Boll Weevil Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 Hi, heroes. I dusted off my old copy of Stronghold (Champions super prison sourcebook) and am lamenting the fact I had not used it a single time since I bought it. Deathstroke is one of my favorite CU villain teams, and I especially enjoyed reading the excerpts from Deathsinger's journal. A Stronghold campaign, or story arc from within a campaign, could be a lot of fun but challenging in that you would play a superbeing with his/her powers (at least mostly) stripped away. Much roleplaying opportunities and not so many explosions. This film would be directed by Wes Anderson, not Michael Bay. Has anyone here used Stronghold in a game? Was is an break out/in game or did you spend much time in lockup? The setting is rife with potential plot seeds that I have not used. I could imagine having a team that works at Stronghold. You could intersperse action (oh crap, the power negation field is down in sector four - again!) with day to day interaction with captive madmen and powerless megalomaniacs. I want to hear your stories. If you don't have any make some up. Plot seeds, fan-fic, war stories. How would your character(s) break in/break out? Have you ever had a scenario as a GM or player where you needed to know something and had to go to Stronghold, Silence of the Lambs style, to talk to a criminal mastermind? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher R Taylor Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 I ran a convention game where the characters could bring any PC they wanted, I didn't even care if they were balanced or built correctly. Then I ran a quick fight of them against their "arch enemies" which they won, saving a cruise ship from being taken hostage, and one of the bad guys muttered something about "this isn't over." The next day, the heroes woke up, in stronghold, in the bodies of the arch enemy team. Meanwhile the villains were out doing nasty deeds in the heroes' bodies. So they had to escape, avoid recapture by other heroes, figure out how to get their bodies back, reverse the damage done to their reputations, and beat their own (unbalanced and broken build) heroes. It was quite fun for me, and the players seemed to like it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BoloOfEarth Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 I ran a campaign arc involving psionic aliens trying to start a war with Earth. At the beginning of the arc, a particularly not-nice alien prince was captured and put into Stronghold. (He had "mind-raped" a high-ranking UNTIL officer and had sensitive top-secret info, so the powers-that-be didn't want to just let the prince go.) The PCs were called to assist when alien ships attacked the super-prison, ostensibly to rescue the prince but actually to let a bunch of prisoners free and mind control the most powerful and easily-duped supervillain they could find (in this case, Grond) to kill the prince, giving them justification to declare war with Earth. (The whole plan was concocted by a younger prince in an attempt to get his older brothers killed off to put him next in line for the throne.) By the time the heroes arrived at Stronghold, there were over a dozen supervillains loose inside the prison, along with alien troopers and heavily armed spaceships to contend with. It was a grand melee, with the PC mentalist the only one who knew, but couldn't prove, that Grond was mind-controlled by one of the aliens to kill the prince. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BoloOfEarth Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 I ran a convention game where the characters could bring any PC they wanted, I didn't even care if they were balanced or built correctly. Then I ran a quick fight of them against their "arch enemies" which they won, saving a cruise ship from being taken hostage, and one of the bad guys muttered something about "this isn't over." The next day, the heroes woke up, in stronghold, in the bodies of the arch enemy team. Meanwhile the villains were out doing nasty deeds in the heroes' bodies. So they had to escape, avoid recapture by other heroes, figure out how to get their bodies back, reverse the damage done to their reputations, and beat their own (unbalanced and broken build) heroes. It was quite fun for me, and the players seemed to like it. Ha! Love it! Just curious, have you ever played in one of Dave Mattingly's BYOB (Bring Your Own Brick) games at GenCon or any other convention? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BoloOfEarth Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 In my upcoming campaign, I'm making Stronghold temporarily hamstrung. Much of the structure and defenses are badly damaged and are being rebuilt, most of the guards are new to Stronghold and fairly inexperienced in dealing with supers, etc. Basically, a plan by the Empress of a Billion Dimensions to remove the supers from the campaign world (to make it easier for her to take over) went awry. A bunch of supers disappeared from their cells in Stronghold, many of which were replaced by a bunch of new supers from another world. Unfortunately, those new supers had powers different from what those cells were designed to suppress or resist. Cue one mass escape and super-riot that destroyed much of the super-prison and left many of the guards either dead or badly injured. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher R Taylor Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 I should consider writing that convention game up as an adventure, I still have all the stuff for it somewhere. I never have had the pleasure of playing in a game with Mr Mattingly. The only conventions I've been to have been local, in Salem and Portland. I would like to go to more but they're always at a bad time for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassandra Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 There was an Adam West Batman episode where the Villainess committed a series of robberies, but in each of them a member of her gang was captured. Eventually she was captured, but it turns out that was part of her plan. She took over the Prison to use as a base, and could commit crimes with the perfect Alibi. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher R Taylor Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 Some natural catastrophe could weaken Stronghold significantly, making escapes and riots inevitable. An earthquake or meteor strike could do it, then the Heroes would have to head in and restore order. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lucius Posted January 16, 2015 Report Share Posted January 16, 2015 Some natural catastrophe could weaken Stronghold significantly, making escapes and riots inevitable. An earthquake or meteor strike could do it, then the Heroes would have to head in and restore order. How many dice of Luck did that villain have?? Lucius Alexander How many palindromedary taglines do I have? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BoloOfEarth Posted January 17, 2015 Report Share Posted January 17, 2015 Some natural catastrophe could weaken Stronghold significantly, making escapes and riots inevitable. An earthquake or meteor strike could do it, then the Heroes would have to head in and restore order. How many dice of Luck did that villain have?? Think about it the other way -- so many villains with Unluck, all in one place. A natural disaster is bound to strike eventually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted January 17, 2015 Report Share Posted January 17, 2015 In order to create a "zone" in which players could readily travel from one adventuring location to another, the Champions Online MMORPG tweaked the setting's geography to bring various sites that previously were relatively far from each other into closer proximity. The latest published PnP game background has conformed to that. Officially Stronghold is dangerously near the radioactive, monster-infested Burning Sands region; Project Greenskin, which is now an active base dedicated to dealing with Grond; and the Snake Gulch western tourist park covering for a VIPER project, which was upgraded to a Westworld-like high-tech theme park. There's an awful lot that could go wrong in that scenario. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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