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Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

Darren Watts

By Darren Watts
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Darren Watts

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Hey guys! While I'm still working on Golden Age Champions in my copious spare time (Narosia and another top-secret project are taking up my daytimes currently), I *am* done playtesting it with my current group, who have made it all the way from 1938 to 1945 over four years of play. This means, of course, it's time to sic these talented roleplayers on the Silver Age! I'm starting this thread to keep Herodom informed on how they're doing.

 

To start with, they selected the team archetype of scientific explorers, a la the Fantastic Four or the Challengers Of The Unknown, with a hint of the Doom Patrol mixed in. They'll be proactively expanding the boundaries of superscience rather than stoppng bank robberies, and they've totally embraced some of the tropes of that particular subgenre, down to the mostly-matching uniforms. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the Exonauts!

 

Session one begins in the summer of 1959 with our team leader, Myriad, working on her latest gadget, a matter teleporter. As revealed in flashback, she's a brilliant polymath physicist who was once employed by industrialist Willem DeVries to build this very gadget. However, being an unsavory sort, he pushed her to test out the device before it was fully ready, even actually shoving her through an untested portal to see what would happen. (As it turned out, this gave her the superhuman power to duplicate herself, though he didn't stick around to find that out.) When she told him the device was still unsafe even though she apparently survived this hazardous test, she was summarily fired, followed by having her marriage to another of DeVries' employees break up. Penniless and on her own, she built another lab in the wilds of New Jersey and went to work recreating her efforts as best she could.

 

We meet her lab partner, a brilliant twelve-year-old named Widget, and in flashback also learn of his difficult past as a young technological savant, including his own experiments on himself that gave him both the ability to shrink and, given the time to prepare, to shrink other objects around him (which he has used to create a complete miniaturized lab he can carry in his belt.) That day, the two learn through contacts in the scientific grapevine that a comet has been discovered on a collision course for Earth, and though it's being kept quiet for now, soon the word will get out and planetwide panic is expected. They summon Myriad's other agents from their current secret mission and begin work on a spaceship capable of intercepting and destroying the comet before it destroys the world.

 

Myriad's two other current teammates in the Exonauts are seen working to rescue miners from a collapsed coal mine in Pennsylvania. The frst is Matterhorn, a dwarf who flashbacks reveal was once the henchman of an evil scientist himself and was exposed to a dark matter device that gave him the power to add mass to himself, either in the form of increased density or expanded size. The second is Rift, who was the first astronaut from a parallel Earth, and as trapped in space when something caused his entire universe to collapse cataclysmically, though he was rescued at the last minute after having been discovered by one of Myriad's dimension-scanning devices. Rift learned, to his horror, that the very matter of his body reacted negatively and explosively to this new universe he found himself in, and has resigned himself to permanently having to wear the protective suit Myriad designed for him. The two rescue the miners without giving away their involvement, and return to base to help with the rocketship.

 

However, it's not as easy as it seems. The rocket prototype is ready, but lacks a powerful-enough fuel source to reach the comet in time! Radium X, a longtime plot device element from the Golden Age campaign, is the only thing that will do, but only exists on Earth in microscopic amounts as far as Myriad knows. She begins to try to collect as much of it as she can, but since it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per microgram, she despairs.

 

Meanwhile, on the South Pacific island of Bensalem, a blind radio journalist begins to investigate the doings of a mysterious corporation headquartered there that has begun developing an unusual number of high-tech patents. Flshbacks reveal that this young man was once exposed to a nuclear bomb test while wearing faulty eye protection, with the result that his eyes themselves had become mutated into emitters of strange radiation. This made him both effectively blind but gave him both a special extra sense replacing his sight, as well as the ability to project destructive beams of energy, and he began to call himself the Atomic Eye!

 

The Eye investigates the company and learns it's actually based in a cave beneath the island, where he encounters several unusual traps before meeting Red Raven, a teenage girl genius who apparently predicted his arrival! We learn that she is the daughter of the Golden Age hero known as the Raven, and inherited his secret island base on Bensalem, as well as the loyalty of the natives... and their secret stash of tons of radium X! She has apparently manifested such amazing intelligence that she's able to predict the future with tremendous accuracy, including both the arrival of Comet X (as the public quickly names the deadly new addition to the nighttime sky) and Myriad's need for the radium X for her ship. She's contacted the heroine, and proposed a partnership. All six heroes gather on Bensalem, complete the rocket, and blast off into the sky as the last hope for an otherwise-doomed humanity! But what, and who, awaits them on Comet X? Tune in next time, true believers! dw

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Darren Watts

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Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

 

"And Now... The Exonauts!" Part Two:

 

Our team shoots off into space in the first (that they know about) spaceship, the Exonautilus (this campaign takes place in the same continuity as my last GA campaign, so slightly off from the Champs universe but close, and the players know the GA team went to space a couple of times.) The trip takes a couple of days, during which they get to know each other and are interviewed by Atomic Eye for his broadcast radio show. Eventually they arrive at Comet X, which they discover to be a big ball of ice around an apparently rock-and-metallic core. Exploring the surface, they discover the wreckage of a crashed alien ship, footprints leading across the ice and into a ravine, and then a hatch at the base of the ravine!

 

Inside, the last PC member, Veil, whose ship crashed into the comet while exploring the solar system for her extradimensional masters (whose existence has yet to be revealed) has discovered the core of the comet is a vast, empty spaceship whose cavernous corridors are patrolled by giant robots largely immune to her own mental powers. Hearing our heroes bashing around outside, she decides they must be more robots looking for her and decides to blow the spacelock hatch to get rid of them. Doing so shoots half the team into space when the atmosphere blows past them, but Widget recovers with his glider and rescues Red Raven, Atomic Eye and Myriad before they're shot into orbit. Meanwhile, actual security robots do arrive investigating all the ruckus and Rift and Matterhorn battle them to a draw, which is broken when Veil pitches in to help the heroes.

 

Everyone reenters the ship and the team slips past more robots, hearing cryptic explanations from Veil about how she arrived here a few days ago herself. She's convinced there are sentient minds on the ship somewhere, but their thoughts are somehow shielded and obscured from her. The team agrees that if there are living beings on board, they can't simply destroy the comet, and go exploring into the corridors.

 

Eventually they find a master control room, and upon entering meet the Warden Computer, a giant wall-mounted Kirby Machine that blinks when it talks to them. They try to question it, but it realizes they are not in fact a maintenance crew (as they claimed) but instead inhabitants of the world they're aimed at. The Warden Computer reveals that it is protecting the mental essences of the Solonians, a parasitic race of pure mental energy stored in crystals, who intend to take over the bodies of humans on Earth and once again live free after a million years of being trapped on this ship. Half the team battles more security robots, while Widget and Matterhorn get their bomb set up inside the crystal chamber. Once it's ready, they flee the Warden Computer; Atomic Eye uses his Penetra-Vision to find a nearer hatch, but it's still buried under ice. Rift says he can disintegrate a tunnel through the ice, but the Exonautilus will still be tethered too far away to reach. Myriad shouts "Don't worry- the ship will be there!" and they leave at top speed. Sure enough, the ship is hovering outside the hatch, since Myriad had the foresight to leave her duplicate behind to pilot! The ship escapes just as the comet blows up spectacularly.

 

Most of the remains are drawn into orbit around the sun, but a single glowing meteorite crashes into the South Pacific not far from Bensalem. It hits the ocean floor, cooling and settling into the muck. After a few minutes, a curious octopus approaches it...

 

Meanwhile, Atomic Eye's broadcasts are heard around the world, and everyone on Earth knows they've been saved by the mysterious Exonauts! Are our heroes prepared for the welcome they'll get upon returning to Earth? Tune in next week, for "Enter... The Monolith!!" dw

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Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

 

So, anybody actually reading these?

 

Session three begins with some group work on how exactly the team was going to function going forwards. They return to Earth to a massive planet-wide celebration of the comet's destruction, but also to a tense political situation as the world's powers would like to know precisely how this little South Pacific island became the leader in the space race. The PCs make a point of telling the world that more than half the team is American, which pleases the Navy- however, they decide to keep the existence of the Solonians (and their destruction) a secret. Chief Zuba of Bensalem agrees to have the team become business partners with their nationalized high-tech corporation, Saloman's House Inc., which helps defuse the US Government's interest in poking around too much in Myriad's activities; instead, President Eisenhower agrees to have them become government contractors as a private concern themselves.

 

Meanwhile, of course, the individual team members have become celebrities in their own rights- Atomic Eye and Matterhorn make a point of doing lots of interviews and going to the best parties. Myriad decides quickly that she's had enough of reporters camping out on the lawn near her lab in New Jersey, and accepts Zuba and Red Raven's offer to move the Exonauts' HQ to Bensalem, keeping a fixed transporter location in New Jersey so the team can get back and forth quickly.

 

After several weeks of establishing the lab and island, the team is almost relieved when another crisis arises. In the East German city of Leipzig, the government unveils a 100' tall statue dedicated to the working man, Der Arbeiter. At the unveiling ceremony, the statue seems to come to life, laughing manically while destroying entire buildings with it's massive sledgehammer. The Exonauts fly their ship to investigate, but the East German government denies them entry, insisting nothing is happening. Widget figures out how to turn theExonautilus invisible, and they enter anyway. The statue by this point has walked most of the way to Berlin, smashing up the countryside and ignoring the futile efforts of the East German air force to even slow it down. Atomic Eye leaps from the plane to lead the attack, attaching himself to the body with magnetic clamps and blasting away with his Gamma Glare (pat. pending.) This is of limited effect, and the statue eventually nails him with the hammer,, knocking him out (though Veil rescues him from a long fall.) The rest of the team joins in the fray, except for Myriad, who remains in the ship to study the strange energy field she detects around the statue. Eventually she finds traces of another such field, a couple of miles back down the monster's path, and heads off to investigate while the battle rages...

 

dw

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Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

 

Will reading these spoil any of the contents of the book? I already intend to buy it' date=' but I want lots of pleasant surprises. :)[/quote']

 

Hmm. I suppose it's possible in the broadest sense, but since I'm nowhere near writing the thing yet I honestly don't know what if anything from this game will actually make it in. We're very early in the process here. dw

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Re: Silver Age Champions playtest begins!

 

The Atomic Eye tried out for the team' date=' but I thought we were going with the Atomic Pie instead, and having both on the team would just be confusing.[/quote']

 

The Atomic Pie was simply too delicious to live. We'll always remember him and his brave sacrifice for us, much like Ferro Lad or Wonder Man. In fact, we'll probably bring him back from the dead in Bronze Age, even tastier than before! dw

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