The Substitute, Part II (from long ago)

SYSTEM: ICONS

Continuing reposting things from six years ago.

We finished off The Substitute, and much though I didn't want it to be "big fight, everyone goes home," that's pretty much what it was.

James' description is here on Dreamwidth, but the Livejournal cross-posting has more comments; I think for the purposes of my records (the GM's notes) I'm going to point to the LJ version with its more comments, but for the record of the adventures I'm going to point to the Dreamwidth version (eventually the Blogger version), because I like the purity and consistency.

I'm sure I'll have no problem keeping up with a complex system like that. Or I'll make a drive-by on James' account and post the LJ comments I really like to the Dreamwidth versions, just so I can get to them. (Because really, it's all about me.)

James misses the parts where:

• Good Dr. Bailey, in his quest for supplies, thinks about heading to the teacher's room beetween science labs, but first checks for traps (because in the Old Days, he would have put traps there) and finds several;
• Hari sees the chairs of the lab are all booby-trapped with blades and electricity, which the teacher can activate (but non-lethal, probably, because there are Ords who might have survived to take the class).
• Oh, and although there was a coral snake lying across Sari's foot at one point (as a snake who has lost its heat lamp will search out the nearest source of warmth), she was quite effective at beheading it, getting it and a nearby tarantula with a single blow.

The shock troopers are the equivalent of the school patrol, of course. The PCs never ran into the equivalents of themselves.

Presumably the shock troopers who went onto the football field are detained, because the Hope Prep dimension won the fight. That will be something to bring up later: a group of Pryde Academy parents stage a "rescue" mission or the Hope Prep teachers send them home. They didn't discover the connection between the two dimensions, so that didn't get uncovered, and could be fodder for a future adventure.

It is a measure of our, uh, nonchalance about sports that we didn't even ask who won the Homecoming Game, nor did it come up. So that particular set of details skipped by us.

Rumspringa was an NPC for the session because the player couldn't make it, so she got entombed in earth by Serena early on and without life support, she fell unconscious until rescued. She might have done something to break free if she had had PC aura, but she didn't.

The goatees thing started as a joke, a running reference to the goatee that the evil Spock wore in "Mirror, Mirror" on the original Star Trek but somehow by the end of the session, it became established that many of the Twisted Earth residents have goatees, which is part of the reason that Hari was concerned by them when arriving in Peet's. Also, in a fine example of evil sluttishness, the Twisted Earth version of Serena has tattoos and piercings, and according to the players, the shock trooper armor is built to show that the women have secondary sexual characteristics; I don't know why, because in the real world, bumps aren't necessary.

It didn't come out, but the Pryde Academy version of Super-Science concentrates a lot more on poisons and deactivating agents, hence all the animals. The slug gets used to test contact poisons, but for some things, you just have to have a person. "So I want you to tell me, does this cause a burning pain, an excruciating pain, or a bright pain?" The victim had retractable claws, but we didn't learn anything else about him because he booked it.

I notice I still can't design solo villains who are meant to stand up against a group. I feel like I'm still back in 1984 with the Champions villain I designed and only GM intervention kept him going. Same for Professor Pulse. At least in this case, the PCs get Determination Points when I do that. The poison gas was one of those improvs. So was the team of schlock—er, shock—troopers who came through the floor. (I mean, it made sense...Shock troopers are in teams of 4, so there's someone to wake Serevil and her teammate, they rush up to corral the PCs, hoping to get the points...but the team from House Omega is heading there too.)

'Course, it didn't help that the way the adventure ran, the PCs had surprise, and I didn't take that into account. Plus some of the attacks are 8 or 7 damage, and his defenses weren't quite enough: he should have had more, or as GM I should have just bit the bullet and given him more Stamina (or the excuse of all Stamina returning, or given a Determination point for the rolled Stun failing--though I actually hate to do something like that: the PCs fail often enough that I don't want to take a success away from them).

Anyway, group versus group works better, though it is more work for the GM. What doesn't feel like it works is NPC versus NPC. Best (in my opinion) to get them both off the playing field somehow.

Complaints

I had already noticed that Glimm and Sari were underpowered relative to the other characters who were randomly rolled, and sometimes that happens: it's part of random-roll systems. Brian made good use of Determination points to bring Sari up to speed--the targeted shuriken throws that immobilized part of the Professor's armor were some of them, and Glimm's high Strength mean that he deals out damage quite effectively, so Determination points helped make that up.

But Brian pointed out that Sari's writeup refers to powers she doesn't have, and uses the wrong name for the power she does have...and it's not the Mutants & Masterminds name. (At a guess, it might be from BASH, but I only read the original version of BASH once, so I might be wrong.) That kind of conversion error (and that's what it has to be) is just sloppy, and proofreading should have caught it. For the record, I gave both players 5 points to spend and I threw in Shooting 5 for Sari's player, to represent the darts or shurikens it says she has. (In fact, it should probably be Blast (Shooting) 3, Strike (Slashing) 4, both through devices, because a thrown dart or shuriken should be less than a strike, but that was my mistake.)

Also, the artwork gives the impression that Glimm towers over everyone, but the character sheet suggests he's at best nine inches taller than the shortest kid, and six or less over the rest. In the original part of the adventure, I had him as like, eight or nine feet tall, and the facts on the character sheet don't support that. Clearly, he's about to go through a growth spurt if he's going to get to the height on the cover.

The Determination/Starting determination thing is starting to get to me. I actually thought about whether it was really meant to be Determination (as written) given out as a reward. But in that case, characters who have two less than their starting determination get effectively no reward for the session, because it will reset to their starting determination next time.

So I'm disappointed in the Freshman Pack. I haven't had good results with the characters chosen from it, and I'm curious as to whether they will release the same characters updated in a Sophomore Pack, Junior Pack, and Senior Pack. I don't think they need to; if they want to enlarge the line with other character packs, I suggest (and it's worth exactly what you pay for it) that those packs, if they come about, have other characters in them. Then the characters can be from the same cohort or simultaneous, as the GM prefers.

Yes, I'm complaining about a small press product. I know they don't have much money to spend, I know that it's done on a shoestring by very few people as a labour of love...but they're also saying it can be used with little preparation, and these kind of inconsistencies make that difficult. I like the line, I like the products, but I'm aware of where it comes up short for me.

We will run Halloween Ball as the next adventure. One of the players would like to move on to a different system, I think. James is content with ICONS for a while. Another player is content with ICONS but for less time, so it'll stay a fill-in. And that'll give them time to get one of the spring adventures out. I believe they're revamping the layout of the Handbook, and I suspect they take my criticisms seriously. They might decide not do anything about them--colour-blind fifty-year-old GMs without free time are a rather small subset of their market--but I think they take them seriously and weigh them.

It occurs to me that I've missed the intention in one part: do they mean for the GM to run only the adventures they've prepared, or some mix of homebrew and prepared adventures? I suspect the latter, because one every two months is not fast enough for a weekly gaming group. Certainly after this one adventure, I have enough potential subplots to populate a session or two, so long as I can fit them into the High School esthetic. I won't create my own adventures—ICONS remains a fill-in for our group, much though I love it, and part of the intent is to be able to use published adventures so I don't have to spend a lot of free time.

Oh, sure: this idea would make money (not)—a set of two- or three-paragraph descriptions of fallout from various thngs in adventures. The Hope Prep Followups. In a convenient small package so these plot threads can be dropped as subplots into any adventure to flesh it out and make it even longer....

Ways to handle the Big Villain?

So you have a group of characters, and for whatever reason, they have to face a single character. The nature of ICONS powers and defenses suggest that if you have a group with mixed power levels, the defense level of the villain will be high. So what to do in a fight? I'm sure somebody has written about it somewhere, and if I can't find it, I will. Look for a pointer or a discussion in the future.

Various Ideas for Hope Prep

I was thinking about Hope Prep on the bus, and there must be a club, not school-sanctioned, for what would be jokers and deuces in Wild Cards. Essentially the Hope Prep version of the Legion of Substitute heroes. So you'd have Micro-Fish in there (a character from an M&M adventure that the players remember fondly--he's not my invention, but I'd import him wholesale), and Shadowflask, who has TK and forcefields, works in Shadows only, but whose powers can be defeated by a lit candle and who can't see in the dark to make it all work, and Ice Cream Man, who has "elemental control: Ice Cream (create,attack,control)" but nothing else...but his parents sent him to Hope Prep because, hey, he has superpowers! I don't know what you'd call the club--the Fizzle Club? It might be fun to build a subplot about trying to give a chance to shine to one of those kids. ("Sure, you're a big-time hero, but me? I'm Ice Cream Man. Yeah, my father made up the name.")

Clearly Jade has someone from the Science Club in mind to hack into the school computer and add the gossip blog. Have to think about it, and where the information will be. Will Dakota Heil be involved? Perhaps she's trying to find the source of the anonymous blog, because I'm sure that the blog will be a big topic of conversation while it exists. Heh. Dr. Bailey secretly approves, so he doesn't do anything to fix it, claiming fatigue from "dimension-lag". We'll see if Dr. Bailey continues to approve after they publish something about him...

I am sure that Tommy's and T'kla's upcoming breakup, when the pheromones wear off, will be covered in the new gossip blog.

Also, can Sia read anything electronic? I'm going to say no for now, but it will be only seconds before someone prints out the text of the blog, and he knows what's been said.

The Substitute, GM's Notes Part I

SYSTEM: ICONS

We played The Substitute from Melior Via. GM fills this in as he has time. Also includes comments on some of the characters in the >Hope Preparatory School Freshman Pack, also from Melior Via.

We met the primary purpose: We had fun, so the main thing is done. The rest is kvetching.

On the Hope Prep adventure and style:

• The adventure took quite a while: this is not a one-night adventure, even though I cut out the living chess portion with the Science Club. That may be because I miscalculated and did too much with the slugs. In the grand scheme of things, they are just a side line. (Memo: Have to have them see the giant slugs while they're in the alternate dimension, so they know that the slugs came over then.)
• Why do Jimmy Tauran and Johnny Starr both have names that begin with J? I used Tommy Starr, just to make it easier, but that meant I had to do the translation. (I am acutely aware of this since I made the Khes mistake earlier in the Jaws of the Six Serpents adventure.)
• Having Jimmy pick on Glim was a mistake, in retrospect. I should have known better, but maybe in the future, there should be some guidance in the adventures for the GM that says something like, "picks on the character most likely to fight back and get in trouble" as a hint to the GM to look at Qualities and Challenges. If I had been thinking, I would have used Sari instead of Glimm for that conflict, because Sari is (a) not nine feet tall and a wall of muscle and (b) has "Never Backs Down."
• I found the whole adventure kind of confusing. I added the part where they discover that Tommy found his adoration for the alien sophomore (I had a lot aliens, so I made her a sophomore) with Dr. Bailey. The players, bless them, jumped to the right conclusion. A writeup of her—I didn't notice one—that I could use or ignore, that would have been nice. I claimed that as an alien she has feathers or feather-like extrusions and a tentacle instead of a nose.
• Even though the adventures claim they're set up for easy use, I still have trouble finding things in the heat of the session. This might just be me.

On our session specifically:

• Mentioned that there are 10 schools in the metahuman secondary school league. With teleporters and everything, it's hard to claim that each services a particular area, but the majority of students are "local". So there are three in North America (Toronto, New York, San Diego), one in South America (Peru), one in the UK, one in Africa, one in an unspecified place in Europe, one in Australia, one in an unspecified place in Asia (China? Korea? Would Japanese have their own?), and the rest to be named later. Retroactively, I'd probably make it 8 or 6: enough for actual competitions, but not so many that I can't name countries.
• The adventure as written ends kind of abruptly, sort of a let-down. I'm going to let them have the possibility of a knock-down drag-out with the real Twisted Earth Dr. Bailey, who used to be a superhero but had an operation to make him evil, and who sports all kinds of cyborg enhancements. (I'll start with the Dr. Pulse writeup and go from there.) (Now, we didn't get to the ending, so I can't be sure that it's a let-down, but it reads that way.)
• But in the interests of sowing confusion, I had Dakota Heil wondering aloud if Dr. Bailey's new interest in sports was the result of an infatuation with someone who played or taught sports...that is, Moon Maiden.
• Miz Beazley works in the cafeteria. She's the one who supplied Hari with anti-slug chemical...just enough to annoy the mother slug rather than kill her. (And so what if the name is taken from Archie comics?)
• The players rightly wondered why the janitorial staff weren't looking after the water problem; I claimed that the janitorial duties were handled by a robot, which was currently sitting down and reciting haikus in Japanese, a language which it doesn't know. In other words, an early attempt at takeover by the clone.
• And I stated that Dr. Bailey sponsors the Science Club, which makes sense, and when they found irregularities in the security system, they told...Dr. Bailey. Which didn't work out well for them.
• The Shock Troopers have no weapons in their armour, and it's not clear to me that they are supposed to use their natural powers or something in the armour. Probably natural powers, though I didn't (using the excuse that those two were an extraction team).
• Gonna have to work up a reason why the teachers seem so unconcerned when the kids tell them about a potential threat, or otherwise it's an idiot plot. (Maybe it's an unspoken assumption that the patrol will handle it, or that as metahumans, weirdness is guaranteed to follow these kids for the rest of their lives, so HPS provides a way for them to learn to deal with it, with the teachers there as backup when they fail?)
• I didn't give out enough Determination, in retrospect; remembering the session, there were at least two incidents where I should have given some out, and I didn't. And anytime they try to warn a teacher, who blows them off, they should get a point. Because, like, they're the Metahumans of Tomorrow. Or people expect great things. One or the other.
• Have to figure out what gets done with the slugs in the long term. I think they get shipped back to Twisted Earth.

Interesting that Glimm has a crush on Serena. Have to bring her back, then.

We've got these two powerful (and similar) characters and two underpowered characters. One has an obvious niche, the other does not: she's not excellent in brainpower or has powers that no one else has. She's foreign just like the other three. Tough to make her stand out. Have to think about that.

Note: I think I'm going to give Glimm and Sari, the two underpowered characters, the options of their origins (unearthly in one case, probably trained in the other). I don't recall if it suggests this in the Freshman Pack or not. This might be one of the things that happened in the conversion from M&M. The Freshman Pack doesn't include origins at all, so I think this is just a dropped ball on Melior Via's part. (See, they could mention it as a bit of customization for the characters..."You can apply the character's origin as a way to customize...")

Orientation Day: Notes

SYSTEM: ICONS

Only James could make it tonight, and he was willing to run solo (I offered him the choice of passing, but he came anyway), so I set aside what I had been going to run and will do that the next time the group is together to run a Halifax Heroes adventure. Instead, I used something from Melior Via: Hope Preparatory School. This is a high school of superheroes. It doesn't have the same voice as Hero High but—on the other hand—it's cheaper. And it's for ICONS. So that's what we went with, the HPS Orientation adventure.

Changes:

• Set in Toronto instead of Anycity, USA.
• It's set up for a group of 7-10 students, but I used 5 because only one was a PC. (In retrospect: 70 freshmen and 10 teams makes teams of 7. But I never specified the number of freshmen, so I'll live with it. Heck, I never specified the number of teams, I just said they were teams of 10.)
• For NPC characters I used ones from the HPS Character Pack, but changed one of the characters (Lorn) so he better suited the aspects of James' character Hari, who hates Atlanteans: Lorn became Prince Lorn, or Loren, heir to Atlantis. Essentially, I used the same writeup but added Swimming, Immunity (drowning), and Lifesupport (pressure, cold). I explained away the superspeed as water being a thousand times denser than air, so out of water he's fast. Characters ended up being Eric, Kylene, Glimm, Hari, and (Prince) Loren and not the ones from the adventure (which, uh, I had forgotten about).
• I did include a real attack from the Alchemical Cabal.
• I added the detail that the staff are arguing about whether to have the RFID tags issued at the beginning of the day or the end of the day (or hire someone so it can happen at any point in the day).
• I introduced USHER at the end, so maybe they're all part of the same universe. Of course, if it's in the same universe as the Halifax stories and it's set in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, it shouldn't be USHER, it should be SHARD. If we ever do a second one, then I'll have to think about whether it's retroactively changed or if it was a (possibly rare) instance of inter-agency cooperation.
• Added that Alchemical Cabal members are given poison before a mission. If they complete it and get back, they get the antidote. The poison starts to work if they get knocked out. (Don't use the minion rule with this idea.) Also added that Alchemical Cabal members might not be using poison: the suit might contain interdimensional transporters that get rid of the body, conscious or not. That is, there might be a dead-man's switch on the interdimensional stuff; so long as they keep moving or doing something, it doesn't activate. Bodies disappeared if knocked unconscious, with fumes leaking out from the suit and giving the impression of the bodies dissolving inside the suit.

Thoughts on the adventure:

Not bad, but the character writeups are scattered throughout the pages. (EDIT and correction: My decision to include a real Alchemical Cabal attack meant I had to switch; otherwise, the characters are as they occur—which means that if you have recurring characters, you'll be switching around.) You want to print them two-up because they're meant for reading on a screen so a letter-size page has something like 14-point text. It would be nice if the Alchemical Cabal writeups were at the back of the adventure so all the cast is together. Certainly I'll do more HPS adventures given the chance.

Originally the HPS materials are written for Mutants & Masterminds and I have to wonder why. Hero High does such an excellent job of capturing the possibilities of a high school supers setting that I have to wonder what the advantage is to HPS over Hero High. (Though I have not looked at the M&M versions, so I can't comment on any real difference.) For ICONS though, there is no such setting and it provides one. It also handles the wonkiness of ICONS characters, who can have almost any power level. (I mean, I prefer ICONS now, but I know the game is not perfect.)

But in ICONS there is no high school setting. Or there wasn't, until this came along.

EDIT: Comments from the publisher indicate that the niche in M&M is of a filled-in school setting, rather than a toolbox, which is what Hero High is. Melior Via is specifically trying to emulate a coming-of-age setting in school—echoes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are possible.

The conversion to ICONS is good, though there's mention of Determination when (I think) they mean Starting Determination, and the character boxes are somewhat hard to read—filled-in bars for the characteristics would have been easier to read for me, but they would have sucked up more ink. (I wonder if you could do anything interesting with a character sheet that uses a circle with ten pie pieces for power levels?) EDIT: I notice the bars are filled in, technically, but between the paleness of the fill (it's paper-coloured, I think) and my colour deficiency, I couldn't tell.

A big part of the adventure is an obstacle course, and I think I ran it as well as I could (for not being prepared), but I wasn't recording time correctly—as I recorded it, the heroes were fast, easily faster than anybody else, and they had a series of embarrassingly bad rolls. (Basically, a panel per roll. I rolled for the NPCs, which isn't ICONS canon, but it became roll or railroad with the number of NPCs I was controlling.) And the hero team had powers that made it easy (telekinesis covers a multitude of things).

There are currently three HPS adventures: Orientation, The Substitute, and a Halloween-themed one. It looks like they're working their way through the school year, but I'd suggest a couple of adventures that can be inserted anywhere, any time. (Though that immediately sparks an idea for an adventure during the holidays.)

Note: Inkjet printing and highlighters don't go together as well as they might. Things smear.

Boy, I'd like a Ten Bullet Points Or Less summary on sections of the setting book (the adventures have them). It's cute to have fictional character writing comments and it's a good mood thing, but it takes time to study and I didn't have much. (My own fault, I guess.) What I wanted on the setting book—the Freshman Handbook—was a summary page: which teachers teach what subjects (Mr. Bailey aka Dr. Pulse: Weird Science), locations of rooms (Science lab: Second floor of wing), so that if I had to refer to anything in a hurry, it would be there. I'll probably produce one for my own use but I can't see how you give it to other people without undercutting the actual product. (EDIT: In retrospect, maybe it could be done with a one-page table, which has the columns Subject, Teacher, AKA, Location, Notes, Rumours?. Just to find things if you don't have it memorized. You might have a second table that has team names, sports, club names, and notes.)

For adventures, the little teaser there, the summary, in adventures—they help, but aren't quite enough. I'd rename the "Talking Points" section of the adventure because I have the impression that Talking Points are short. I might be wrong on that, though.

What Happened

Really, read James' writeup. James' writeup is much more interesting than mine, as usual, though I fill in some facts he didn't (and he fills in some facts I don't).

Orientation day: not the first day of school (that's next week), but everyone new meets and learns the lay of the land. Some seniors have already moved into the dorm or are around.

They suffer through the president`s speech. Hari meets the other people from his group, and they are largely introduced by talking with Jade O`Leary, an older girl with a tattoo of an ankh on the side of her face. She guides them out quickly and tells them about the Cliques in school. Some students don`t like it, and some teachers don't, but it's tradition and Hope Prep like runs on tradition. And why do we have to be superheroes anyway? Can't you just be an artist? Do powers mean you have to be a superhero?

(EDIT: On thinking about it, that's like a theme. Play handball with both sides of it. Go.)

The people are:

• Hari of the Cerulean Light Unearthly, with TK, teleport, and a severe stick up his ass.
• Eric Su, a homeless pauper boy and a gadgeteer.
• Karlene DeLong, with a force field and a knack for healing.
• Glimm Grivbazz, an alien and a diplomat's son who is big, strong, invulnerable, and clumsy.
• (Prince) Lorn of Atlantis, who is a speedster of a kind.

The implication is that these are the only aliens starting this year. ("Alien" means essentially anyone who isn't an earth-human, so Atlanteans count; Eric and Karlene got added to the group because there weren't enough aliens.)

Jade does the tour. They learn that it's the one day of the year that the security system is tested and overhauled, because the new students have to have an RFID chip added to them, and because of that, two of the last four years have seen someone attack that day. They learn you shouldn't go to the top floor of the tower after dark—magic things will get you—and you shouldn't go downstairs to the basement without a commuter pass because the security system will get you.

Eventually, she hauls everyone to the obstacle course. They get their uniforms. Ms. Sanchez is there and she gives her little speech. The characters notice that the use of powers is not forbidden, only certain powers are: No flying, no teleporting, no carrying. You can push, pull, or drag a person, but you can't fly or carry. The slowest team earns Ms. Sanchez' scorn all year. The obstacles are:

1. Wall: Everyone gets over this fairly easily, though Eric makes some bad attempts.
2. Hidden Bomb Recovery: Each person carries an egg through duct work without cracking the egg (or the duct work). Karlene had to heal Glimm's egg.
3. Swim: Not surprisingly, the Atlantean excelled. Hari dragged Eric, who can't swim.
4. Cross the Chasm: Don't fall crossing a rope bridge. By using TK and force fields, everyone was safely hemmed in. Though Lorn did fall, Hari caught him and slowed his fall (though he did debate whether he should or not).
5. Save the Hostage: Hari used his TK.
6. Hurdles: Glimm jumped all of them, and then was told you had to jump hurdles one at a time so he re-did it, jumping about 30 feet in the air nearly straight up; Hari used his TK to make sure that he didn't land on the hurdles. Hari didn't think to help anyone else.
7. Balance Beam: Between force field and TK, balls didn't touch anyone.
8. Laser Grid: First, they tried to out-think it. Eric checked to see if he could disable all of the lasers with a single power source removal. No go, so Hari did the test. He managed.
9. Diving: Hari used his TK to pull up the weight, and Glimm set it down.
10. Relay: They did fine, though it took Eric forever, it seemed.

It turned out that Hari's team won. They each got a detention certificate, good to avoid one detention for forgetting your gym uniform. (Missed roleplaying opportunities: I should have had the second-best team and the worst team named and identified. They could come back at later times. I think I'll have them ready if we ever do another HPS adventure.) And they got good cess from most of the other teams.

The team had lunch. Hari tried to prevent the food fight, but couldn't (hmm, should have given him Determination for that; didn't think of it). That led to the alarm going off, and…the group got left in the hall while all the others were in classrooms under lockdown.

And then the Alchemical Cabal appeared and attacked. Three of them. If Hari had known better or Lorn had remembered, they would have known this was a hazing because the Alchemical Cabal always shows up with a multiple of seven people: one leader, six minions. But they didn't remember or know that. The Alchemical Cabal looks like a clean suit in one of the colours of the rainbow (red through violet): these guys all wore red. They also wear a bandolier of flasks and test tubes that contain various alchemical and magitech reagents. (For instance, one kind splashes acid for a Blast effect; the other unleashes an area Paralysis that petrifies.) The test tubes that these guys threw released some kind of red or green smoke, but everyone missed, so no way of knowing what they did.

The team decided they had to fight instead of run away. So Hari and Lorn fought, and after a few panels discovered that it was just a hazing prank by some seniors. They discovered this because Hari had them captured, and they didn't want to be dragged up before the school president so they offered him a deal. Several deals, but Hari wasn't dealing: they had done wrong and had to face justice for it.

And the school security system was on the fritz. It decided that it had been asked to use lethal force, so robot drones were being sent. Eric looked at the system and decided he couldn't stop it in less than two hours, or make them invisible to the drones in less than one. Not good enough.

The seniors disappeared: having a teleporter really helps. (Hari's ESP shows that they are about a mile away.) Of course, Hari is a teleporter too.

Hari made the extra effort to get his group away to a park, and then he phoned the school…only to discover that the real Alchemical Cabal had attacked. You could tell they were the real thing because they appeared in a multiple of 7: one leader, six minions, all in the same outfits.

They were looking for someone named "Sheena." That is to say, they were looking for one of the three seniors who had been hazing them. Hari teleported over to them and tried to convince two of them to come back. But their teleporter had used all his group teleports (well, had used his Determination points), so they needed Sheena to gate them back. She made a portal and they all went back.

Big fight with the Alchemical Cabal. The cabal lost three people (because Hari suggested all the teens concentrate on one at a time, starting with their leader), then managed to petrify everyone but Hari, Sheena, and Glimm. Hari and Glimm took care of them.
A Cabal member knocked unconscious will die and dissolve or otherwise disappear: they all believe that they have taken poison before the mission and will get the antidote after returning.

Mr. Bailey, the science guy, says he thinks he can restore them with much less radioactivity than last time (a nod to the concrete cows of Charles Stross, in The Concrete Jungle).

Kaleidoscope/Mr. Able looks at the petrified folks and says that a virgin's kiss can restore them. Is anyone here a virgin? Hari volunteers that he is, and kisses each of them. (I'm sure that will have repercussions down the road, but in a culture where pretty much everyone has ESP, there are no secrets.)

Now, the adventure suggests that the characters get determination for completing the adventure, but my understanding is that if you give experience, it's in Starting Determination, so I gave Hari +2 Starting Determination.