About that campaign...

Icons

First of all, I’m running it. Setting it in our version of Stark City, so it’s current day but otherwise the same as in the book from Fainting Goat Games. We go three Thursdays a month (other Thursday is book club for me) and Thursday is ideal because during the game my spouse is at choir practice.

Everybody’s on the more powerful side. Nobody turned out to be the doughty two-fisted adventurer with a mask and a grappling gun. We have ranged transmutation, mental blast, amazing strength, several element/energy control and alternate form characters, and a speedster. Powerful mix.

We’ve missed one session because I finally caught COVID and wasn’t up to it, so we've had a session 0 and two more...which brings me to my topic.

I was a bit too rigid in the first session and didn't let the players win enough. I disliked that I did that, so I resolved to say “yes” more.

Single paragraph context: Plan was, meet the mercenary group and trash them, and then discover a vast conspiracy behind the mercenary group. Well, various plots got planted, they met the bad guys (a party of five situation with three kids: sixteen, twelve, and eight, but the twelve year old has duplication). The speedster sixteen-year-old got away with the eight-year-old, but the tween stayed behind and defected to our heroes. The session still has ten or fifteen minutes to go.

And then the improvisation started. The players found some earpieces belonging to the vast conspiracy and we had fifteen minutes left in the session. Surely they could find the source...so I said “yes.” They found the Poseidon Building in Tesla Industrial Park. One of the players theorized this was a mental control thing, imprinting personalities on host bodies, so he examined the building for a mind shield. (When you have Amazing Telepathy, you just look through windows, try to check minds, and look for when you can't. Not that he described it for me; it might have been a stunt, too: Detect Mind Shield. We weren't in combat time, so I didn't care.)

Say “yes,” right? There was a mind shield over the basement.

Fortunately, time ran out just before they decided to infiltrate the building.

Originally, the conspiracy was relatively normal people trying to create superpowers reliably. We know that this can be done, because most of the characters have Transformed as their origin, and at least one went looking for the change. With the new facts in play (I like the idea that it's personality superimposition), I have to re-think this. Maybe this is the Great Race of Yith, transformed for comics?

I have to meet at least half the players' expectations as they make their way in; the other half I can leave as dangling plot threads, I think.

And I have to have a map: secret basement base.

Game Quotation: “Hiding your base with a mind shield is as unobtrusive as trying to hide things from Superman with lead.”

GMing note: There are several powers that can wear off at a particular rate, such as Nullification and Stunning. Both got used last session, and I now know that the GM has to keep track of pages as they pass. One power is easy (but should be tracked; as powers come back, they get stronger) but the Stunning that got used last time was power nine...and nine pages is a loooong time. So I'll add a pair of clocks to my GM sheet.