GM Goof-ups

[Duke Bushido]

The correct answer, of course:

 

"It's a male mentalist!"

 

"Wait!  he was a she last time!"

 

"A very powerful mentalist."

 

"But last time--"

 

"See what I mean?"

 

 

[archer]

Yeah, I'd go with, "As best as you can tell, this time your opponent is a man."

 

Then mess with their minds with some mental illusions seeing him/her the other way at various points in the confrontation.

 

And if they eventually find the villain's base, find the person's room with an assortment of wigs, toupees, men's clothes, women's clothes, makeup, disposable women's razor's, and aftershave.

[Jhamin]

I once ended a session by having the PCs find a letter that contained vital information.  They had spent the whole session looking for it, felt good they had found it, and one Player transcribed the letter as they were certain it had more clues than were obvious.

The next session they formed a plan to act on their new information & I had a NPC interject to remind them of an important thing they were overlooking (I didn't want to waste a session with them going down a blind alley).  They insisted that *wasn't* info that they had.  I insisted it was in the letter they had just worked so hard to get.  The players all looked at me in silence & the one who had transcribed that letter held up her notebook page & proved that info *wasn't* among the info they had gotten from the letter last session.

 

Knowing I had screwed up & left out a vital point, I (rather lamely) had the NPC declare there was "a hidden fold" in the letter that contained the information.

 

The Players all laughed for about 10 min at my weak save & from that point on if I ever tacked something on to an ongoing info dump someone would mention that "there must have been a fold".

 

This has been a running joke now for 25 years.  I married one of them.  The woman with the notebook was our Maid of Honor.  In the years since I've gotten christmas cards that say "Merry Christmas! and a >obvious fold in the card< "Happy New Year".  I texted my wife 4 things to pick up at the store a couple weeks ago, then remembered something else 10 min later & got a text back "was there a fold?"

 

I try to take it with good humor......

[Duke Bushido]

Egad, I just remembered one!

 

In corresponding with a dear friend earlier today-- we were discussing Traveller; his primary experience being with Mongoose and mine being with 1e / 2e, I had been curious enough about Mongoose to study up on it a bit and I must say, I wish I bought in on it when it was in stores: evidently they took great pains to keep it as much like the original as possible.  (sorry: 2300, TNE, and MgT were just _terrible_; they just were!), right down --well, it's not the point: I want the corebook now to add to my small Traveller collection (I chucked almost all of my RPG stuff when we moved here-- had kids planned, a wife, all that-- didn't think there would be a lot of time.  The only thing I kept was my HERO stuff, my CT stuff, and FFS from TNE (The only book of that entire era of Traveller actually worth owning!), and my old xeroxes of Starfire.   Everything else went bye-bye. My brother D got all the vampire stuff (since it was his fault I owned it), the rest was unceremoniously shoveled into the lobby of a game store in Savannah with a cheerful "No charge; Fred!  Get what you can for it; most of it is vintage and all of it is complete!"  Alas, it did not save the store....    

 

Anyway....

 

Anyone else here familiar with Traveller?  LIke the culture and gadgets and day-to-day stuff?  I know Scott seems to be quite up on it; I was hoping maybe some other folks were.  It's kind of important for this...

 

You know what?  Skip it.  Either you don't know what Patches are and you're about to learn, or you _do_ know what Patches are and you're about to get a refresher course. 

 

Patches were super-ungodly sticky squares of steel-reinforced polymer.  Most ship's lockers had a dozen or so.  As they were constructed in the order of "super-thin layer of metal, polymer, alloy reinforcing mesh, polymer,  paste of pureed gecko feet," they were lightweight, remarkably flexible (you couldn't fold them, but they moulded easily to contours) and incredibly tough, they were used as emergency hull repairs for small arms (as in "not ship-mounted weapons" strikes, micro-meteorite penetrations, and anything else that might poke a hole in the hull.  I am not certain, as I haven't looked at the source material in years (since our primary Traveller game got ported to Champions legs), but I think they were roughly 24 inches by 24 inches, square?  At any rate, they had to be applied to the inside of the hull, as the difference between one atmosphere and no atmospheres is apparently way more than 14 psi or so (I don't think sea level matters much in the void) and these same things-- these things that if you dropped them on the deckplate, they were a permanent fixture-- would be blown right off the outside of the hull....  (as you can see: I questioned some of the science there).

 

Finally I just accepted "well, you can probably get to the interior side of the hole before all the air disappears; putting on a vac suit and going outside probably slows you down a bit......." as a reasonable justification for "must be applied to the inside of the ship."

 

 

Anyway, the set-up:

 

The PCs have been hired by a trans-stellar shipping concern to address a problem with piracy that is affecting several members of their trade co-op.  Random ships will be struck by pirates.  No one has been able to intercept them, and all they have to go on is that the pirates, after boarding the ship, kill all but one person, program the ship to return, and somehow wipe all the nav data, leaving no clue as to where it happened or where they came from or went.  The PCs, itching to do some brain work and maybe engage in a little gunplay after their last adventure (salvaging a ship that went down on in an ocean) gladly accept.

 

During the initial investigation, they arrange to get hired on as hands on a ship with a particularly desirable, hard-to-trace and easy-to-carry cargo (beanie babies or something; I don't remember.  Maybe it was Pogs  ).  As they begin to thoughtfully review all the evidence from the previous hijackings (there have been eleven in the last eight months), they come to the (correct) conclusion that someone on the ship has to be involved.  They (again, correctly) theorize that it is the "survivor," (he is lightly injured, sedated, and treated with chemicals and enzymes that trigger horrific-looking but generally harmless reactions to make his injuries look more severe than they are, and returns with the story that he was made to watch the crew's execution, was tortured, and left alive "to tell the tale of Solomoni vengance!"

 

They begin to investigate the individual crewmembers-- carefully, of course.

 

Ooh!  If there had been a "quote of the week" forum back in '82 or so, I might have entered this one:

 

"This has _got_ to be our guy!"

"No; we don't know what.  We need something definite; something straight-up criminal.  Then we can alert the captain."

"He's got six different sets of ID!"

"Yeah?  _I've_ got six sets of ID!"

"_And_ you're a straight-up criminal, moron!"

"Oh yeah....   Then--  we need to find his partner!"

"Partner?"

"I wouldn't do this alone; someone has to keep their eyes open while I'm working."

"But only one guy comes back alive--"

"Yep; that's the way I'd do it, too.  You never know who's gonna get one of those conscience thingies..."

 

 

They begin to keep an eye on him (he's the navigator), and double-check (carefully and secretively) everything he does, and carefully track his comings and goings.

 

The alert comes on, and the captain does an all-ship hail to brace for a coming out of a misjump.  (in our universe, you didn't immediately know that you misjumped: your clue was that the drop out of jumpspace was going very, very badly.)  One of the players is on the bridge, serving as an engineer and monitoring the jump drives. He has Astrogation- 4.  In CT, that's _a lot_, and he thinks it's peculiar that the navigator isn't here for the drop out of jump.  Unwilling to tip his hand and yell "Look out, guys!  The navigator is running around the ship!," he instead does an all-ship to request the navigator come to the bridge.   The PCs are tipped off, and begin to get suspicious.  They start to go looking for him.  

 

The drop out isn't smooth, but nowhere near as bad as a misjump is reported to be.  The engineer notices that the maneuver drives have been firing crazily and randomly from the moment the drop out started, and that they have shut down completely just seconds after reentering normal space.  Suspicious, he pulls the nav tape and swaps a blank into the navigator's console while reviewing the real tape on his own console.  This was not a misjump.  It was a full Jump 4, and the maneuvers were programmed to do what they did when they did; it's all on the tape.  The Jump 4 is a direct violation of company policy, as it leaves the ship's fuel almost completely spent: there is nothing for an emergency jump away should something be very, very wrong.  They are exactly where the navigator wanted them to be, and the first thing the PC on the bridge notices is that there are thousands of stars, and no sun.....  with Maneuver 2 as their only option, they are effectively dead in the water.

 

Just as the PC on the bridge puts this together, a decompression alert sounds, and the PCs and NPCs scramble for the nearest locker, grabbing masks and tanks and patches  (training says ignore the Vacc Suit at first.  If you don't find the leak in ten minutes, then start worrying.  If it was explosive decompression, you wouldn't make it to the locker anyway, right?)

 

Following the screams and the banshee-like screams of escaping air, the two PCs (there were only three PCs on this adventure) make their way to a narrow maintenance shaft that leads to life support.  The navigator and another NPC crewman (the gunner-- two of the other PCs were serving as gunners) are fumbling around with the patches, but they cannot get them to adhere.

 

Figuring that at the moment, everyone was in danger, they put aside their concerns.  "Give me that!" shouted the first PC, taking the patch from an NPC gunner who was getting tangled up in his own carbine and throwing it to her partner.  She then grabbed the patch from the other guy and pulled the wire that removed the liner and started the heating process to activate the adhesive.

 

"Where are your damned masks?!  Get to a locker and get some masks, now!"  shouts the other PC, both because they weren't wearing masks and in the hopes that these guys-- one probably villain and a guy who _could_ be his accomplice-- would vacate the shaft.  The two step back and let the PCs turn toward the wall...

 

 

I am _so_ clever!  I am _so_ brilliant!  The third PC didn't get a lot of spotlight or glamour in the previous adventure, and thus far, his player has felt kind of third wheel spending most of his time checking the computer behind the navigator every time the navigator did something.  He's going to have his spotlight, though!  because he's going to have to rescue these two!

 

I am _brilliant_!

 

"Javohn, you haven't had any reports about the progress on the leak, and it's been nearly six minutes...."

"Okay!  Javohn unstraps, grabs his SMG (stashed in the locker on the bridge), a mask, and a handful of Patches and heads out."

"The captain looks at you confused.  'The ship's not that big, Boy!  They'll find-- where the Hell did you get that weapon and what do you think you're doing--?"

"Saving your butt, Sir!"  and down he drops into the main corridor.  He hears the shrieking of the air leak and heads toward it, checking at corridor intersections to determine direction.

 

Meanwhile--

 

'Okay, they take a step back and let you squeeze by to repair the four holes--'

Are they blown-in or blown out?"

"?  Oh, uh-- they look like they were burned, like with a laser. "

 

 

here it comes!  They don't suspect anything!  

"squeeze by?  I thought we were in the corridor to life support?"

"No.  You're in a mantenance shaft that leads to life support.  There's a corridor, but this shaft is for direct access to lots of the conduits and plumbing, etc.  It's pretty tight in here; that's why the gunner kept getting his rifle hung up while he was trying to open the Patch."

"Okay, so we squeeze in and get busy!"

 

 

HA!  This is going to be _great_!

 

"As you waste time studying the holes you should be patching, you hear an ominous ratcheting noise as the navigator cocks a pistol.  "Turn around!  I won't shoot a woman in the back!"

"I turn around."

"You see the navigator, no expression on his face, gesturing with his revolver that he wants you to move out of the shaft."

"And he sees _nothing_."

"Come again?"

"I still have my Patch, right?"

"Well, yeah, I guess-- you were studying the holes--"

"And we opened them when we took them from these guys--"

"yeah, but--"

"I shove it on his face and wrap it around his head."

PC2-- "Yeah; I'm thinking I can patch his gun arm to his chest"

 

 

 

Bridge PC gets there just in time to see one of them slapping Patches (remember they had brought some, because this wasn't their first rodeo) on the holes while the other held a dagger to the gunner's through (he had spent the entire charge of his weapon burning three holes though the hull, and the PCs had suspected he was out of juice.  He couldn't swing the weapon as a club in the confines, but it was pretty easy to push a dagger point to this throat....)

 

and one navigator in the final throws of suffocation with an arm-and-gun-shaped lump showing through the patch (yep.  Dex roll went in the PCs favor-- by a lot)). 

 

 

Everyone knows what's up: the navigator and the gunner would have gone through the ship, taking the other NPCs one by one, then hand over the ships when the pirates arrived.  The gunner would be killed, the navigator roughed up a bit, etc--

 

Knowing the pirates were coming and that they were dead in the water, the gunners (the two PCs) took their stations and fought it out when the pirate ship showed up just a few minutes later.

 

While the other PC has nothing to do but plan the refueling trip for when the battle was over....

 

 

 

 

There are a lot of great memories from that adventure, but in terms of hitting my own goals for it, well.... it was a complete disaster.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tjack]

On 2/21/2022 at 9:19 PM, Fry Daddy said:

My funniest one --- Players fought a team of villains who had a female mentalist as a member. Later, I forgot about that and rolled the team out again with the same mentalist as a male. The group said "wait a minute -- last time that was a woman!" I disagreed and told them they were mistaken, which they completely proved me wrong with their notes. After that, anytime I threw a mentalist at them, it came up --- are you SURE this is a man/woman?

 

They got a lot of mileage out of that one.

     I’m agreeing with the others on this one.   If my players caught me out on something like that I’d just smile mysteriously and say something like “Yeah....Interesting, huh.  I’d decide later if it was twins or a shape/gender switcher or a disguise of some sort.   Never let the players see you sweat.   Everything is always part of your Games Master Plan.

[rravenwood]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

my old xeroxes of Starfire

 

Only played the basic ship combat game a handful of times many decades ago, but I remember it being fun.  I was captivated by the campaign game expansion, though - it was probably the second-edition "New Empires" rather than "Starfire III: Empires", but my memory could be misleading me.  Anyhow, I attempted to get a game of that going, but unfortunately it never really got off the ground.  I think I still have page upon page of handwritten generated systems in a box somewhere...

[Duke Bushido]

Yep.

 

I played it exclusively as a solitaire game.  I wanted to pick up III when it came out, but by then the only game store within two hours of me had folded. 

 

I enjoyed the solitaire game, and generally when I was done with a game-- suddenly I had new systems that converted ridiculously easily to Traveller, so it was all a win-win. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Tjack said:

     I’m agreeing with the others on this one.   If my players caught me out on something like that I’d just smile mysteriously and say something like “Yeah....Interesting, huh.  I’d decide later if it was twins or a shape/gender switcher or a disguise of some sort.   Never let the players see you sweat.   Everything is always part of your Games Master Plan.

 

 

That right there.

 

I won't say I don't make mistakes, but I throw out so much stuff-- _just in case_ I need something to reach back to later, something to either tie it all together or something for the players to revisit for whatever reason-- I throw out so much "could be extraneous" stuff that for the most part, if I were to make the man / woman mistake, my players would automatically assume it was some sort of clue or intentional distraction or whatever.

 

I'm not a good GM; I just play one at the table.   

 

 

 

(where you here when I told the board about the werefish incident a decade or so ago?)
 

[Tjack]

44 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

Yep.

 

I played it exclusively as a solitaire game.  I wanted to pick up III when it came out, but by then the only game store within two hours of me had folded. 

 

I enjoyed the solitaire game, and generally when I was done with a game-- suddenly I had new systems that converted ridiculously easily to Traveller, so it was all a win-win. 

 

 

 

 

That right there.

 

I won't say I don't make mistakes, but I throw out so much stuff-- _just in case_ I need something to reach back to later, something to either tie it all together or something for the players to revisit for whatever reason-- I throw out so much "could be extraneous" stuff that for the most part, if I were to make the man / woman mistake, my players would automatically assume it was some sort of clue or intentional distraction or whatever.

 

I'm not a good GM; I just play one at the table.   

 

 

 

(where you here when I told the board about the werefish incident a decade or so ago?)
 

      Tell me the story about the werefish Unca’ Duke!

[Duke Bushido]

It's not too terribly exciting, really.

 

I was trying to fill in a gap in activity / conversation.  The denouement  had...   denouement...ed? -- after the completion of a long story arc (four or five months of sessions on the one arc), everyone was feeling deflated (in a good way, I mean), and there was suddenly a very long pause-- no players spoke; no characters did anything, so just to keep the silence from hitting that "awkward" stage, Earl- the maintenance guy at their base-- chimed up with "well, it's Thursday already; I've got to be going!  Welcome home, folks.  Don't call me if you need me; I've got custody this weekend, and I'm unplugging the phone!"   

 

Hmm....

 

Think the Players.  What could that be about?

 

"HHHmmmm....." grunt the Players.  "What was that about?"

 

"Earl's divorced.  It's his weekend with the kids.  He's done this before.  It's on the calendar in the office, but you guys have been so busy the past few week...."

 

"He's up to something--!"

 

And for the next hour-- real time; a couple days game time-- the start gathering intel on Earl-- everything they can get their hands on.

 

The next two game sessions they are _obsessed_ with Earl!  To the point that they follow him, looking to see what he's up to.  It was funny for about ten minutes, then it got weird....

Problematically, they got really _excited_ about the idea that Earl-- a pop-up NPC who had been running their base for honest-to-God _six years_ of game time-- was secretly a villain, or a spy, or some sort of mastermind---

 

Toward the end of the second session of "What's up with Earl," I had put up with all I could handle.  I dug in-- Earl left his apartment an hour before sunset, took a cab to the drug store, and bought skin cream, lotion, a humidifier, and stopped at a hardware store and got rock salt.

 

"Where's his kids?!"

 

You don't see any kids--

 

"I _knew_ it!  He's up to something!  He's probably building some kind of bomb!  What kind of bomb can you make with salt?!"

 

Truth was I had focused so hard on giving Earl something to _do_ that I had forgotten it was custody weekend.  That's all there was to it.

 

You've already learned he lives on the top floor--

 

"Skylight!  What do I see through the skylight?"

 

The skylight....   what would you do in a tenement building with a skylight?  Hmmm.. ooh!  Better lighting in the shower!-- the skylight is directly over Earl's bathroom--

 

Is he building a bomb in the bathtub?  What's he doing-?!

 

Well, as you watch, set back from the grimy glass so as not to cast a shadow on it or to accidentally be seen, he appears to be --- running the bathwater!  

 

"What's he putting in it?  Ammonia?  Bleach?  Nitrogen?

 

crap... what did he buy.....?   A hasty side glance at the notes-- uh...  he's carefully measuring out the rock salt!

 

What?  What's he up to?

 

There's a... Thermometer!  He's checking the temperature of the water very--

 

he looked up!  Good thing the sun is setting and you're setting back a bit, or he would have looked dead at you!

 

The water!  The thermometer!  What's it for?!

 

He appears to be checking the temperature of the water--

 

I call John!  This could be it!

 

(john, in character) Jetstream here.

 

Jetstream, I don't know what it is but it's going down!  Earl's measuring rocksalt into a bathtub full of temperature-controlled water!  This could be it!

 

(jetstream)  I'm on my way!  Call the others!

 

Within moments, all the heroes are gathered, staring at Earl as he carefully checks the salinity and temperature of the water.  Then he darts off to another room and comes back with a mysterious sealed container!

 

What does it look like...?!

 

Well, it's brownish, maybe quart-sized (I had been winging it, but at this point, I had made a decision).  It says "Country Crock" on the side..

 

What?  Butter?

That's margarine, idiot!

Yeah, and it's pretty---

 

What's he doing now?

 

He's lighting candles--

 

A ritual!  Is he summoning something?!  They need salt for that!  Where's Mysteria--

I'm right here--

Yeah; make a skill check!  Is he summoning something?  Can you tell what it is--?

 

oh, why not....  "Go ahead, if you think he's summoning a demon."  I push her player (Straight John) three dice.  Natural 18!  Under the circumstances, hilarious to me; frustrating beyond measure to them. 

 

Wait!  He's putting something in the tub-- 

 

is it the butter?

 

No; it's a small device of some sort.  There's a cord that runs to it and plugs into the wall---

 

(to Mysteria) Are there electro-demons?  (to me) is a bomb?  Is the water crackling with electricity?

 

No.  make a PER Check....  You see some kind of clear tubing hooked to the machine; it's laying on the floor-

 

Is it pumping the water out?!

 

No.  The candles are lit in a pattern (now I'm just having fun with it).  There are three arranged in a triangle around the tub, five in a circle beyond those, and nine outside of those.  He's pressed on a button on a gizmo that looks like CD player-- at least, same size; same shape--

 

Does it vibrate?!

 

No, but when he throws a switch in the cord, the small device in the tub appears to-- a small, steady stream of bubbles begins to percolate to the surface of the water---  it's pretty dark; you can probably get closer if you want-- 

 

Yeah!  What do I see?

What do I see?

Can I see what he's doing--?

 

He's opened the plastic tub and he reaches in...  he appears to be sprinking something into the water-- like bits of potting soil and..  something you can't really see what it is--

 

I have telescopic vision!  Where's my dice?  I rolled five!  What do I see--?

 

 

it looks like small worms of somekind-- not earthworms, but hundreds of small worms....

 

Demon worms!

nanobots!

Alien parasites!

 

(if you're wondering:  tubifex.  Tubifex was the correct answer.  No one got it).

 

You see Earl start to tremble-- his hands are shaking, and he's having trouble with his balance--

 

He's in a trance!  It's beginning!  Mysteria, get up here, front and center!

 

Be careful!  All of you, make an easy PER check (no failures) The moon is coming out, and you're perfectly silhouetted against it--!

 

Crap!  (rolls dice) I want a stealth check to creep silently to the other side of the skylight!

 

No problem; you make it.  You see--

 

oh, me too!  

I don't have stealth!  Can I just creep over slowly--

Got an 11-!

 

You're all on the other side of the skylight, and have the perfect vantage point to watch a fifty-four year old man strip.  Clearly, this is one of your finest moments.

 

No; he's up to something--!
 

He's also naked.  He's staggering; he can barely stand--

 

Should we help him? maybe he's being possessed!
No; he's summoning something, or building some kind of weird bomb

I don't think Earl is a bomb....

Maybe it's the control pod for like an entire mech hidden on the floor below--

In someone else's apartment?

He probably rents that one, too!  (to me) How much do we pay him?

"Not enough for him to catch you watching him undress, or rent two apartments....   He kneels down beside the tub and rolls over into it and begins to spasm.

 

Here it comes!

 

And as the moon finishes rising, complete and full, and its silvery light shines through the skylight, you see him twist and writhe and---  He's shrinking!  Something's happening!  He is getting smaller, his arms are shrinking and his fingers are getting nightmarishly long-- 

 

It's a transformation!   He's becoming some kind of Hell beast!

 

He's becoming a fish-

 

WHAT?!

 

Right there, before your eyes, you-- The Seven, the mightiest defenders Campaign City has ever seen-- stand aghast as you watch a naked old man (this was long enough ago that I thought 55 was ancient) shrivel and shrink and gasp for air and sprout scales and turn as silver as the moon-- and within moments, where Earl had been, there is a smallish fish, swimming around the bathtub, lazily eating tubifex worms.....

 

 

 

WHAT?!  

 

THAT'S _IT_?!

 

THAT is what we've wasted two entire sessions on-?!

 

No one is more upset about it than I am; I promise.

 

Why would you do that--

 

_I_ didn't do it!  _I_ was getting tired of telling you that know Earl, you know his ex-wife, and you know his sons, but _you_ wierdos decided he was some sort of Soviet spy---!

 

Well how where we supposed to know--?

 

 

And more and more in that vein...

 

 

I have said it before: Players do the most confounding things.  Just roll with it.  If you don't leash them too tightly, they'll build you an entire world.

 

And Earl the werefish.

 

 

 

[Tjack]

    At least you gave them a payoff.
    I was in an episode once where the players were Supers searching a castle that was the fortress of a person calling himself Drake.   We weren’t sure if he was a Vampire lord or maybe a dragon  (Dracula literally means “Son of the Dragon and Firedrake being another word for dragon) or if he was “just” a powerful sorcerer.  We also didn’t know who’s side he was on, so the paranoia was in full bloom. We spent an entire SIX HOUR SESSION searching his library/study and found nothing out of the ordinary.  Which of course lead the more crazed players to search even further. 
    After the night was done, and we were packing up to go home somebody finally beseeched the GM to let them know what they missed.......he said “There was nothing there.”

We almost murdered him.  Instead of saying “You search as many hours of game time as you want but find nothing,  what do you do next?”  He amused himself by watching us chase our tails for an entire night.  This was not Games Mastering.  This was pulling the legs off of one side of an insect so you can watch it crawl in circles.

[Duke Bushido]

Agreed-- that's too much.  Way too much.

 

You can call stuff like that short with a simple NPC interruption:

 

 

May I help you find something, Sirs?    That sort of thing.  The hour is getting late; the Master isn't comfortable with his guests milling about while he sleeps.  Please, let me show you to your chambers.  Would you like a nightcap first, Sirs?

 

That sort of thing-- anything.

 

Just because they are on a dead end doesn't mean it can't be entertaining.  Like I said: if you let them, the players will build the greatest world you've ever played in!  All you have to do is decide that even if they are on the wrong path, they will find _something_, even if, in the grand scheme of things, it is absolutely nothing. 

 

The last time I told the werefish story on this board, I got a few guffaws, and all kinds of scolding about "letting them waste time" and a few other things that I forgot even before I finished reading them.

 

Why?  Because to this very day, the werefish story comes up, and it elicits laughs.  I have one-- ONE-- original player from that group left.  I also have-- sorry, had: Corona, etc-- three groups going and meeting regularly.  All three groups have "yeah, that's probably a werefish" in their lexicon, meaning "it might pan out, but I don't think it's something we need to get really deeply into right now."  Today-- what?  Forty years later?  I can call anyone from the Old Guard (well, two of them are no longer on this earth, but you get what I mean), mention the werefish, and there are nothing but laughs-- pure laughs.  Frustrated or not, they enjoyed it immensely.  It's not like letting them search a library for six hours and getting _nothing_.  The spent two whole sessions at this, but they did manage to learn everything there was to learn about Earl, and got themselves such an out-of-left-field revelation for their troubles, and have nothing but great memories of the whole fiasco.   

 

It's not hard: you just have to _want_ everyone to have a great time. 

 

 

[MrKinister]

On 2/3/2022 at 12:10 PM, Scott Ruggels said:

Killed a beloved NPC to demonstrate a villains trap. Players objected, then quit. End of campaign. 

Ouch. I can see this happening. But this is clearly not your (direct) fault. The loss of an NPC they liked caused them feelings of loss and pain, which they could only manage by stepping out into anger. Since the situation didn't allow for a way to address the feelings (since it was a roleplaying game, nothing more) the easiest way to show displeasure is to disengage. Makes sense, really. But there is a certainly lack of maturity in their responses. They didn't want to deal with their feelings. I suppose that happens. 

Are you still playing with that group?

[Christougher]

I was running a sci fi game, setting based on the Master of Orion computer games.  The Antareans had almost extincted the Humans before vanishing, so things were rebuilding from near-zero but climbing quickly.  Recovery and growth was teh constant goal, and the PCs were an elite special operations crew.    They had enough hometime to see the effects of advancement - a crewmember with a prosthetic arm was transplanted a cloned arm, the farmer planted a field of the new high yield grain, etc.  

 

Targetted genetic sequencing was discovered, a way to repair flaws or weaknesses (as 10 XP of bonus CHA) was announced, and one character's special needs daughter was approached to be an early adopter.  PC said no, and that was mildly surprising but understandable.  The discovery goes mainstream and the military wants all its soldiers to benefit from the improvement, so of course, they want to start with their elite special operations crew.

 

Except that they all refused, to the point of resigning from service.  I was so dumbfounded, I couldn't backtrack orfix things.  It killed the campaign.

 

Chris.

[Scott Ruggels]

3 hours ago, MrKinister said:

Ouch. I can see this happening. But this is clearly not your (direct) fault. The loss of an NPC they liked caused them feelings of loss and pain, which they could only manage by stepping out into anger. Since the situation didn't allow for a way to address the feelings (since it was a roleplaying game, nothing more) the easiest way to show displeasure is to disengage. Makes sense, really. But there is a certainly lack of maturity in their responses. They didn't want to deal with their feelings. I suppose that happens. 

Are you still playing with that group?

In some ways I wish I still was. But the "heart" of the group did not wish to participate in games with lethal consequences any more, and without the "heart" the rest of the group drifted away. Soon after 9-11 happened, and I became the angry emotional one. We remained in contact somewhat, but then I moved to Los Angeles. That was the end of my face to face gaming. Only since 2014 or 5 that I started gaming again on Roll20.

[starblaze]

On 2/3/2022 at 6:56 PM, Tjack said:

   I can see your point although I may not always agree with it.  But that’s in reference to PC’s, under a players control who refused to take a hint from the GM.  What happened there was to an NPC under your control, and you have to admit in retrospect that if it killed the campaign it might not have been a good idea.

 

BTW;  “girl in a fridge” refers to an issue of Green Lantern where Kyle Rayner found the dead body of his girlfriend stuffed into his refrigerator by a serial killer. It has come to refer to graphic violence (often to women) meant only to shock the readers and done in in a way that puts it beyond the line of good taste especially in comics targeted at younger readers.

And that women tend to be treated worse than men in comics.

[Armitage]

18 hours ago, starblaze said:

And that women tend to be treated worse than men in comics.

 

 

I was going to mention this.  One element is a female character being reduced to an object whose only purpose is to motivate a male character.

 

 

Similar to BoloOfEarth's Genocide story, many years ago our GM sent us against the Seven Horsemen, from "Wrath of the Seven Horsemen".  As written, Plague's signature attack was a Continuous Uncontrolled Cumulative Transform that caused a debilitating illness that imposed reduced CV and increased END costs for all powers and abilities.  The GM decided to replace it with a Continuous Uncontrolled BODY Drain and almost immediately killed a long-running PC.

[Lord Liaden]

15 hours ago, Armitage said:

 

 

I was going to mention this.  One element is a female character being reduced to an object whose only purpose is to motivate a male character.

 

 

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

Conversation with a friend jogged my memory on this one:

 

Imperial Roman themed space opera (no, not leather skirts and brass helmets; just the assumption that Rome had remained the rulers od the earth forever-  no impetus to make any signidicant cultural changes, etc.)

 

I drew a complete blank, and the only Latin-sounding name I could cime,up with was Aronnius...

 

 

Hillarity ensued, most of it at the expense if "Erronious."

 

 

 

[Sailboat]

I was NOT the GM for the misadventure I am about to relate, but it's the worst example I know of.

 

D&D.  The DM's wife was a writer and wanted to see what this D&D thing was all about, so we set up a little party for a campaign.

 

* Elven Rogue (me), sailor by trade, good with knots.

 

* Dwarf fighter, strong and tough.

 

* Halfling of some flavor.

 

* Halfling bard of some sort (DM's wife).

 

So the absolute opening scene of the campaign:  we open a door and are confronted by a chasm with a river of lava in the bottom.  We must cross to continue.

 

My sailor Elf with rope and high agility manages to get a grapnel across and shimmies over.  We have to make dex rolls, which frankly not many first-level characters are good at. The generic halfling goes over next.  

 

Then the DM's wife.  She rolls a 1.

 

Down she plunges toward searing molten lava! 

 

Signaling to our doughty Dwarf, still on the starting side,  to anchor the rope around his waist and brace himself, my Elf leaps into the abyss, swinging down to save his companion, the DM's wife, and the entire campaign.

 

A perfect roll!  The elf snatches her from certain death.  Both their falls are checked momentarily by the Dwarf's brawn as he performs a belay.

 

He rolls a 1, and is yanked off the ledge. You knew this was coming, didn't you?

 

All 3 of us plunge into fiery death.

 

The halfling is the sole survivor, left alone in the hostile side of the chasm with no rope and no way home.

 

The DM's wife, who, as a published author, is used to having *total control* of plot and characters all to herself, storms out of the room without a word.

 

Campaign *finis*.  She never wanted to try again.

[Scott Ruggels]

On 2/27/2022 at 7:13 AM, MrKinister said:

Are you still playing with that group?

I did, for about half a decade after that incident, but I wasn’t the GM any longer. Then A couple of us had a falling out over game styles/ politics, and some of them stopped gaming. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2005, that was the end of that phase of gaming until I got coaxed back into it due to the advancement of online tabletops by 2015. I still will send a note to a couple of them from time to time, but I game online exclusively now, and they didn’t need to ( three of them live in the same house. )

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

One element is a female character being reduced to an object whose only purpose is to motivate a male character.

 

And the reaction in a similar vein of bad writing is to do the same with men, or write men off entirely as irrelevant and pathetic

[Drhoz]

Hardlight has investigated the PSI-mooks equipment, and happily none of it was rigged to explode if dismantled. It includes some rather nifty autoheal stuff.

 

Hero Shrew: Smart supervillains don’t piss off the Goonion. 

 

Hero Shrew: You could always patent the Goo Gun and sell it to police departments across the country - what are the inventors going to do, complain?
Flux: Do you want to get sued by evil lawyers? Sorry, evilLER lawyers.
Magus: How much do you want to bet that they did patent it, and it got ‘stolen’. 

 

GM: The gun only worked for Scooter because he’s always thinking violent thoughts.
Flux: ‘I could murder a mealworm bar’?
GM: He’s also thinking happy thoughts, and it’s not an imbalance, just weird. 
Hero Shrew: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

 

GM: I don’t know where Hardlight got the idea this equipment has organic components.
Hero Shrew OoC: Well, don’t blame me.
Flux OoC: Yes, it’s not a Scooter Filter problem this time. 

 

Hero Shrew’s player: *to the cats* You two, behave yourselves!
Flux’s player: That's a perfect impersonation of Fireflash when she finds out what we have planned.

 

GM: As a reminder as to how you got involved with the clinic, that's because it's run by E-G Employment, the subdivision of Erikson-Gulsvig Logistics GmbH. The corporation you're setting Loweltech to sue so you can progress the Moreau issue. They’re providing the Moreau the suit will focus on. I’m resisting the impulse to make them a lamb. Or goat. 

 

Getting the financial records of the company turns out to be more difficult than we might have anticipated - the clinic never applied for charity status so the records aren’t easily available. We eventually get the records anyway - which are sent over in hard copy. Hundreds of thousands of pages. Including huge amounts of irrelevant material. 

 

GM: At least they didn’t do the old trick of non-standard formatting as well. But it’s still three whole semi-trailers of loose paper. 
Flux: We’re going to need office space.
Hardlight: We’re going to need a warehouse. 

 

Even with a team of accountants from LowellTech and a device Flux invents to digitise it all, it’s still going to take weeks to go through it with a fine tooth comb and find anything that might interest the District Attorney. Beyond the factory that was making psi drugs instead of destroying pharmaceutical waste. 

Hero Shrew: Circular economy.
Hardlight: What?
Hero Shrew: Make powerful drugs, sell the pharmaceutical waste to this company, who make different powerful drugs. 

 

Sending over all the records in paper form isn’t an admission of guilt, but it’s certainly evidence that Erikson-Gulsvig Logistics GmbH is annoyed with us. It almost certainly means they won’t want to help with the Moreau situation anymore. We hand the investigation off to the FBI.

 

GM: They have people that get off on going through this kind of paperwork.
Fireflash: Remind me next time - don’t ask, just break into their system. 

 

At least we’ve put a major crimp in PSI operations. There’s not many places they could hide manufacturing on that scale.

 

Magus finally gets a copy of The Whispered Paths, although the person that found it for him was so annoyed by the experience they’re going to charge any future mystic customer double. Unfortunately it’s in Fucine, an extinct language once associated with witches. Someone was very upset that somebody was after the book, and increasingly upset the closer it got to Edge City. The bookhunter tells the Magus that for free, because he didn’t try to stiff her, which is apparently a problem with mystic types. 

 

GM: There’s apparently a book that can help you translate Fucine to Latin, but it’s rare, because why would anybody need to read Fucine?
Magus: Well, I’ll try Amazon first. It seems I’ve embarked on Book Hunt 2.
Hero Shrew: Now there’s a phrase you need to pronounce carefully. 

 

Although the author of the journal, P. Lanzo Geovanny Renzo Aberto Geomar Alfredo Pasquale Conti, is best known for going completely mad. 

 

Flux: That’s never a good sign. 

 

Flux: To be fair all penguins are man-eating, they just don’t often get the opportunity.

 

Magus: I have a nasty suspicion who has the journal.
Fireflash: If it’s who I’m thinking of we did deal with their local cult.

GM: You have to be a special kind of wrong when even the Descending Hierarchy of Hell wants nothing to do with you.
Flux: ‘We’re evil - but YOU are CRAZY’

 

APPARENTLY, a copy is in the possession of septuagenarian antiquarian Angilia Eleonora Dubois, who is old Monterey money. It’s highly suspicious that such a rare book is present in a city that someone wanted to keep The Whispered Paths far away from.

 

Hardlight: Are we pulling a heist? I'm all for a heist.
Fireflash: I am entirely against doing a heist! I’ll just ask her if we can borrow the book for a few days, for the public good.

 

Dubois’ entire family were killed in the disaster that turned Monterey into Edge City, so Fireflash turns her attention to the Dubois family lawyer. Said lawyer points her towards the collection’s curator, Liberty Kendra Brown. 

 

Hero Shrew OoC: You might want to assure her you’re not letting me anywhere near the collection.

 

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/215759724728156160/967384043790430228/unknown.png

 

Dubois is in her 70s, but barely looks it. Apparently she came out as a mutant 20 years ago. . She has pointed ears and a slightly lengthened lifespan. Some of us suspect elf ancestry.

 

GM: Do any of you have Architecture skills?
Hero Shrew: I do! *looks at building* Yep, that’s architecture.
Flux: He’s eaten enough of it. 

 

Her house is original Spanish, by the look of it.

 

Flux: I’m impressed it’s survived this long.
Magus: Any building over 60 years old has survived three alien invasions.
GM: Dude, this one survived a zeppelin assault!

 

Ms. Dubois: No need to be so formal, people keep forgetting I was a young woman in the 60s. 

 

She doesn’t remember the journal at first, but recalls the auction she acquired it at. And starts seeming a little concerned as Fireflash and the Magus explain their interest. She needs to make a phone call, and has Liberty take them through to the densely packed library.

 

GM: She has one of those old-fashioned phones.
Magus: One with a cord?
GM: Thanks for that, now I feel old. 

 

As Fireflash and the Magus make digital copies of the journal, Hardlight waits out in the car, since he felt weird about going in in costume. One of the staff brings out refreshments.

Fireflash: These days if you scan a demon into the internet it’s back 30 minutes later, whimpering and asking to be put back in the book.
GM: ‘I tried the worst things I could think of and they kept suggesting improvements!’

 

Flux gets a phone call on his Chris Jones phone, from Bob in accounting.

Bob: Hey, Chris, have you been making some strange friends lately? This jacked surfer-looking guy came in asking questions. Wanted to know if you’d made any new friends lately. Have you?
Fluxt: Not really, you know what my social life is like.
Magus: Funnily enough ‘good-looking surfing dude’ is a good description of me, when I’m not wearing other faces. 

 

When we get back to the base, we’re very glad we uploaded the images already, because the new camera we used to take the images has mysteriously vanished. 

 

Hero Shrew: Well, if the book deletes anything that it’s copied onto, we probably shouldn’t have uploaded the images to the internet. 

 

On the other hand, if somebody else wanted the contents of the book, there didn’t seem to be much actually stopping them raiding the collection directly. 

 

Flux is cautiously checking his apartment, just in case the jacked-surfer-dude is a threat.

 

Flux: It’s a bit embarrassing, I’ve been successfully kidnapped once, and we failed to get Fireflash kidnapped twice. 

 

Fortunately he doesn’t need to rely on the Mk.I Eyeball. Whoever was hanging around is magical, but not a flavour he’s familiar with. But his apartment is so small that sending more than one of us in to check is honestly difficult. There are other issues too, of course. 

 

Flux: Maybe don’t have two or three costumed superheroes STANDING AROUND OUTSIDE MY SECRET ID 

 

Fireflash goes in disguised as a civilian, instead of wearing her usual string bikini. She gets comfortable and uses Retrocognition.

 

Flux: Ah. It’s just occurred to me that this is my personal living space.
Fireflash: Fortunately it's vague and unclear and that is very small so we don’t have to worry about it. 
Flux: I really have to stop asking my friends for help. 

 

Whoever was here seemed very interested in the traces of Flux’s magic, and entered and left through the wall. 

 

Hardlight: Maybe they were just here to recruit you into some kind of magical school?
Flux: I’m allergic to owls. 

 

Magus tracks the magic back to Little Haiti, then loses him in the magical hotspot there. But it would appear from there it leads straight to, and into, Lake Effinger.

 

Magus: Ah. I wonder if it’s whoever rang me, after I left my number there. 
Hardlight: You left your phone number on the Tesseract???
Magus: Of course not. I left it on the outside of the cave the Tesseract was in, after we sealed it. 

 

The jacked-surfer-dude is indeed at the underwater cave, with waterproof bag and swimtrunks. He’s just ignited a torch. 

 

Fireflash: That’s a neat trick.

The Magus: That’s Atlantean fire magic. 

Atlantean: *cheerfully* Magus! 

 

He surfaces to talk to us. 

 

Atlantean: My apologies for intruding on your private identity. 
Flux: In future, I have an email address, a phone number, and a doorbell. 

 

The Atlanteans didn’t MAKE the tesseract, but they do consider it their responsibility. 

 

Fireflash: *sigh* What are the odds we’re going to have to go through it before we can shut it down?
Atlantean: My people did try to sense what lay beyond it when we first discovered it. We detected only fear and death. So hopefully not?
Magus: The thing’s the drain for most of the magical energies in the city, so that can’t be good. 

Flux: Why did Magus get a phone call?
Atlantean: He left a card. 
Flux: Note to self - graffiti more walls.
Atlantean: Please don't.
Flux: ‘For a good time call’

 

The explosion that created Lake Effinger WAS intended to create a dimensional breach, although given the ‘fear and death’ aspect it might not have been the original intended destination. 

 

Hardlight: At least we don’t have to get hit by a truck if we decide to Isekai.
Magus: We could build a Dimensional Damage field into the Quadraphibious Qruiser.
GM: Please don’t. 

 

GM: Well, that went much more peacefully than I expected.
Magus OoC: ‘What, there were no misunderstandings? Bulls***, what is this comic!’ ‘And then they talked like adults about it and went home’

 

GM: There’s one thing protecting Captain Planet from a reboot is that it was created by Ted Turner.
Hero Shrew’s player: So it won’t be so much resurrected as recolourised.

 

Flux’s player: Buy Demolition as a skill.
Hero Shrew OoC: People keep telling me not to do that.

 

GM: I had this picture I was going to use a neat stadium, then realised it was from Pokemon. And I don’t want to put Hero Shrew in a pokemon arena. ‘What do you want me to do?’ ‘Beat up this cock-fighting seizure monster’ ‘ Well, OK’
Flux OoC: ‘You weren’t supposed to eat it!’
Hero Shrew OoC: I don’t want to speculate what Scooter would evolve into.

 

The organisation that's monitoring Fireflash’s superhuman metabolism has a problem regarding the moreau medical analysis program they are involved in with Allanah, but it's not something they want to worry her about until they’ve dealt with it themselves.

 

Fireflash: Well, that’s a sentence guaranteed to make me worry. 

 

Some of the biosamples they’ve been taking of her are going missing. The samples are all supposed to be destroyed, but the residue numbers aren’t adding up. And the security about the samples is enough that it has to be some kind of superhuman stealing them. 

 

Hardlight: Biotechnology isn’t my strong suit - what could somebody malicious do with these samples, if they had them?
Hero Shrew: Make an army of clone soldiers? We’ve already had that one. 

 

How can we do our own security inspection without giving the culprits time to hide the evidence?

 

GM: At least you know if it looks like they’re hiding evidence, it’s evidence their security organization is compromised.
Flux: ‘oh look, somebody fled the building a minute after you told security you were coming’.

 

Hero Shrew’s player: Back, what did I miss?
Flux’s player: Firelash’s player brought up Dimetrodon and broke the internet. It was probably punishment for all the puns. He didn’t SAY any but was probably thinking them.

 

Flux’s player: Their audio sounds like GladOS dying. I know it’s disrupting the game but it’s hilarious - like GladOS and SHODAN  having a conversation about Dimetrodon in the background. 
GM: HoWWWWs my -a—--DIO nooooooooooWWWwwwW
Flux’s player: Still GladOS having a stroke.

Hero Shrew’s Player: And now you sound like someone using a taser on a Cybertronian.

 

Fireflash’s Retrocognition reveals the fact that a known shadow-manipulating and teleporting superhuman, Ghost Shadow of the Six Teens, messing about on the site. It looks like he’s stealing a bunch of feline samples now.

 

Magus: And now you have to go apologize to Security for being kind of a d*** when you showed up.
Fireflash: Sorry, we’ve been dealing with all sorts of aliens and psychic shapeshifters for the last few months, we've got kinda paranoid.
Head of Security: Psychic shapechangers? Now I’M going to be paranoid.
Fux: Try not to think about it too much - they’ll know.

 

Hardlight is a bit uncomfortable about the big greenhouse dome in the middle of the facility.

 

Magus: He was once stuck on a flight where the only entertainment was Biodome starring Pauly Shore, and it had a lasting effect.

 

One suggestion we have for security is blinds on the inside of the warehouse windows, to stop our teleporter friend easily getting in and out.

 

Hero Shrew: Are we going to have to go into the big glass dome they’ve been pumping mutagens into?
GM: What?
The Magus: There probably aren’t any mutagens, no.
Hero Shrew: Oh good, so I don’t have to retroactively ask for today off.
GM: How did you get the idea that the dome is full of mutagens?
Magus: He saw a suspicious biotech company with a big greenhouse. Hero Shrew is the kind of person who bases his understanding of science on Saturday Morning Cartoons.

 

Hardlight: Are we going to have to worry about cat-themed supervillains now?
Hero Shrew: Maybe he just wants to make a pet for his girlfriend?
Magus: The only cat-themed supervillain I can think of works for Teleios, and he wouldn’t need the help.

Although Flux does recall one Lynx, who works for the Overbrain. She’s also a huge anime nerd.

Magus: Probably explains how she knows Ghost Shadow.
GM: They probably met at a convention. ‘That’s a really good Ghost Shadow costume.’ ‘Costume? That’s a really good fursuit.’ ‘Fursuit’?

 

We determine that the samples are being stolen in-between sampling and destruction, while they’re in the queue until there’s a full load for disposal. So Ghost Shadow must have access to the full schedule on the disposal chain, since he’s going straight to the right canisters, and we already know the Six Teens have good tech savvy, since the first time we met them they were ransacking a server. Hopefully he hasn’t noticed we've been to the site yet, and we can plant some samples that Flux and the Magus can track and wait in ambush.

 

Ghost Shadow is well-known enough to us that we know he claims to carry his own ‘internal shadow’ as a power source. 

 

Magus: Any chance we can go beat up Black Paladin and steal his sword?
Fireflash: ‘Now you don’t HAVE a shadow, Bwahaha.’

Fireflash: Do you have any more of those tracers, like the ones they stuck into me?
Magus: We know their group has a tech expert as well as a magic user.
GM: The Black Warlock?
Magus: Hmm. Well, if we ever meet him I’ll try to refrain from any comments about being a proper warlock. 

Hero Shrew: So, this Overbrain, does he have a humanoid exosuit?
GM: No? He doesn’t need one, he has minions.
Hero Shrew: Sorry, still thinking about mutagens and Saturday Morning Cartoons.

 

Hardlight: Well, we still need to make this fake sample. Scooter, pull up your shirt.
Flux: Let’s NOT give them a sample of an actual biological superhuman, ok?
Fireflash: For one thing we don’t know what they’ll do with it.
GM: Indeed - Steiners are rare, as well as having innate psychic abilities.
Magus: Scooter is innately capable of determining what the people around him are thinking and knowing exactly the wrong thing to say. 

 

Magus: So let's set up our trap
Fireflash: And hope it doesn't turn into a cat-astrophe.
Hero Shrew: I’ve got a bad feline about this.

 

We track Ghost Shadow and a single other person, to a makeshift lab in an abandoned warehouse.

 

GM: Supervillain Hideout #3

 

And the other person is a Moreau that Scooter recognises - a Moreau that never needed to be caged back at the Genesys labs. A Moreau that helped the scientists. The one the other Moreaus called Lab Rat. Scooter is not happy about this. Of course if we are going to grab him, we have to deal with the teleporter first. Flux Flashes them, and the Magus and Hardlight try to bubble them. To the GM’s shock, this works.

 

Hardlight: Flawless Plan!
Magus: Feels wrong, doesn't it?

 

Unfortunately Lab Rat hit a panic button. More unfortunately, Scooter grabbed and shook Lab Rat, who goes limp after an audible crack. Magus hurried heals him, while Fireflash hurls much deserved abuse at Scooter.

 

Flux: World of cardboard, Scooter, world of cardboard!
Fireflash: If you keep doing this Scooter you’ll kill somebody and end up in prison.
Magus: And I’m neither fully aware how nor entirely willing to heal death.
Ghost Shadow: *hacking away ineffectually at the walls of the bubble* F***!
Flux: Oh, sorry, I forgot you were there.

 

Flux manages to stop the harddrives being overwritten, as well as stop the countdown to some other kind of precaution. We call in the ECPD, and do a quick search of the building for anybody else. We’d better be fast - it turns out that Hardlight’s bubble will be exhausted in under a minute, unless he drops everything else he’s doing, including moving around.  

 

Ghost Shadow: We were trying to help a friend. And the ragdoll over there was the only Moreau with the skills we needed. Your bat friend is capable, but she’s not a geneticist.

 

Another problem is that it’s not Lab Rat doing the bulk of the work - Lab Rat was just doing the preliminary work for Dr Steinbeck, the creator of Moraeus with superpowers. Who wasn’t in Edge City.

 

Fireflash: It would be incredibly unwise of him to be in Edge City.
Ghost Shadow: Or incredibly clever. I don’t think he’d want to be far from his children. 
Magus: I hope you don’t mean that literally.
Ghost Shadow: What? EW. EW.

Fireflash: We do know another geneticist that might help. But we still want to know why you need the help. 
Ghost Shadow: Like I said, I just want to help a friend.
Magus: Is it Lynx?
Ghost Shadow: What. How did you kn-- No, of course it isn’t!

 

He admits it’s her. Apparently the Overbrain has screwed up her enhancements, and his control of Lynx leaves something to be desired too. Fireflash offers to help, if she hands herself in.

 

Ghost Shadow: Why do you heroes always go this route? Why can’t you just tell me if you know another geneticist?
Fireflash: We do - it’s Allana?
Ghost Shadow: She does know genetics? Cool! See ya! *teleports out of the bubble*

 

Allana the Bat Moreau might well offer medical help anyway, regardless of whether they’re a hero, civilian, or villain, but that won’t stop her throwing people through walls if it becomes necessary. Lab Rat gets handed over to the authorities before Scooter glares him to death, and hopefully without any other Moreaus finding out. 

 

Duty Officer: Lab Rat? Lab Rat? Wait, THE Lab Rat?? Oh hell, Duty Detail, NOW. Get him into one of the high security cells and sit on him, and do NOT take him past the Kennels - I mean the Moreau cells. 
 

[Sundog]

I think you put that in the wrong thread, Drhoz.