"Enter - Safeguard" I start actually challenging the characters

So in this two-part session (both talked about here..most sessions I am running seem to go across a two session arc), I would finally get the chance to hit the characters with some actual power. Not just a handful of Rank 3 "terrorists" but also with a new Supergroup of Rank 4 potential foes. As a reminder, the characters are Rank 3. There is a decent difference in those numbers. But all in all, the party did not get in as big a punch-up with them as I would like. But getting the characters out to a public place to face foes with high tech weapons, and foes with strong powers, was something I was working towards. 

After the Night Clubs scenario, the PC's had a about a week to do their own thing. Which included moving out of the Justice Incorporated offices. Ultimately they had a choice between a small but luxury apartment in a Kyono owned corporate residential skyscraper.  Or a larger single building to stay at and consider a safe house. Seraph was the only one opting for a nice private studio unit.

Kind of the perfect crib for a flying girl, and better than the 
old warehouse she was crashing at before this 

Meanwhile a small shipping and receiving building in "Japan Town" (ethnic neighborhoods and tourist area), at the end of a short street between a Japanese restaurant and a tailors building, had some of its small office converted to bedrooms, and stocked with TV, fridge, and other living essentials. The Paladin player Andrew whipped up a map for it between these couple of sessions as Paladin and Igneous moved in.

I started calling him "Iggy" because
I keep calling him Ignacius rather than Igneous

At some point during the week, Seraph was flying above the city like she is want to do. I had her spot another flyer, which you don't see that often in the city (except maybe above mutie town). It was a young Japanese woman in ancient traditional dress, and she was flying on a giant white feather the size of a canoe.

The woman did not notice at first when Seraph followed, but she did at some point and used a Japanese fan to summon huge blades of wind that shot towards Seraph. She backed off as the woman disappeared among the skyscrapers. 

Kagura is from the anime Unuyasha, which I posted about last year.  She is my favorite character on that show, and I created her in Demiplane last year while I was practicing making NPC's and decided I could use her for this. She woke up in this era and fell in with Boliver York of York Industries, and his sponsored superteam "Safeguard."

I found some cosplay/AI of her and I 
may start using these for her tokens

I pushed to have this little solo encounter not take a long time (lf you have read a couple posts back then you might understand why I would be concerned about things like this taking more than 15 minutes). 

So Friday came around and Kyono asked for a meeting at the Justice Inc. offices (more often than not she showed up on a video screen conference call). She said that her data monitoring department has gotten rumor of a possible violent attack possibly occurring Friday night at the Metroplex Mall, the second largest indoor/outdoor mall (largest I guess is in Japan). 

With little other info, the group hung about in the corner of the mall where things were maybe going to go down. Yeah, I know. Easy set up. Indeterminate occurrence at so and so time. Not every set up has to be complicated in comics!

The "terrorists" who do eventually show up on the scene are using advanced tech personal weapons, either rifles of some type or melee-based weapon.

The weapons also projected a light personal force field (Sturdy 2, but dropped to 1 after first hit of more than 10 points health) and also fortified the body with Mighty 1 and some extra health. So two of each, bo staff guys, armored arms guys, and laser rifle guys. 

Also this was where we introduced a new player. He was brought in by player Will (Iggy) so unvetted by me but turned out to be a good guy. He is running a Nova corps member. Calling himself Nova, because, well he's a Nova. With all those good powers such as flight, hard skin, and some pretty heavy energy blast stuff. This battle is where he would meet the other characters. In the heat of combat. 

A little Nova in the comics background. I have no idea what goes on with Nova stuff in recent decades. As a kid I collected a comic called Nova. He could fly, was hard to hurt, and had energy blasts. 

He was basically an attempt to recreate the success of Spider Man. A teenager gets powers out of the blue and has to deal with that and his new heroic life. I remember little else. 

But this new Nova is a bit different. Same power set. Fly, energy abilities, some Sturdy. He is also kind of dances to his own beat. 

He likes to decorate his military helmet,
kind of like the marines in Aliens. 

The party dealt with the terrorists fairly well. Iggy had grown to giant size (though not full size because of the close packed stores) but managed to take a couple of heavy hits from the laser rifle guys. Paladin really mixed it up with them. 

The couple that got knocked out were teleported away somehow, along with the couple of others when "Safeguard" showed up. 

Clockwise from top left is "The Wind Sorceress," "Mastodon," "Spider-Max," "Blackwolf," and "Aegis." 

So quick history lesson. Back in the day (and in the setting currently between 12-20 years ago overall) I had two major global industrial organizations in Haven called "York Industries" and "Kyono International." 

York Industries was the company of Bolivar York. I had a great mini for him back in the day. I might still have it. It was a David Bowie Goblin king mini. Since I had Bolivar be a Hellfire Club lord much like Marvel Comics Sebastian Shaw I had painted it to look a bit like him in terms of clothing he wore behind the scenes.

Was not this, but similar

York was the evil company. Sort of a Lex Luthor thing. He used tech, and people he swayed, for all kings of mayhem. Characters in The Protectors and Justice Incorporated (and maybe the Future X-Men thing I did for a while but forget if they met him).

Patricia Kyono and her corp were the good business. She put together Justice Inc and often interacted and helped the Protectors. After some years of various campaigns (and an alien invasion that I think I am going to retcon away in this new thing) , they all managed to prove Yorks's crimes and get him a lifetime in prison. 

For this new era, I have it that York's son, Boliver jr., has taken over the company. And of course he has evil intent, especially to those who harmed his father and the corp. He is a handsome, well educated chad with charisma, and often when he says his father was framed by the Protectors, Justice Inc, Kyono, and the Science Police, some people listen. 

Business in front, party in back

 a more casual look I have yet to use

So in the 10 years or so there has not been super groups around or heroes in geneal in public, Bolivar jr. put together his own superteam that has recently been seen out and about stopping crime, and BY has had a press conference or two about them, with them in attendance. He called them "Safeguard." And of course they will be used to his evil ends. 

A yokai sorceress from feudal days
who has powers over wind.

Mastodon is part of an ancient race the remnants of live
in a city of science in the south pole. He is Mighty 3 and 
can grow up to 100 feet. I created him to go against Iggy.

I got the idea from a Red Letter Media/Noiselund video...

Spider Max is a 15-year-old with Spider Powers. And orphan. Have not
decided yet if he is a Peter parker clone, or a clone of Bolivar sr. with
Parker DNA in him. 

he is a Canadian hipster who can turn
into a large super wolf. 

Aegis. Power armor with many functions.
Secretly Boliver jr (he will be in there 
sometimes and sometimes it will be
a Life Model Replicant of him.

Tank built by Mastodon. He usually drives.

We did not a get a big fight between the group. Wind Sorceress swooped into the courtyard to attack Nova out of the blue with her Crescent Wind attack. 

Spider Max webbed up Seraph in mid air, causing her to fall from 50 feet. The kid realized she was heading for the fall, and swung in to get her to the ground gently. "Sorry lady." So maybe these are not bad guys?

Seraph has already been nabbed in a net
by her arch foe Blimpkrieg two times. So
that's three nettings in several sessions. 

I forget if any more attacks went down. I really wanted Iggy and Mastodon to grow huge and go all Kaiju fight. But Paladin was yelling at Aegis that they were not the enemy, and Aegis, who was on top of the tank, was forced (cameras and possible film crews are always around) to talk it out. 

That was it for possible violence. I did get to introduce an NPC from the old days I used for comedic value. He was a police lieutenant back then, but now he is a police captain. His name is Louie DePalma, a name you might recognize if you like old sitcoms. I had him be an asshole back in the day and hate superheroes, and now at probably 69 years old he's grumpier than ever. Characters always hated him, and I think these new ones do too. 

Back in the day I remember a player came up with a song about him. They started singing it when he showed up on the table (I think I used a hobbit mini that had a hat). It was sung to the tune of the old song "Louie Louie" and I think some it went:

Loo-ee loo-i

Oh whoa every where he goes

Soo-per-he-rows

Loo-ee loo-ay

Oh whoa every where he goes

they both-er him

Same actor in the role.

Science Police also showed up. Both groups had reason for being here. Because both Kyono and York had lawyers nearby ready to intervene when shit quieted down. 

Here's the thing. Safeguard claims to be employed officially as security for York Industries. the Kyono lawyers argue that Justice Inc, as private contractors working in security and investigative capacity for Kyono International. With some of the properties in the Metroplex Mall being owned or its product related to these companies, their security forces have a right to intervene in terrorist situations. 

So the characters finally got into a little conflict with another group. I really wanted to see more of them mixing with them. See how they do with Rank 4 foes. But Safeguard is playing at being good guys and have to watch their step. I sort of fantasize about a full fight at some point and hopefully the Rank 4 Safeguard beat the hell out of the Rank 3 Justice Inc. Then have a training montage and JI comes back Rank 4 for payback. 

Just a word on the Science Police. The concept goes back to Superhero 2044 where they primarily started as nuclear watchdogs after WW3, eventually moving in the future to overwatching strong or illegal science, and meta humans. During the heyday of my campaigns, with the Protectors, whoever was in Justice Inc, and Kyono would fight against frequent York Industries agents and schemes. Whatever it was, for those years the SP was an important agency and often involved in the meta human chaos (though usually show up after a fight). Now, with a decade or so of peace and few super powered beings causing trouble, they have less staff and agents than they used too and mostly monitor mutant issues (mutantgs have a large neighborhood of low income and HUD housing). The SP being a bit weaker these days will be a running theme in upcoming games. 

So Seraph went after Nova and invited him to the office, where he met everybody and of course got a job offer. Rather than go to the safehouse, Serapah invited him to stay at her small apartment. I would have some fun with that. But that is a story for another day! Stay tooned. Cheers.

Superhero Gaming finally going Full Steam Ahead

 

Almost a full year ago, I posted about my long and fruitless efforts to find a way to run my old supers setting Haven on Roll20. You can see links there about old posts about my Supers campaigns of yore, or just search the blog for "Haven" or "Superheroes" or whatever. But in a nutshell, I ran this setting, based on the Ancient Superhero 2044 Island nation of Inguria, since I was a teen, through a variety of systems. Superhero 2044 briefly, (you can read about my somewhat unhappy experience with early Supers rpg Supergame here ) then Villains and Vigilantes, then into Champions. 

In that post last year, I mentioned that after 3 years or so of looking for a game that would be doable on Roll20, I had found out about the Marvel Mutliverse RPG. 

Though I of course overthought the rules as usual, it turned out to be not at all as complicated as I first thought. But it was supported and linked though Demiplane into your Roll20, so it seemed my best chance at getting my Haven setting going again. So first step would be to study it so I could run it effectively. Then learn to use the Demiplane connectivity (which included paying for a Demiplane subscription). Maybe be a player in some sessions. Then get my own group going for it. 

All easier said than done. Like I said I overthought the rules. But eventually I figured out that the basic task resolution was fairly simple, if not a little wonky. But the various powers and abilities weren't something I needed to memorize at all. I just needed to know the basics of how they tied into play. So much like spells in DnD, I leave it up to the players to know how it works and then tell me. Done and Done. 

I then played in some games. I played in a couple of sessions by a guy called Morganwolf, who has tons of live plays on Youtube. He runs it at conventions and such, and overall promotes the system, which I think is not exactly popular yet as far as I can tell. Morgan uses published adventures, and you have to play existing Marvel characters. He is good at it, but I am not a fan of using pregens. And I was late in signing up, so got stuck with Black Widow. But I had some fun with it. These sessions don't exactly give a lot of leeway for role-play, but the little I got to do was having Black Widow at Avengers Mansion drinking Vodka and smoking Russian cigarettes.  

Then sometime later, I found a little group through the Marvel RPG Discord. They were gaming very infrequently, and it was set in the Marvel Universe circa 1980. But we got to create our own characters, so the opportunity was there to better learn the system through character generation. My character was a version of my old gaming days Champions character Manx McCallister. He was a human cat hybrid, who got stuck in a teleporter pod his Quantum Scientist parents were working on and got spliced with his pet cat, much like Jeff Goldblum and his not pet fly. 

OK, I at first was going to use Fritz the Cat for his image, but settled on a more human version.

Manx is a Physics student in college, so has science stuff
in addition to feline agility and some knowledge of "Cat Fu"

These handful of sessions were fun, though our characters seemed to be secondary to the goings on of various existing Marvel heroes. But here I met the guys who would make up half of my group. More on that in a bit. 

So I knew the system a lot better, was now versed in character creation through Demiplane, and just needed players. So I started reaching out in the Marvel RPG discord, with less than satisfactory results. Since most advertises sessions there where for one shots with existing Marvel characters, somebody looking to do actual campaign play with original characters got a lot of attention. But honestly, a lot of the dudes (and yes, the members of the Discord were almost all dudes) raised red flags for me. 

For example, one guy seemed OK with some good ideas, but eventually told me he would have to use his phone to play, because he lived in a tent. Another guy wanted to run a Star Wars Stormtrooper who was dancing all the time. Ugh. 

My setting is sort of a kitchen sink pastiche
but this was going a bit too off the rails

 

Month in and month out, I was having trouble finding good fits for me. The guys from some of the games I played Manx in were up for it, based mostly on how much fun I think the role play of Manx was in those sessions. But I would need more. And ones who did not seem like lunatics were few and far between. But slowly it came together. Here and there I found somebody who might work. A guy who had streamed tons of his Marvel games on Youtube. And eventually a girl, who was super rare on the forums (and she has been in my Saturday DnD games for a few weeks as well and injected some new energy into that). 

So holy mother of fuck, it was off to the races. As of last week (had to be off this last Sunday), we are three sessions in. 

OK, so here is what I decided to run. In my old Champions campaigns, I would have two different groups. One was The Protectors, a government sponsored superteam that for years of play was the main situation. Supers fighting super stuff in the streets of New America City. But also as an occasional side thing I did Justice Incorporated, which was a kind of heroes for hire that was more street level. So like a cowboy, and field hacker cyberpunk, a ninja, a depowered genie called Blue Jinn. Things like that. I figured Justice Inc would be a good start. 

And I had used my Inkarnate account, which had been sitting idle (and getting paid for annually) for around four years, to recreate and update my old Haven setting map. 

Inkarnate doesn't have great futuristic
city and town tools, so I just used images

Justice Incorporated of old was a sort of side hobby of rich Japanese/Irish industrialist Patricia Elizabeth Kyono, who in my old games served as the "good" corporate CEO to counterpoint the evil ones. She was a good bit older, but still hot as hell. 

I actually may still have my mini for her 
somewhere. A female in corporate garb. 
But this one I made with AI captures her. 

So since it has been over a decade since I did anything with the Haven setting, I have had it be that there has been almost nothing in the way of supergroups or supertypes in general, things have been quiet and the world plugging away in the decades following WW3. I still have the Science Police (inspired by such from Superhero 2044) who try to handle meta human and science gone awry situations these days. 

So after a couple weeks of letting the players do up their characters, we were about set. Again, this was a long time in the coming, so I was pretty jazzed. And a little nervous about a few things. The oddball way I would start the campaign, that these would be more powerful than basic street level dudes Justice Incorporated had in the old days, etc. But I wanted them to be Rank 3, which in this system was sort of mid-level supers (Rank 4 would be heading into Thor and Iron Man territory), and just in general trying to manage expectations. 

Well, my expectations were by far exceeded. I can only say that these three sessions so far have brought me great joy, and the players are enthusiastic as I could ever hope. I have a DnD campaign going on, and its OK, but this is just bringing back old feels from the Old Haven campaigns. 

I want to talk about the actual sessions, but this would be a gigantic post, so I will save that for the next one. But for now, here are the great characters:

Igneous. He is a descendant of Titans, 
and has walked the earth for centuries. 
He has great strength and some rock powers.

Ghost is blind since birth, but has Daredevil
type sensed and almost supernatural ability to 
sense things down to almost the molecular level. 
His mentor is actually a now in this 70's Matt Murdoch.

Paladin is a descendant of an ancient order
of fighters against the supernatural going 
back to biblical days. 

Crash is a wealthy, partially cybernetic
cyberpunk who has almost mental powers
to use to tap into technology and the web

What can I say about Ra-Ta? He is a small grey alien who flies around
in a small UFO while studying earth. His players often works late, so only
shows up for the last half of some sessions. But it is pretty funny. An absurd
character that actually works with what I am doing. He comes and goes. It works 
for this character. His player is hilarious and the character cannot speak English
so he does a sort of high pitch gibberish (that Igneous can understand for some reason)

Seraph. She is a member of an ancient
winged race. She is just a loner who 
lives kind of homeless on old warehouse
rooftops. Loves fresh fish. 

Finally found my Supers RPG to run online?

 

I have posted in the past about my deep background with Supers RPG's (also here), going all the way back to childhood starting with the very first superhero game Superhero 2044. Then Supergame, then Villains and Vigilantes, and finally Champions/Hero System. That was my favorite, and using my futuristic hero setting Haven (based in part on Superhero 2044's Inguria Island) I turned many of my DnD groups on to it as an alternative. There would be resistance (most were not comic book fans) but they would eventually be requesting it. They loved it, despite the crunch of Champs. It was probably my favorite genre, in large part having grown up a comic book kid.

Now several years since the last time I ran a supers session, and also now that I essentially run all games online, I have been hankering to give it a go on Roll20. But the crunch of Champs would make it very hard. I considered Mutants and Masterminds which was fairly popular online, but it has its own high crunch it seems. I don't want to have to learn nor run another crunchy ruleset. 

Interesting note: when I first looked into this about
a year ago, the deluxe book (the most recommended 
as far as character creation choices) was out of print
and going for around 300 bucks where you could find 
it. But it is now apparently around 50 bucks and easily found. 

Last year for a couple session I played online in Kickstarted supers system I can't even remember what it was called. It was based on 5th ed DnD. It was kind of fun, but the guy kind of lost it mid-session and decided the system was no good for what he was doing. He declared he was probably going to try another system, but I passed. Put my search for a system on hold. 

But now in recent weeks I discovered Marvel Multiverse RPG, a fairly new system. I always rejected a licensed supers game, especially based on Marvel or DC, but the attractions of this was it was fairly rules light, and had excellent Roll20 support it seems. I immediately ordered the book off Amazon, and started watching Youtube videos about it. 

It has an odd, what I think is kind of clunky dice rolling system, but it is indeed simple. I can work with it I think. And it based around Marvel is OK. My Haven setting is more or less an alternate future version of the Mavel Universe (I always had it 20 years in the future of whenever I ran it) as a base, though having grown up on comics I was very familiar with Multiverses. I had Haven be a kitchen sink of genres, and other comic universe stuff could enter into it. Sci Fi in general really. I even had a Jedi show up in some old session. 

MM RPG has a rank system to determine your supers level, from street level like Daredevil all the way up to Galactus, and how that all works with the powers is something I need to research more of. Also it is all a little bit of an investment. The physical book was almost 40 bucks, and for Roll20 I will need to buy the in-platform version. For full functionality (sharing rules with players, a character sheet builder, etc) I think I need a subscription to something called Demiplane. But money is not really an object if I could get this off the ground with some decent players. 

I have plenty going on with my DnD right now. But I am around 30 sessions into the campaign and already past the point where I get a wander lust for other genres and systems. So as always it is sort of life raft building time. My research shall continue, but I am hopeful for supers action!

Cheers