Next Flight: Flying Solo 2b Damsel In Distress (The Reach)

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This is the second adventure from Victory RPG’s Flying Solo, which was written by Fran Vaughan as an M&M Superlink module for Mutants & Masterminds 2nd edition.

When I converted characters, I used the same artwork as in the module, but I don’t see attribution on them. Anyway: no intent to infringe or take money; if it’s an issue, please contact me at jhmcmullen@gmail.com and I’ll remove the artwork.

The portrait of The Reach is by Ade Smith for the character Flux in the excellent campaign setting Stark City. It is used here entirely without permission, and again, if there’s an issue, contact me, and I’ll remove the artwork or provide better formal attribution, or something.

House Rule: Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

Damsel In Distress

The Reach liked riding the subway in his secret identity, Jason Crawford. Yeah, the subway was sometimes crowded, frequently disgusting, and prone to breakdowns.

But it was real, full of people who wore no costumes and didn’t try to take over the world or steal arcane relics. For instance, on today’s ride, there had been one kid who had never heard of earphones for his phone but had a complete discography of AC/DC, three university kids about Flip-Flop’s age celebrating the end of term, and one old man who really wanted to talk gargoyles and rain spouts to anyone near him. He’d seen one, the old man said. “Wasn’t a gargoyle yesterday, but was this morning.”

Next Flight: Sewer Kings 3a Fundraiser

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This is the first scene or chapter Victory RPG’s Sewer Kings, being interleaved with their Flying Solo. Art and story are copyright by Victory RPG.

• House Rule: Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

Fundraiser

Down the street from the bank, The Reach got the situation from the officer on the scene. It wasn’t even dark at this point in the summer: all of the businesses in this part of town were closed but hadn’t been closed long. “The explosion happened after most of the employees had gone home,” said the officer who talked to The Reach. “We figure that was when the wall went up.” The wall was debris at both ends of the alley beside the bank, piled about twenty feet high. The wall was made of cars, garbage cans, a dumpster, parts of a billboard…^[1] The Reach noted that all were ferro-magnetic. Magnetic guy.

Next Flight Flying Solo 2a Corporate Raider (Flip-Flop)

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This is from Victory RPG’s Flying Solo. There are three solo adventures and my intent is to use the three characters of Next Flight as characters from the solo adventures. Will that work? I dunno. I also intend to interleave those solo bits with the scenes from the same publisher's Sewer Kings. I have no idea if that will be successful.

Anyway, the first one will be Flip-Flop, then The Reach, then Succubus.

• House Rule: Prone people are +2 to hit hand-to-hand, absent cover.

Credit for the story in the first three scenes goes to Victory RPG’s Flying Solo, which I presume is written by Fran Vaughan as an M&M Superlink module for Mutants & Masterminds  2nd edition. When I converted characters, I used the same artwork as in the module, but I don’t see attribution on them. Anyway: no intent to infringe or take money; if it’s an issue, please contact me at jhmcmullen@gmail.com  and I’ll remove the artwork.

• Corporate Raider
• Flip-Flop (Henny Barker)
• Brigand
• Game Mechanics

Corporate Raider

Henny (as herself, not as Flip-Flop) was passing time until Dr. Kittner appeared by checking out an automated CRISPR tool on the Expo floor. Dr. Kittner had said that he was going to unveil something that (he said) would “revolutionize computing.”

Next Flight: A tale of two modules

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I was thinking that I haven’t published any solo plays for a while (I know, you’re heartbroken), but honestly, I haven’t done many. However, I have the Flying Solo and Sewer Kings both done or nearly done, but looking at them, they’re both sort of piecemeal things, with chunks to be dropped in sessions and then later picked up.

So I figured what I would do is take the three chapters of Flying Solo (and the fourth that I added) and the four chapters of Sewer Kings and see what they’d look like if you interleaved them. Will it be interesting? Well, at least as interesting as these things ever are.

For convenience’s sake, I'll be numbering them Flying Solo a, b, c, and d, and Sewer Kings a, b, c, and d. We’ll see if they end up being interesting.

As an addendum, I should point out that all of these solo play things have both the tags “Actual Play” and “Fiction” on them. I play them out, and then I do a half-revision, where I turn things like “She tried to hit him and succeeded!” into “She hit him hard.” I don’t remove any results or change things that are unpleasant, but I try to make it read easier and eliminate some of the redundancies. So it’s like fiction in that way.

Actual roleplaying can take a meandering path, while fiction tries to support the story. My current opinion is that actual roleplaying doesn’t really have a story, but we create one in the retelling. So I’m turning it into a story.

Villains - a taxonomy

Image from Fainting Goat's Deluxe Super Villain Handbook

Right now I'm thinking about villains.

Coming up with an adventure means (for me) coming up with villains. And a villain group is more likely to give a player group a decent run for its money than a single big bad. (Not always true, but mostly.) So while a single big bad is easier for me to conceptualize, it's also easier for the players to win because of a lucky shot.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, but you don't want that all the time.

Wait, let's back up a minute.

Let's make up some terminology. For bad folk facing a group of heroes, you have:

• Big Bad is a single monolithic force who just overwhelms the heroes. Your Galactus, your Kang, your Dr. Doom, your Dormammu, your Amazo, your Starro, your Prometheus, and so on. The intent is that taking on this force directly is going to be tough. Sometimes the Big Bad can be defeated by a trick (“simple garden lime!”) and sometimes you gotta think outside the box. Sometimes it's just overwhelming force (I'm thinking Doomsday here, who defeated the whole Justice League to show how tough he was), but that concentration of force will come at a cost. Depending on the story, the Big Bad might have other resources, which could include any of the other types of bad folk.
• Puppeteer is a weird hybrid: a single opponent but usually a set of punchables in front of the heroes. He can be treated as one of the other groups; we say no more about him today.
• Villain Group is a group of opponents. Usually they have better teamwork than your heroes, at least in the beginning. This is your Masters of Evil, your Hyperclan, your Injustice League, your Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. I feel like there are more memorable Big Bads than Villain Groups, but comics have been around a long time, so I'm probably wrong. If the evil cult has a small group of super-powered leaders (vampires, demons, aliens, whatever) then it's an Agency headed by Villain Group.
• Horde is a special category I made up for “overwhelming numbers but no individual distinction” such as the Brood. They have a goal, but you're not working against an individual, you're working against all of them. A sudden uprising of zombies, for instance, might be a horde. Hordes are often subservient to a big bad (because it's more satisfying to cut off the head of something) but they don't have to be. (If they're not subservient, then all of them have to be exterminated, which might not be what you want for your campaign.) A Horde feels to me like it often engenders horror, whether it's aliens taking over bodies or the dead rising.
• Agency is a group of non-powered opponents, probably with some kind of tech support (really good weapons, for instance). Like a Horde, they have to be disabled in some way, usually by getting the government to pull their funding. Examples might be AIM or Hydra or SHIELD or maybe the Church of Blood.

(Individual heroes can also have equal antagonists, but that also is outside my remit today.)

You can mix and match: perhaps the Agency hires or creates a Villain Group. Perhaps the Puppeteer tries to make use of a Horde. Maybe the Villain Group hires the Big Bad, and then there's a personality conflict that involves violence and property damage.

Now, it's fun once in a while to have the Big Bad show up, trash everything, and then be vulnerable to one of the heroes' attacks. Can't be the point of the session, it seems to me (having run more than my share of pointless sessions). You want some kind of equivalence.

I don't have a deeper thought at this point. My tentative conclusions are:

• Memorable characters of any kind usually repeat.
• A Big Bad who is simply defeated by a trick is usually not memorable.
• A Horde can be frightening but usually isn't particularly noteworthy.