I haven't forgotten you

Heck, there are still five more actual plays to bring us up to date, this time featuring the group Uncanny Justice, which has fewer members so is easier to play. And I'm side tracked on converting some characters from V&V (namely Crisis at Crusader Citadel) while work demands more and more of my time, plus various vehicles and appliances breaking down. (Because intense cold is fun, folks!)

So I will be back. Maybe no one will be interested, but I'll still be throwing these things out into the void.

Another thing I should do is post new links to my form-fillable Mutants & Masterminds character sheet. I posted the old link on a defunct forum, where I can't post the new security-approved link, and I get a request or two every week for access, so I have to dig up the correct link and send it. That's short, so I'll post that link tomorrow.

League One loose ends

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League One exists primarily for adventures that require a heavy-hitting group. Though the members aren't the Justice League or the Avengers, they are close, even though the uniting theme seems to be "Something to prove or atone for." There are a limited number of adventures that absolutely require that kind of power level. Not none: there are still some I can play, and will.

But the things I want to address in the group — like, we never get into Menagerie and Palimpsest's relationship at all, and I think that would be interesting — are mostly soap opera things, and for that I'd need to create new adventures or heavily customize existing ones.

As a for instance, looking at these three adventures for the first time in a couple of months:

• As mentioned, Menagerie and Palimpsest's relationship.
• What the heck is Doc Golem atoning for?
• What about Skyblaze's mysterious past? We know that “Deanna Sult” is not her birth name, and “Mysterious past” is right in her qualities.
• How is Penultimate adapting to this world? What the heck is the backstory that gives us “From another dimension”? I mean, she's probably adapting well, because she excels at nearly everything, but how?

What I find interesting is that this is something that comics do as part and parcel of what they are in the last fifty years, but RPGs don't really address it yet. Qualities is the best I've seen at summarizing them, and DC Heroes had Subplots, which gave them some impetus, but I don't really see it features yet. (I'm sure there's a game somewhere that does it, and perhaps you'll point it out to me.)

League One 3: Vampires of Red Square

A League One solo play

I have updated the adventure’s characters to the Assembled Edition. Of course, you won't see that in this blog entry; I've outlined the changes to make in another entry. Night Hunter is renamed Dusk Hunter here; I forget why.

League One: Jailbreak!

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Continuing the various solo plays I have done in the last year.

Jailbreak!

A League One solo play

I have updated the adventure’s characters to the Assembled edition. I did this before there was a version for the Assembled edition, so if you see differences in the NPC abilities, it’s because the character updates are not identical.

League One: Whiteout!

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Whiteout!

A League One solo play

Several adventures call for a group of heroes and aren't easily adjusted to solo heroes. Because I didn't have to get other players together, I decided to create a team: League One, a mid-tier team that gets called up to sub in for the top-tier Guardian Society while the Guardian Society is off-planet. I did three adventures with them, and they were cool, but I never figured out how to incorporate the story parts of the characters. I would probably have to create a separate adventure, because it's not like an adventure really spells out things like "Palimpsest is the ghost of a girl that Menagerie murdered by accident, so she's haunting him, but she's fallen in love with him." Tough to squeeze in.

Titles of Books I Will Never Write

A Princess Bride of Mars

The Found and the Furry

The Maltese Beagle

A Sea Otter And The Philosopher's Stone

The Fall of the Weapon Shops of Usher

Quickstep 4: Gangbusters!

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The last Quickstep adventure. Next comes League One.

A lesson learned: Magic and Gadgets

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So that adventure with Professor Destiny taught me that without extras the powers of Gadgets and Magic are very versatile but only useful as a backup. A solo hero is usually busy in the middle of the fight, so it's tough to adjust the spells or gadgets on the fly.

So if you're planning to use a primarily Gadget- or Magic-based hero solo, then consider adding an extra like “Instant” so that they still have the Performance aspect but can get the spells off or the gadgets out in time.

That doesn't apply if there are two magical or gadget-based heroes; Batman can always say, “Robin, run interference while I check the utility belt for the Bat-mind-control-protection device!”

I tried the magic character again with the Uncanny Justice solo plays, but in this case, the magic character is part of a team, and that seems to work better.

Today's odd idea...fantasy, this time, though I could put a superhero spin on it.

Something fantasy-ish

In reaction to some other post, it occurred to me that turning the hereditary ruler into some short-lived mammal like a mouse or mole would not actually kill him/her but would leave them very likely to be killed, thereby skirting a possible geas against killing the rule.

But at that point I suddenly flashed forward to the part where the heros have found the ruler and transformed them back but too late: the ruler expires of old age, despite the fact that it has only been a few months! So the ruler dies without issue.

Or maybe not...

Suppose that the ruler went ahead and did traditional vole/mouse/hummingbird/whatever things, and bred. This sets the stage for the kind of silliness that can only happen in a fantasy milieu, which is the war of succession between the usurping Duke or whatever, and a family of field mice that the heroes can prove are descended from the ruler.

You have some NPC off trying to turn them into humans, you have a vet of sorts trying to figure out who is the oldest, you have people who quite rightly say, “I'm not going to be ruled by a mouse!” and off we go.

Oddball Quickstep/Professor Destiny: Danger in Dunsmouth

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This one is an oddball. I thought, oh, let's try a magic character, but you'll notice that the Magic description says you have to take a page, and I suspected that might be a problem. It was, so I had said to myself it was okay if Quickstep showed up at the last minute (or sooner).

It was the last minute. So this adventure is mostly about Professor Destiny.

Quickstep 3: The Day of the Swarm

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Here we go, the third one. The fourth one is kind of odd, because I played it mostly with a different character and then brought in Quickstep when an emergency developed.

Quickstep 2: The Tomb of ICONS

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The Tomb of Icons (Icons solo)

Contents

• Commentary
• Overture
• Outside the Tomb
• Entrance to the Dungeon
• Characters
• Icons Conversions
• Character Conversions
• Traps

Commentary

I originally started writing this as a kind of “up yours” to the idea of the killer dungeon. That’s not my play style and it’s not what I like, so I figured that, kinda like dropping Superman into Hamlet, I’d mix it up. It was pointed out to me, quite correctly, that this doesn’t actually prove anything: the setting is based on such different assumptions for the player characters that there’s really no congruence.

A comparison of Oracles (Quickstep 1)

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Quickstep: Comparison of solo systems

It's worth mentioning that I did not correctly understand stunting powers until surprisingly recently. I had the roll-for-Gadgets-or-Magic thing associated with regular stunts. So that misunderstanding continues for the first five or six solo adventures.

Fiction/actual plays

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Nothing's been happening here, and really I've been doing solo actual plays: originally of adventures that just happened through the oracle and lately of actual published adventures (in ICONS but not necessarily ICONS adventures.

I've settled on the convention of endnoting/footnoting the actual game mechanics and trying to make the rest of it story-like. That pleases the part of me that once wanted to be a writer but feels honest enough about the mechanics.

So, starting with the next post, there will be, oh, ten actual plays? I started with an adventure that was a superhero and a setup and then two different oracles (Heroic Icons and Mythic). I used the same character to run through the D&D module "Tomb of Horrors" and then did Fainting Goat Games' "Day of the Swarm," Ad Infinitum's "Danger in Dunsmouth" and "Gangbusters!" "Danger in Dunsmouth" actually started with another character, and that was where I discovered that Magic is a versatile power but heavily disadvantaged for a solo character.

Then I had a couple of adventures that, really, called for a group. So I generated a group, League One, and did Ad Infinitum's "Whiteout!" and "Jailbreak" and Fainting Goat Games' "Vampires of Red Square."

Then I took a break for a while and came back with Ad Infinitum's "Devil's Night" with a pair of new heroes, decided I liked them but they needed some muscle added, and now I've done three more adventures with Uncanny Justice: "The Mastermind Affair," Fainting Goat Games' "Panic! At The Museum," and "The Sidereal Schemes of Dr. Zodiac."

So I'll start converting those to HTML and seeing what they look like here.

It should be self-evident, but hey: spoilers for the modules abound, along with areas where I don't go along with the written adventure.

The adventures go into a campaign world, I guess, with a Superhero Relocation program for people who get powers, and an organization called UNLES, and things stolen from all over. A mish-mosh, like superhero comics.

So I hope you like the adventures of Quickstep and Abraham Cadabra and Penultimate and all the rest.