Share your good gaming session

[Hatut Zeraze]

Share your good gaming session:

Some threads, folks share ongoing stories of their campaigns, but I just wanted to type up how much fun I had with the session I ran tonight, rather than the entire campaign.  Maybe having an ongoing thread just for that might be fun.  Perhaps some of you will add to this.  We will see what it does.

 

Tonight's Session:

Background:  My Champions campaign is my own creation, minimally using some elements from the official Champions setting.  Since it just for the folks at home, I occasionally lift an idea from other sources as well.  

Players:  I have three.  

- The Pelican: A self-promoting nightclub security worker.  He has an enormous jaw/bill which can be used to grab and trap people.  He has low-grade super strength, can sprout wings and fly, and can talk to birds.

- Phineas Partridge:  A stark, punishment-obsessed bounty hunter with a suite of fire powers.

- Alternity: An entrepreneur who makes his living promoting and selling the weaponry, security, and defense gadgets he invents.  He uses an exoskeleton, ray-gun, rocket boots, and utility drones to fight crime.

 

A weird-science cult called The Signal Ghouls have been mining strange, psionic, mystical, and hyper-cosmic signals to create super weapons that they sell to supervillains and other criminal organizations.  UNTIL finally succeeded in capturing and deprogramming one of their members, Percy Woolwart, who they used as a highly valuable informant for several years.  Now, without explanation, he has suddenly, mysteriously escaped from their protective custody.  Unbeknownst to UNTIL, Woolwart became psionically aware of a powerful signal passing through our plane of existence.  He knew that the Signal Ghouls would seek it out and try to get him to help them.  Woolwart didn't trust UNTIL to be able to protect him, so he came up with a plan - he would entrust the discovery of the cosmic signal to some local heroes he had become aware of.  He created a psychic mantra that would open up their perceptions to the signal once it was spoken aloud.  Woolwart then tracked down each of the heroes and shared with them one part of the mantra.  When all three were read aloud in the correct order, they would then be able to perceive, but not necessarily understand the cosmic signal.

 

To achieve this goal, I attempted a challenging structure.  I ran each of the three players through a mini-solo adventure, with each one involving the strange interaction with Woolwart in which he shared one-third of the psychic mantra.  I had to keep each mini-adventure entertaining enough that even the non-participants were entertained and short enough to get through all three.  I am not sure I would recommend doing this regularly, but I was able to pull it off.

 

1. Phineas Partridge

Partridge was tracking the bounty for a credit-card security data thief named Jovan Lukavic.  Lukavic was hiding out in a retro 80s-style arcade with big standing video game machines, foosball tables, and a bar.  Instead of actually playing games, he had rigged up one of the Galaga machines to give him internet access and he continued his criminal work from the arcade.  He was protected by a trio of martial artists called Dunce Dunce Revolution.  Partridge fought the bodyguards and apprehended Lukavic, but not before being handed an index card with seemingly jibberish words by a weird man with huge, Marty Feldman eyes.

 

2. Alternity

Alternity was setting up his booth for the local Future Design Expo and everything went black.  He awakens inside a tight box, not dissimilar to what it might feel like to wake up in a coffin.  He is without his exoskeleton and most of his equipment.  He does have the controls and eyeglass monitors that let him utilize his targeting drone, though (the drone has visual clairsentience).  He turns it on and the drone powers up in Alternity's van, but the van doesn't appear to be in the Expo parking lot.  Alternity remote flies the drone up and finds some local landmarks and Alternity realizes the van and the equipment were dropped just off the highway less than a mile out of town.  Alterntity flies his drone back to and into the Expo and finds not only his empty booth, but the nearby booth of a rival tech organization, Precision Horizon Industries.  Their booth is especially ostentatious with a huge, towering silhouette of a spy above their logo.  Flying the drone around the booth, he realizes that the silhouette is mounted on a box, one that is suspiciously man-sized, with a unnaturally sophisticated lock on it.  Alternity lands his drone on the box and confirms that he is indeed inside that same box.  He then flies his drone over to a police officer he knows from a previous case that happens to be attending the Expo.  With some nudging, he gets the officer to follow the drone over to the box.  The police officer frees Alternity.  At one point, during the mini-adventure, though, the drone was approached by a man with big eyes who stuck an index card onto the drone.

 

3. The Pelican

At Studio 43, weird local hero The Pelican welcomes local citizens into the popular nightclub.  An absurdly sweaty man tried to get in, but was turned away by The Pelican.  The sweaty man tried to run past and when The Pelican tried to grab him, the sweaty man slipped right out of his grip, leaving a weird, abundant oily residue.  He exuded more oil and slip-slide-skated into the club, pursuing Peytience Amore, an up-and-coming internet exotic model who was at the club that night.  During the pursuit, The Pelican was confronted by the big-eyed Woolwart, who handed him the index card with his third of the mantra.  When The Pelican got back to the sweaty man and found once more  that grabbing the man was no use as he again slipped out of the hold, he attempted to draw him out by charming the object of his apparent obsession.  The Pelican sprouted his wings and took Peytience for a dance above the crowd on the dance floor.  Enraged by the competition, the sweaty man declared that he too was a superhero and called himself The Slicketeer.  He came at The Pelican and tagged him with an ineffectual punch. The Pelican responded back with a one-punch knockout.  

 

The heroes met at the nightclub, sharing their stories and they read the parts of the mantra aloud, which resulted in each of them hearing a constant buzzing pulse that no one else seemed to be able to hear.  Through a review of the Nightclub's security cameras, they found that the mysterious big-eyed man who shared the mantra pieces was, in turn, being followed by another man, one they all recognized as retired baseball player Martin Gale.  When they approached Gale, who was still at the club, he revealed that he was secretly an UNTIL agent and shared the background of Woolwart.  Once the heroes shared the information about the persistent buzzing pulse that they could hear, Agent Gale became alarmed.  He has now invited them to come with him to the local UNTIL facilities to determine whether or not they are in danger and how to use this information to try and find Woolwart, who somehow disappeared from the club during the fracas.  

 

NEXT:  The heroes will face an assault team of the Signal Ghouls who are also attempting to find Woolwart.  If they discover that the heroes can now identify the cosmic signal, though, their efforts will be turned in their direction.  And just what does that cosmic signal do?  What are the real stakes at play?