admiralducksauce
Scarenormous
Joined: 25 Jan 2006
Posts: 3605
Location: Secret Volcano Lair
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 Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 10:15 pm Post subject: Dieter's goodbye game - Actual Play |
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I wasn't sure where to put this post. I know the SCU game went out with a whimper, and I apologize. This thread isn't about that. This weekend Dieter, Aihal, and myself, along with three of our friends, are having a tabletop gaming weekend and I am running what might be Dieter's last tabletop session for a long time. It's a Heroes? game, he's playing Clive "The Shield" Walker, and teaming up with the world's first costumed contractors.
I have actually planned NPCs for this adventure. I have named NPCs for this adventure, and I have given them divorced wives, kids, jobs, etc. You guys never notice this because in PbP I've got time to prepare, literally, post by post, but IRL my NPC names are atrocious.
Anyways, if the outcome isn't horribly embarrassing, I'll write up what happens, post it here, and move it over to the Wiki. I just have to take a second and explain just what I plan on fitting into 4-5 hours. Some of the references won't be universal to everyone, I just need to expound and I ask you to permit me a moment of vanity. 
1. The North Hollywood Bank Robbery redux with supercriminals vs. supercops
2. Stonegate prison/the Sanctuary Project
3. Mark Simmons
4. COBRA
5. Sartaine
6. The Deadliest Man Alive
7. Frankenfish
8. Amway
9. Keith "Action" Jackson, the only henchman to survive both "Justice is Served AND "Liberty Rock City"
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Dieter's running Firefly, and I encourage him to post what happens here as well if it doesn't turn out, as I said, too embarrassing.
_________________
"There's a LOT of cookie in a giant cookie."
- Ben |
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admiralducksauce
Scarenormous
Joined: 25 Jan 2006
Posts: 3605
Location: Secret Volcano Lair
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| Posted: Tue May 02, 2006 4:13 pm Post subject: |
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All right, it was slightly embarrassing. And I realize that my pre-game enthusiasm buildup was from not having anyone I could brainstorm with/expound my ideas upon, since they were all playing in the darn game!
And I also realize that in hindsight, the events of "Actual Plays" are not all that interesting unless they hold some insight for the reader's own games. I'll spend a bit of time on exposition and then explain what went right and wrong IMO.
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With Stonegate Penitentiary shut down from an EMP bomb (in my brother's last Metal Gear Heroes? adventure) and 32 escaped metaconvicts still at large, Vigilance has a lucrative contract on their hands and a plate that's overflowing with supervillains all of a sudden.
Action/Intro Scene: The Bulletproof Banditos
I redid the North Hollywood shootout as a Bond-esque opening sequence. Two armed and armored thugs, each with super-toughness and high strength, tried to get out of the bank, get to their truck, and escape. They were not successful and were subdued. The next leg of the adventure was going to be combat-light, so I wanted to get everyone into it before we switched gears for a while. It also gave me a good excuse to get the Shield (played by Dieter) in with those costumed do-gooders from Vigilance that everyone else was playing.
When the team gets back, they learn of two very odd murders in Garden Springs, Colorado. Why would freshly-escaped metacriminals want to advertise their presence like that? And why were both victims high-level executives in Fruit of Eden?
The Interrogation of Mark Simmons
Although I don't run Spycraft 2, I am a firm believer in their Dramatic Conflict systems and have liberally ripped off their ideas for chases, interrogations, manhunts, etc. Vigilance still had Simmons in custody since their last adventure. This scene was meant to link Sanctuary with the goings-on in Colorado and bring some doubt as to the purity of Vigilance's mission and/or leader. No offense to Gatac, but none of my players like Mark Simmons, and try as I might to convince them that he's really a good guy, Sanctuary goes after the REAL bad guys now, etc. etc., basically using rationales espoused in Gatty/Punkey's Professionals stories, they weren't buying it (although they were civil - aside from some truth juice). But that's OK - they're the PCs, they're the good guys, and Mark was just Mr. Exposition at this time. Failure to interrogate him successfully would've still led to basic information leading them to Colorado, but no advance intelligence (or false intelligence) on what they faced.
What do they face? Why, none other than a Sanctuary strike team, in the mold of the Mark/Sharon/Dingbat/Deadeye/Spectre team from Heroes? Most of the metacriminals who've evaded capture are going to be laying low. Most haven't even had time to get back to familiar ground so they can be caught. Some, however, were early recruits in the Sanctuary program. They've already been organized into cells, and they think that the schedule's been moved up; that the shutdown was the coverup for their operation. What the players learned from Mark was that Sanctuary will not tolerate other secret organizations plotting world domination. Fruit of Eden, an Amway-style front for domestic black ops and terrorism, is about to be massacred by a team of metaconvicts. Unfortunately, not everyone in FoE knows the group's true agenda; they're innocent. Saps, maybe, but innocent all the same.
Fruit of Eden
Garden Springs, Colorado is one of those sleepy towns that thrive during tourist season and can barely sustain the natives during the off-season. It's the off-season right now; the spring is melting the ski slopes but it's still too cold for the majority of the adventure campers, hunting parties, and sightseers. It's also the unofficial base of operations for Project COBRA, FoE's secret paramilitary force. The high muckamucks live in their mansions here, displaying their ranches and indoor pools and Ferraris for the initiates who come here on "orientation training". In the off-season, FoE holds conventions for their members, where the new guys are further indoctrinated, and the older guys get to exercise their authority, pulling them in deeper too.
It's like Fight Club. They call it the Garden of Eden.
The chosen few, the middle-management types who fit certain personality traits, are selected to undergo training. They're the Crimson Guard - they're gung-ho, brainwashed, and think they're living the REAL American Dream, making it on their own with help from their like-minded friends. The small Garden Springs sheriff's department are all Crimson Guard, as well as a few (but not all) of the state cops with local patrols. The local branch of the CO National Guard is staffed by FoE members, but the actual troops won't be in on it ('cept maybe for a few).
The guys with the mansions are the Stonegate targets. Sanctuary's mission parameters were based on, basically, a hunch. They had incomplete paper trails, some semi-reliable confessions, and were planning the strike for when there weren't a metric fuckton of potentially innocent FoE members in town. The Stonegate cons think it's a "lop off the head then burn the body" operation.
The Sartaines
While Zacharie Sartaine is still making good on his vow never to go near Los Santos again, his brother and sister, Xander and Zarana Sartaine, have intercepted, killed, and are impersonating FBI agents Forest Muller and Danielle "Sully" Sullivan. They're on FoE's payroll, and their job is to make sure only FoE-friendly authorities are involved in the investigations.
Deadliest Man Alive
Hollowpoint is one of those villains my group loves to fight. His name is cheesy, he wears a funny mask, but he always brings big guns and usually puts up a good fight. He's been hired by Sanctuary to kill their errant strike team after they make their hits, but gladly hunts Vigilance when they arrive on-site.
Stonegate's Splinter Cell
I had five bad guys for my group of 5 PCs. I thought I had learned from previous adventures that single foes NEVER put up a fight against a group of equally-powered enemies. I thought even numbers would be a fair fight this time. I was wrong.
Keith "Action" Jackson was the only bad guy to survive TWO seasons of the online Heroes? game. He got his kneecap blown out in Justice is Served and got hammered by a bus in "Liberty Rock City". He learned enough cultist magic to be a real supervillain in the time between, got arrested, and got recruited by Sanctuary to lead their team.
Lucas "Cujo" Lockwood was a straight-up werewolf. They figured it out before they even left Los Santos, so everyone had silver weapons. Cujo was screwed from the beginning.
Phyllis "Nuke" Fenton was in Stonegate voluntarily. She's a microwave emitter, and borrowing a page from the recent Professionals story as well as "Brimstone" by Preston & Child, her job is to kill people and have them never know what happened to them.
Frankenfish is one of my City of Villains characters. I toned down his fishiness and made him a supertough/strong Deep One hybrid (I figured Jackson knew him).
"Bob" was just a gullible trucker the strike team convinced of their mission. He had a .357 in his pocket and ran off after rescuing Cujo from a wolfmanhunt.
What Happened
Vigilance arrives at the Horny R, the ranch owned by the first victim. They easily figure cause of death is "mauled by werewolf", and the Shrew, Shield, and Titan start tracking up into the scrub brush and mountains. Savant and Blue Halogen research the vic's computer and ransack his house, finding weaponry belonging to the CO National Guard and info about a FoE convention. Halogen runs his "electro-sense" through the house and finds that it's bugged. A/V surveillance was built into the house at the time of its construction. Savant and Blue Halogen civvie up and check the convention and the Nat'l Guard armory for clues, where they meet the false FBI agents but avoid grisly fates. They learn that nearly every building in Garden Springs is being surveilled, and follow the transmission to Bernard Wabash's mansion. Bernie is another high executive of FoE, and wasn't at the convention.
Meanwhile, Shrew picks up Cujo's trail and they get into first a manhunt "extended scene", and then a foot chase when Cujo spots them. The Shield actually outpaces both his teammates and hits Cujo twice with silver buckshot, but the werewolf barely manages to lose the supercop. They regain his trail, follow it to a vet's office, but lose it on the road. Bob picked up Cujo in his truck and tore off towards Wabash's mansion.
Most of this section was unplanned. The foot chase was awesome and intense; I was quickly planning what to do when Clive finally tackled Cujo and took his ass out but Dieter's dice faltered at the last second. Blue Halogen and Savant mostly ran around collecting Clue Points, using their tried-and-true method of following the surveillance signals with BH's powers and Savant talking them into whereever they needed to get.
Fight!!!
The Stonegate cons are, of course, plotting to kill Wabash before turning their murderous powers on the rest of Fruit of Eden.
1. Wabash is in his panic room in the basement.
2. Hollowpoint is set up in some rocks, about 200 yards from the house. He's going to snipe Cujo with silver, LAW rocket Frankenfish, and full-auto everyone else when they walk out. He has claymores and other remote explosives set up to take out any police coming to investigate.
3. Wabash has some FoE/COBRA goons in his house. They prove ineffective.
Vigilance gets to the mansion, with a local PD/state trooper/FBI convoy hot on their heels. Vigilance heads inside, and Hollowpoint takes out all the cops but the FBI car with explosives. The Sartaine siblings make to escape; they're not soldiers, they're assassins, and they mistakenly stepped into a warzone. Hollowpoint wastes time (shitty rolling) bouncing M203 grenades off the Vigilance helicopter once the team is inside.
1. Cujo's the first one down, beat on by Clive and Titan in the kitchen, then shotgunned into unconsciousness by Clive.
2. Frankenfish is next, having poorly chosen the electrokinetic (Blue Halogen) as his dance partner. Fearsome Fish Fry, indeed!
3. Titan, Clive, and the Shrew fight Nuke and Jackson in the basement, where Nuke has just microwaved Wabash inside his own panic room. Titan nearly kills Nuke with a power-punch, but Jackson pops off a spell that increases his combat ability. At this point, the Shrew is taken out by friendly fire (thanks Clive!). Free of melee opponents, Jackson puts a shot into the Shield, Titan, and one into the downed Shrew. The first two shots bounce off their respective targets, and the Shrew regenerates, so Jackson is screwed - Titan hits him with a thunderbolt of Zeus and stuns his ass into next week.
4. Meanwhile, Savant heads upstairs and finds Wabash's Viewing Room. He spots Hollowpoint outside, dealing doom to the police, loads his tranquilizer gun, and heads outside. Ironic aside: Savant's player is the guy playing Hollowpoint as a PC in another campaign.
I was expecting a big outdoor battle between both groups of heroes and villains. With more teamwork on the villains' part, they might have done more damage, but they got isolated and ganged up on. Also, I spent so much of their points making them able to take damage that I wasn't able to make them able to hit anyone. Except Nuke, but she got popped once and dropped.
As for Hollowpoint, Savant manages to sneak up within tranq range and hit the assassin once before he's forced behind cover by suppressive fire. Then it's just a matter of too many targets and not enough actions to kill them all. Hollowpoint does beat the half-regenerated Shrew in a knife fight (it's all he wanted to do anyhow), but he's taken out by the conscious Vigilance members.
We stopped there, as I had greedily sucked up an hour of Dieter's Firefly game and didn't need to blather about denouement, but now I can!
1. With most of Garden Springs' Sherriff's Dept. dead and the state police bowing to the FBI's jurisdiction, the Sartaine siblings (still in their FBI guise) take the captured metacriminals into custody.
a. The Sartaines'll just kill Cujo.
b. I like Frankenfish, so I'll leave his fate a mystery. Since he needs far more water to live than we do, the Sartaines will shoot him in the head and leave him in the desert or something. He'll find a way to come back if I need a powerhouse, but I can come up with others.
c. Action Jackson's a mercenary-minded serial killer, and that makes his loyalty for sale. COBRA could use a combat mage. At least, that's one story. If I don't need a mage for a while, he'll just end up killed by the Sartaines like Cujo. He survives two seasons full of vigilante killers only to end up dead in a game full of costumed heroes. I kinda like that, actually.
d. Nuke won't be taken by the Sartaines. She's actually saved by her grevious injuries, as she ends up in ICU rather than a shallow grave. If she heals and escapes, Titan will have his first real archenemy.
e. Vigilance takes Hollowpoint into custody on Archangel's orders.
2. Fruit of Eden will take some flak, but the horrific events won't bring them down. They'll write off Wabash as a filthy rich paranoid voyeur to explain his surveillance. Most of the cops in on the FoE conspiracy are dead, as are Wabash's personal guards. He'll be cut off as yet another corrupt corporate slimeball making his own profits without the unknowing parent company's knowledge.
3. Yeah, I went with Sanctuary up to their old La Femme Nikita tricks again. They're a good bad guy, and although they pop up everywhere on these boards, I've hardly used them in my tabletop game.
4. I need some different villains. Bricks are fun, but I've overused them, as well as the "shadowy ninja assassin" type. I'm thinking mind controllers, mages, weird shit like the kid from "Au". Maybe focus my villains more. Maybe they have one crap power, like "never get sick". We expand on that to get an evil plot about "survival of the fittest", maybe some bioweapons or deadly viruses, and we're golden.
One of my players, Sam, says he likes my game because it plays like "superheroes in the real world". I have a hard time challenging the PCs in combat I think, because of this. Normal people just can't compete with the likes of Vigilance, and these guys aren't even that powerful compared to the X-Men, for example. I'm sticking with my "no ray guns, no costumes on every corner" feel, I just need to think of different ways for the bad guys to fight without being unfair to the PCs.
_________________
"There's a LOT of cookie in a giant cookie."
- Ben |
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