I’m going to hold off on posting a Megacrawl update until tomorrow or Wednesday – I want to make sure all the tactical geniuses who want to post a comment have had a chance. A first level party tangling with wererats could be a big deal – I want the Megacrawlers to have the best possible chance for survival.

In the meantime … Swampbilly

Five generations of Vances had hunted and trapped in the Louisiana bayou. minding their own business and doing no harm (well, except to the wildlife) when the federal government slated the area for mysterious highway project – mysterious because the locals couldn’t figure out just what the highway was supposed to connect. A few swamp families raised a fuss, but the g-men cleared them out in quick order – all except the Vances. The women and children found their way into government housing in New Orleans, but the men refused to leave and instead led the g-men on a merry chase through the wilderness.

Young Dovis Vance was among the more ornery of his family. Tall and good looking, he had a way with people and animals, and he more than the others was prone to wandering, harmonica in pocket, gun in hand. So it came that he found himself slipping past a hastily erected security fence and into the “highway zone”, where the federal government was working not on a highway in the traditional sense, but something much more impressive – a portal between worlds.

The project was in the experimental phase, and was intended initially to create a doorway between Earth and Mars using equipment seized many years before from Nazi scientists in the Arctic. As Dovis wondered at the tall, rectangular object standing in the midst of the swamp, it began to hum with activity and he found it impossible to move his feet. Arcs of electricity run up and down the black metal of the “door” until it began to vanish and he looked into a hazy vista of Mars. The experiment was over almost as soon as it had begun. The metal object returned to normal, Dovis found he could move again, and he high-tailed it back into the swamp.

Though he still looked normal on the outside, Dovis’ brush with the cosmic energies harnessed by the portal had left him a metahuman. Back with his father and brothers, he discovered much to his shock and delight, that with a thought he could change people with but a look and a thought. One night, when his brother Remi made a reach for his salt pork, an angry look changed the man into an oppossum. The others fled, of course (as did Remi), and Dovis soon found himself on his own. His travels took him first to little towns around New Orleans, and a crime spree that found him changing bank guards and tellers into ‘gators and him walking away with many thousands of dollars. In good time, government operatives made Louisiana too hot for him, and he followed the river north, where he finally found a home in the wetlands south of Shore City and a new community to torment.

To begin with – Inkwell Ideas, the creation of Joe Wetzel, is awesome. Period. Hexographer and the Coat of Arms Designer are my best friends when it comes to writing NOD and Hex Crawl Classics, and I need to delve more deeply into his Dungeonographer.

He also has a keen superhero generator as well as a superhero sketcher. So, being a random kind of guy who happens to be writing a superhero game, I played around a bit, generated a completely random superhero and then used to sketcher to bring him to life. Ladies and gentlemen, I present Powersource.

POWERSOURCE
As a top Shore City University research scientist about to run out of funding, Richard Beam was desperate for a breakthrough. His genetic modification experiment had worked on hamsters, cats and dogs, but not on chimps. He believed, however, that that wouldn’t be an issue on humans because humans didn’t have the same complications as chimpanzees. So the man who would become Powersource became the experiment’s first and only human subject. Unfortunately, the experiment skewed Powersource’s worldview and now he sometimes fights for what is right and sometimes sees what is right differently than most folks.

Tank Turlington, also known as the British Bombshell, is a professional wrestler known for his John Bull-inspired costume and the endless parade of arm candy he shows off in the tabloids. The Secret Service believes him to be not only a meta-human, born with super powers, but also the director of SMASH, the Secret Mobilization Against Super Heroes, a criminal organization dedicated to removing the super heroic threat to their way of life.

Unfortunately, the Secret Service has missed the mark. The British Bombshell is merely the bodyguard of the organization’s leader, a woman with the ability to change her appearance at will. This woman, called Prima Donna by those few who know of her, masquerades as Turlington’s “endless parade of arm candy” while overseeing the many cells of SMASH that have been set up all over the world.

No post tomorrow – my company is hosting our annual golf tournament for children’s charities here in Southern Nevada. We’ve raised over $2 million over the past decade. It’s always fun, but I’ll be far from the computer most of the day (which is not a bad thing) and dead on my feet when I get home.

Bess “May Day” Collins was one of the best barnstormers in her day, and notable because she was one of the few female barnstormers on the circuit. In 1927, in the closing days of the barnstorming craze, she was making a routine flight from Shore City to a Middledale to compete in a flying circus when a blast of lead from a racketeer’s machine gun sent her airplane down into a swamp, the racketeers assuming she was a spy.

As her plane sunk into the muck, Bess found herself unable to release her restraints. As the water creeper higher, she discerned a glowing green mist surrounding her and closing in. Before she went under, she took a tremendous breath and the mist entered her body. As her head sank beneath the murky waters, the surrounding willows reached their boughs into the water and lifted plane and pilot out.

Bess now found herself transformed – able to speak to plants and command them. Communicating with the plants of the swamp, she discovered the whereabouts of the racketeers and thwarted their smuggling operation. Although the days of barnstorming are over, Bess still works as a pilot in her normal life, and as the super heroine May Day when evil rears its ugly head.

Harvey Paxson was a grad student at Shore City University with his eyes on the prize – a research grant and a place on the faculty. In the summer of 1968 he became a research assistant to Dr. Barton Merryweather, a brilliant man regarded as something of a kook by other professors at the university, but highly favored by several donors due to his research into life extension and metaphysics. Paxson had no particular interest in the research – didn’t believe in it in fact – but he needed the money and wanted the contacts. If Merryweather’s research made wealthy donors happy, Paxson was only too happy to be involved.

And so it happened, as summer turned to fall, that Paxson found himself sitting in a chair in the laboratory with a metal box affixed to his chest by a dozen electrodes in an experiment, Dr. Merryweather explained in his rambling stutter, to “separate, enhance and reintegrate your essential self” – whatever that meant. Paxson was placed under a mild hypnotic trance and told to focus on himself (not that he needed a hypnotic trance to do that) and the box was activated and then everything went black.

When Paxson awoke, it was to a scene of horror. He was still sitting in the chair and the box was still affixed to his chest, but the laboratory was a shambles and Dr. Merryweather was dead, looking as though he had been torn apart by a jungle cat. In his usual reaction of self-preservation, Paxson attempted to tear the box, electrodes and all, from his chest and flee, but the box would not be removed, and the wires now appeared to have sunk into his very flesh. He could flee, though, and did so, seeking the shelter of his apartment on Toth St in College Town. He re-emerged the next day to plead his case to the dean, doing his best to hide the box, and although cleared of the murder and destruction, found himself on academic probation for fleeing the scene and not notifying the authorities.

Paxson again returned to his apartment, bitter and in a rage, and almost as soon as he closed the door, he passed out. He woke a few hours later to the sound of sirens and, a few hours later, discovered that the dean had been similarly mauled by a jungle cat. Being quite intelligent, Paxson had no problem putting one and one together. The box, in some manner, had worked. It had separated Paxson’s essential self – aggressive, self-centered, power-hungry – but had also unleashed it into the real world.

A series of crimes followed, as Paxson got the hang of unleashing his “inner self”. He made an attempt to conquer the underworld of Shore City, taking the name Shrodinger, but ultimately found himself defeated an imprisoned in Iron Island by the Golden Gladiators.

Image taken from HERE.

For those who haven’t heard of Project Rooftop, it’s a nifty website where artists post redesigns for superheroes. I’ll admit that about 9 times out of 10 I prefer the original design for the hero – hey, there’s a reason I play old school rpg’s, have a house filled with old furniture and an iPod filled with old radio shows – my tastes usually run toward the retro. Nonetheless, I love seeing artists being creative and having fun with this sort of thing.

The latest contest at PR involves redesigning Aquaman. I figured I’d post the winning redesign along with some MM! stats of the venerable sea king.

Aquaman and the JLA are, of course, the property of DC Comics and these stats are not an attempt by me to challenge their copyright or trademark or in any way infringe on their rights.

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Other Business

I’m going to try to post the next step in Megacrawl 3000 later today, and tomorrow the February sales report. I’m embarking on the Mu-Pan hexcrawl that will appear in either NOD 8 or NOD 9 (and beyond), so some more fantasy-related material should be showing up on the blog soon. Right now, I’m waiting on my print copy of Ruins & Ronin to arrive, because the rules for the Mu-Pan hexcrawl will be based on that excellent game.

I’m about 75% finished with my third Hexcrawl Chronicle for the Frog God – the first HCC should be in print soon and the second about two months later. I’m about 50% finished with the other big project for the Frog God. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet, but I suppose people who check out the Frog God website and put one and one together can probably figure out what I’m doing for them.

With a successful MM! playtest out of the way, I think that project is about 90% complete. I still need to write up the sample setting and adventure (based on the playtest, with a few changes) and maybe finalize some editing, add some monsters, do the layout, etc. I think I can probably have it ready to go by late April. I still need to send out a the promised premium to the sponsors, and plan to put that together sometime this week. Playtester Crystal Franklin game me a great idea for some heroes that need to be statted up, and I’ve got a few more off-the-wall ideas along those lines as well, so more to come. Maybe I’ll stage a few fights as well – Herculoids vs. Fantastic Four could be fun.

Final note – PARS FORTUNA officially became profitable last week, to the tune of $0.98. Since then, I sold another copy, so my profits now run over $1.50. Super value menu, here I come!

Busy busy busy, and I feel blessed for it. Have fun on the internet!

Last night, my little gaming group and I took MM! out for a test drive. I thought it went well, and the feedback was positive. I figured we would play about 4 hours, but the game went long without people completely losing interest (though Rygar did make an entrance that stripped away one of our sorcerers for a few minutes – hey, they guy was a Rygar addict from way back).

So, without further ado, I introduce you to the power and majesty of OMG (decided after the fact to stand for Operating Meta-Human Group). Character creation probably took about thirty minutes, some of which was spent explaining the rules. If there had been a need to create some replacement characters, I suspect it would have gone a bit faster.

There was one other hero – Random by Crystal Franklin – whose character sheet went home with Crystal. I can report that he was a drag queen based loosely on Gambit who could fly and shoot energy bolts.

So, the adventure begins …

5:00 AM, OMG HQ, Imperial State Building: A scan of the internet brings to light a bank robbery in progress (I guess somebody tweeted it). Our brave heroes leap to action.

[Sidebar: When starting your own superhero group, you want to make arrangements for transportation. A new rule (not yet in the Gamma document) replaces money in the game for XP expenditures at character creation and feats of Charisma for later acquisition of goods. It didn’t occur to OMG that they should buy a vehicle at character creation.]

The First National Bank of Shore City is about three blocks away from the Imperial State Building, so the group immediately starts trying to figure out how to get there. Two attempts are made to commandeer a van using feats of charisma, with neither one successful. The sorcerers are hesitant to spend XP from their sorcery pool to teleport, but eventually M Knight teleports himself, Emma Entropy and Nightmare to the bank, letting Anti-Spidey and Random web-swing and fly respectively.

Getting to the bank, our three heroes (yeah, they split the party almost immediately) find that the vault has been cracked using dynamite. Rushing in, they encounter three thugs armed with machine guns. The thugs beat OMG on initiative and open up with their machine guns, with Emma taking a little hit point damage. Nightmare rushes forward and takes a gunman out with his zweihander. M Knight decides to raise a wall of fire to burn them severely (yeah, they’re those kind of heroes), not discounting the fact that Nightmare is in the line of fire. Emma makes an attempt to put her ally into temporal stasis to stop him, but he makes his feat roll and avoids it (yes, they’re fighting each other only 10 minutes into the game – this is par for the course with these guys and I love them for it).

The wall of fire is raised, the thugs take a bit of damage (they make a dexterity feat and take only half damage) and Nightmare does the same. Taken by blood-thirst, Nightmare rushes through the flames and with a single sweep of his sword (made two extra attacks, took a -6 penalty to all three attacks), dispatches two of the remaining robbers and brings the third down to a single hit point. The thug surrenders and, surprisingly, Nightmare doesn’t kill him. In the meantime, M Knight raises a wall of ice on top of the wall of fire, squelching it and creating a fog cloud. Nobody is entirely sure why this is a good plan, since it would give the thugs a chance to hide in the fog, but since Nightmare already has the last thug by the nape of his neck, no harm is done. M Knight is going to want those sorcery XP back later, though.

Having foiled the robbery, OMG does exactly what my players did when they were the Tender Blades and Wyld Stallyns – they walk away, questioning nothing. Most of OMG goes back to their HQ, while M Knight, with the help of a spell of super charisma, goes out and hires a helicopter and pilot. While in HQ, the Referee decides to goose things a bit with a skype from the police commissioner, letting them know that the thugs work for Boss Feeney, notorious crime lord.

[Sidebar: All of the Golden Age sponsors of Mystery Men! will show up in the Shore City setting. Since Tom Feeney is an old friend, his name popped into my head first, so he became a mob boss. The rest of his friends were quite enthused about tracking him down and bringing him to justice]

A plan is hatched – M Knight will cast astral projection on Random and she’ll go check out the home of Boss Feeney to discover his hideout. She makes the trip, but being unable to touch or move anything makes searching difficult. Boss Feeney isn’t home, his butler is sampling the scotch with his wife, and she does check out the contents of his wall safe (ledgers, papers, money, jewels, drugs) and his cellar, with its secret exit. Back home, she reports to the group and they decide to head to police headquarters to look for the location of Boss Feeney’s hideout. With some poking around and a charisma feat by Anti-Spidey, they find a cop on Feeney’s payroll who is willing to lead them to his hideout, located beneath a pool hall.

Once in the pool hall, OMG manages to convince the assembled toughs that they want to join the gang (another charisma feat by Anti-Spidey). Boss Feeney turns out to be harder to convince, and an energy bolt from Random that was meant to scare him instead brings an attack. This time, OMG faces off against Feeney and five thugs with handguns. Anti-Spidey invokes his black tentacles, M Knight turns to his crossbow, Random throws her energy bolts, Nightmare swings his sword, Emma starts throwing around hideous laughter and in the end the thugs are vanquished and Feeney questioned.

Feeney admits he was hired to hit the bank by a big guy with iron gauntlets to cause a distraction. All he knows is that he visited the guy on a boat (The Flying Duck) docked at the marina. OMG heads for the boat in their helicopter and discovers it has departed. Emma (now played by Jessica) uses locate object to track it, and in a few minutes they arrive to find the Flying Duck committing an act of piracy against a larger yacht.

The Flying Duck has thrown a couple of grappling hooks over to the larger yacht and the big guy – notorious super hit man The Brute – along with three thugs and two men in hi-tech armor and carrying swords – are on board, shaking down the owners. The gunmen open up on the helicopter, which takes heavy damage. OMG jumps out and the chopper flees for the city. Emma invokes a cloudkill and takes out one thug and the two swordsmen, while another gunman is downed by Nightmare and M Knight takes out a grapple with his crossbow (hey, it’s a comic book).

The Brute takes a mighty leap back to his boat and Nightmare attempts to follow, but smacks into the boat and drops into the drink. While Anti-Spidey rescues Nightmare with his web power, Random peppers the boat with energy bolts. The Brute cuts the last grapple and, though he takes a energy bolt from Emma using the true strike power, manages to get the Flying Duck underway. OMG checks out the owners of the pirated yacht and find that a large, valuable diamond was stolen. For some reason they don’t give chase in their own yacht, and instead head back to HQ.

Thinking it over, they decide that the diamond is probably going to be used to make a death ray of some sort. Since this is a comic book world, this is actually a reasonable suggestion. Anti-Spidey and Random hit Google, and figures out that the swordsmen are the henchmen for notorious international terrorist The Clown. The police report an hour later that the Flying Duck has been found a few miles away from the city in a wooded area. They’ve canvassed the cabins and found no sign of the Brute or anyone else. Investigating, they find signs that the Brute got into a heavy vehicle and headed for a main highway.

By checking some traffic cameras at the local news station, they determine the Brute was headed back into downtown. A long thinking session follows, and with a little help from the Ref, they ask the police if there have been any crimes lately that might tie into the making of a death ray. Sure enough, a month ago a scientist from some local labs went missing. The administrator of the labs is questioned, and it turns out the scientist was working on harmonic resonances a’ la Tesla’s earthquake machine – for peaceful uses, of course. He made a prototype machine using a large synthetic crystal, but decided he needed a massive gemstone to make it work and, of course, such items are too valuable to expect anyone to lend it for use in an earthquake machine.

So, OMG now knows what they are up against, but they don’t know the target. A visit to the subway control station reveals no sign of the villains on security cameras. The controllers mention that the older, abandoned tunnels don’t have security cameras and that, indeed, they can be found under most of the prime targets in downtown. OMG decides to hit those tunnels and look under the Imperial State Building, where their own headquarters is located, and they get lucky. There, almost finished setting up a new machine, is the Clown, Brute, three swordsmen (enhanced armor, energy swords, force shields) and the kidnapped scientist. A battle erupts, and in the end Anti-Spidey’s black tentacles finally capture the villains while Emma gets the scientist out of harm’s way and M Knight disables the machine. The day is saved and Nightmare and Anti-Spidey come close to death’s door but manage to survive.

XP earned – 1,520 total, about 304 per hero.

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What did we learn?

1. Crystal wishes heroes had a way to develop a signature move. I’ll need to make a more clear reference to using feats to modify powers and develop such moves. Perhaps there can be an optional rule for heroes putting XP toward getting bonuses to make their signature move.

2. We learn that heroes need to put some thought into vehicles and headquarters and maybe henchmen.

3. Sorcerers need to spend XP on powers outside their sorcery pool. Once he was tapped out, M Knight was reduced to shooting a crossbow at things.

4. Likewise, it’s a good idea for everyone in the group to have at least one super ability score. Failed intelligence feats to make connections and find clues and failed charisma feats to acquire items and shake down thugs made it obvious that super abilities are highly useful. This was only highlighted when the super villains, built with 40,000 XP each to give them a fighting chance against the more numerous heroes, came in with more levels. Honestly, the Clown build was sub-optimal as well – his swords were pretty pathetic, while the Brute’s iron claws almost took out Nightmare.

I can think of a few rules tweaks after the game – I think the fly power needs to have a slightly improved speed and I’m pretty certain I’m going to replace Single-Use / Limited / Permanent with One per Day / Three per Day / At Will – easier to keep track of. I might add some more equipment – a communicator of some sort might be nice.

The game was fun, and I think (if I had the time) we’d make a campaign out of it. I think the proof of concept was a success and the game is just about ready to go live. I need to write up the sample setting (Shore City, Boss Feeney, etc) and put a little more work into the sample adventure, but other than that Mystery Men! is on its way!

Thanks to my players for their input and help, and if anyone else out there has play tested the game, please let me know how it went.

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Sketch of M Knight by Danny Roberts. You can see his real artwork HERE.