E M&M so yes, I think it's safe to assume powers and options included in the current edition will be included in the new one. I'm guessing a lot of the people asking don't play the current game but I don't know. Since they announced the new edition a few months ago there have been all kinds of helpful suggestions made including things like "you should add in a hit point system" which ... yeah, I don't know. How has no one thought of that in the prior 20+ years of the system? "No hit points" is a feature of the game, not a miss that needs to be corrected.

That does lead into another point I see made: "It's easy for D&D players to learn because it uses a d20 for everything like combat and skill checks". That is, in my experience, really not the case. Sure, the Abilities are mostly similar, skill checks and hit rolls are familiar, but for people coming over from D&D 5E there are 3 massive hills to climb:

• Power Level in M&M is not the same as Levels in D&D. They're just not, experience points do not work the same way and "levelling" is just not a thing here, or in most superhero games. This is a pretty big shift. I wouldn't change it, it's just a thing new players have to work through.
• Powers and the construction thereof just blow people's minds. It's not intuitive if you're coming over from D&D. Explaining effects-based power design is a challenge and while many people can pick it up quickly once you've walked them through it using known examples of superheroes there are a lot of people that have a really hard time making that jump. A lot of combat ability comes from either the "Damage" effect or the "Affliction" effect and while they are extremely flexible getting this through to a new player is a lot tougher than sword/bow/axe/magic missile. 
• Finally there is the damage system: it's a huge change from any version of D&D and a lot of D&D-only players hate it as soon as they see it. Some will come around if you can get them to persevere, but in my experience it is the single biggest deal-breaker for new recruits. I would never want them to change it, but it is the biggest obstacle I see. Sometimes that's just the way it is. It's a different game, parts of it are going to work differently, and that's a good thing, not a negative. Not everything needs to use the same mechanics. 
  (It's also very similar to Savage Worlds' damage system and between the two I've played enough that I like them better than hit points for a lot of games but it's an issue for new players there too.)

Other regular requests include a new character creator and a VTT. I agree on the character creator - it makes things a lot easier for the GM to track, build, and update. The VTT ... well, sure, but while maps are still useful in a superhero game tactical grid maps are ... less so. I am using the combat manager option from Hero Lab quite a bit in our game but that's mainly because I can see all the opposition's powers and drop conditions on everyone with a click here and a click there. If a VTT module includes something like that then I'm more interested. If someone thinks they're going to get special effects like visuals and sound effects for everything you can think up for a superhero game I just don't see that happening quickly and a partial effort is just going to be frustrating. 

How about we let them get the core book out the door before we start piling on the requests? I mean I am not really looking forward to having all of those wonderful 3E books (and Hero Lab files) pushed into the "old category" anytime soon so no need to rush this. Take your time, make it good, minimize the errata, get it out, and I'm sure the support and the tools will come.

Mutants & Masterminds 4th Edition Kickstarter is Up and Running

 

Well it's here and you can see it here if you haven't already. They hit their goal in about 6 hours yesterday so that's good and I'm hoping this is one of those realistic goals for what it would take to actually get it done and not a lowball goal like we see sometimes in this arena. I'm wishing them all the success in the world with this - and yes I did jump in on it - as I'd  like to see Green Ronin get a win right now, particularly with what I would say is the best-supported superhero RPG of the last two decades. If you like superhero roleplaying I hope you will take a look.

I do have a few concerns here. 

Personally I've cut back my crowdfunding participation as publisher after publisher puts everything out as a funding campaign. Some of them are not good at it and that spills over, fair or not, into the whole system. I've only done one other recently and that was for the new version of Apocalypse World as I want to see what the creators of it do with that whole thing. I see things like the Savage Worlds team having something like 5 of them in-flight now at various stages and I wonder how long that kind of thing can continue. 

• Crowdfunding just feels less awesome than it did ten years ago, for whatever reason. I hope that's just a me thing  and doesn't limit or cap off GR's ultimate success here. 
• In the fall of 2022 they ran a Kickstarter to reprint some of the core books of the M&M 3E line and it barely made the goal - less than half of what they've achieved in a day with this effort - and made zero stretch goals. Now that was a reprint of a known game, not a new edition, so it's not exactly the same thing, and they have done much better this time already, but I do still wonder how many of us are there out there ready to jump on a major superhero game line update? They're doing well but as I write this it's less than 1000 backers. Are we so few?

Speaking of stretch goals ... these are weird. Those first four are 4E updates of some 3E adventures that have come out over the last 5 years or so. Then we get to what looks like an update of  Atlas of Earth Prime but I'm going to guess a limited version, not the full book? I think these are good stretch goals in the sense that they are updates of things that already exist (and so easy to make) but I have to say they aren't exactly inspiring ... at least to me. There's not a lot of "new" here. Stretch goals rarely make any difference to me as to whether I'm going to jump on board something but I've seen some cool ones and these just seem kind of routine? Expected? How about a new villain team, or some exotic new location? I know 3E has a ton of supplements so that any general thing has probably already been covered in one of the books we have but that's why I was thinking something new would be good - show us there are frontiers yet to be explored with this system and not just updates or rehashes of things we already have!

How about "The Book of Omega: The Ultimate Guide to the Ultimate Villain"? We have pieces and parts scattered around different books but let's see an updated, comprehensive work on the guy who killed Centurion.

Alright so there's my negativity addressed and some ideas on how to improve it from my point of view. This team has been making it work for over twenty years at this point so they probably don't need my two cents but I've been right there alongside them and I'd like that to continue for a good long time. I'm looking forward to seeing where this new effort takes us.

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.