Freethinking

Mutants & Masterminds

So a first session (even if there is a Session 0) is kind of a daunting one, at least for me.

You have to address the character(s), the game system, present the setting, and have a story. Not a big deal, right?

And I've agreed to do eight or more sessions for someone in Mutants & Masterminds.

So, here's what I know.

The player is trans, and the character is trans. That might not be the most important thing about them or about the character, but it's the biggest difference for me, so I lead with that. It might not make a difference to what I choose to run, but it will certainly make a difference to how I choose to run it.

For a first session, I want to introduce a couple of elements that we talked about in our session 0, but I want to keep the actual conflict mechanically simple. It should be difficult, but not hugely difficult: equivalent to a horde of kobods, I guess.

The PC is essentally the speaker for the dead, which in turn says serial killer to me, but I don't want to use up a serial killer on the first session. Unless I do something a bit differently.

Suppose the serial killer is training others. This is the tack that the uber-serial-killer has picked. Others have chosen to make the serial killer a spirit; I'm going to go one step further and say, not only a spirit but one that has decided to train others.

(It's a single-player game, so I can tune it to the individual. I welcome a single-player game for exactly this reason.)

And using a serial killer as our first session says that we're definitely avoiding Silver Age territory. (In fact, we'll head there eventually because I want to present a foil who doesn't care about consequences at all, but I don't think that works here.)

Okay, serial killer. I have multiple ways to get the PC involved — there are police ties, mob ties, and there are undertaker ties. The setting is a small city in Canada: I think of Thunder Bay as the model but not Thunder Bay.) So the serial killer is targeting...indigenous women? While that's a real problem I'm not sure I can present it at all realistically with less than two days to research. So we'll go with a slightly less real-world approach.

Mutants.

Kids who might be mutants, that is. One of the things in setting is that they haven't had a superhero for eighty years, and one of the reasons might be that someone is killing people with powers. So our Ur-killer, the spirit of teaching death, has been grooming people to do this. (Actually, that's a nice running plotline, so we'll stick a pin in it and it's a running plot if the PC decides to follow up on it.)

But: why this kid, why now, why the scenario? What goes on that makes it happen now?

Obviously, something has gone wrong. And because we have a newly-mint3ed superhero in the mix, that might be what's gone wrong.

How might it work? You're at a funeral home, the cops bring in a body, the spirit of the body says, "I was murdered."

Actually, that's pretty straightforward. The ghost says, "Hey, here's who killed me," but it's not like the police can do anything even if the PC says so. But would the ghost know who the killer was?

Well, if the killer was someone well-known in the community. Like a philanthropist of some kind.

And what about powers? Because this is a superhero game, not an episode of Law and Order: Batman.

Ideas:

• Go the Jack'O'Knives route. The NPC is possessed by a murder-spirit. Okay, but it seems kind of letting people off the hook, and getting it across might be difficult.
• Gadgets. There are enough specialty items there to create a gadgeteer. Okay, but at this second it seems like it cvalls for more creativity than I have.
• The bad guy is a mutant himself. (Serial killer: probably male.) He has a kind of self-hatred that builds on it.