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.

About that campaign...

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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.

New Campaign Prep: My thoughts so far

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I'm missing me some superhero gaming. So I'm going to run something online. Here's what I know so far:

• It will be either Roll20 or Roll20+Discord for voice.
• My current plan is Thursday nights, 7:00 Eastern, except for the one night a month I have book club also on Thursdays. (This Thursday as I write this.)
• The setting will be Stark City in the present. When necessary, we'll introduce sliding timescale, but I think it will go fine. When in doubt, we'll use Chicago as the model, so there will be (for example) a Morgan Park Zoo.
• The focus of the campaign will be the city. While there will be stuff that focuses on specific neighbourhoods (for example, if a player wants to focus on his or her attempts to improve the neighbourhood), or some
• Characters will be rolled. Oh, someone can build on 45 points if they want, but the bonuses that come with a particular origin only come with a rolled character. Of course, the emphasis on rolled characters means that I have to be adjacent in some way so people don't “accidentally” roll twenty 12s in a row. I might re-think that because if you don't trust folks, why are you gaming with them? However, being able to talk through the Qualities is a big deal. Qualities inform the focus of the game, really.
• I'm not a big fan of Knacks but I'm going to allow them, with the known thing that having a knack can reduce your starting determination pool to 0; if you don't have a knack, you can't have a starting Determination less than 1.
• Pretty standard superhero thing. I'm not throwing in any twists.

Because I was listening to an interview with George MacDonald this week, the first adventure will be a bank robbery with some time-travel shenanigans mixed in. (No, the robbers themselves won't have time powers, but they'll be pointers to a time-travel thing that's probably not accessible to the PCs, and which might be an overarching big bad of the first arc...if the players are interested.

To a large extent, I don't want to plan anything without knowing who the players are.

Idea du jour: Elves

fantasy

What if the elves we see are obsessed with nature because they are urban. I mean seriously urban. They're long-lived and population pressures long ago forced them to use up their world. What we see are campers and hikers and even eco-terrorists.

Elves in Faery actually look more like punk rockers and salarymen.

This is why elves are all, “We will not help,” and against industrialization: they’re trying to preserve our world. The elves we see are the upper class, the ones who can afford to take a sojourn of a few centuries in our world.

So when your characters take a trip to Faery, they might get the technological/magical help they need, but they're traveling to the ultimate urbanized area, full of industrialization and concrete and mazes.

City names

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This is a general thing, but it's for an Icons game I’m planning.

It seems to me that for a city-based superhero game you can go real or fictional. Real has the advantage that all the maps are available and the stuff is right there. Fictional has the advantage that you can include new stuff as needed and mould the city to fit your needs, your themes. And, of course, you can do both, starting with a real city and modifying it to your needs.

I am inclined to a fictional city in this case. I might change my mind; I won't be asking for players for a few days, so there's a chance for me to change. But right now, I'm thinking that I want to be able to shape it. I might use a real city as the basis but I plan on changing enough stuff that it might as well be a fictional city.

Here's what I want:

• A four-colour mood. Not necessarily Silver Age, but some goofiness might sneak in.
• A zoo (got an adventure idea that requires a zoo)
• Waterfront in case somebody comes up with an aquatic hero
• Some kind of university or lab, because we'll need some experiments.

Actually, Chicago is a good fit for what I want, although it's entirely possible to get too grim.

So I've talked myself into using Chicago.

Weird Idea O’ The Day

So driving all day does things to the brain.

I present this concept:

James Bond: The Musical

Numbers include:

• Most Famous Secret Agent (sung by Moneypenny and the chorus)
• Lethal Sidekick Even Stephen
• I'm Limestone Scaramanga (But You Can Call Me Spectre)
• Suggestive Name, I'll Turn You (On)
• I Expect You To Die
• Base Ain't So Secret On Fire

I haven't figured out what Felix's role in all of this, though.