Killer Shrike

Everything is relative to baseline 8 characteristics 0 point normal humans. So, people with a 150 odd points plus some number of hidden points of gear are quite good by comparison. And as on each character their butter is spread thin over their toast, even a single +1 in something and a semi-niche ability is enough to cast a character as a "specialist".

Ya, it's interesting to me as the GM to see relationships between the characters form over time. Adds a lot to the interplay.

Yes, there's config options for currency symbol and # of decimal places on one of the campaign rule tabs. I have a clear memory of seeing it before. Not yet had a reason to change the defaults. I'll play with that later tonight; overloading the cost field would be better than having to rely on Notes, for my purposes.

Ok...I'll adjust things next time I'm in HD and repost.

I didn't have a problem with it...you don't get to be the final girl in every supernatural set to by being dumb. Also, it was well within her "looks out for number one" psylim.

I can't look at the file currently (working) but off the top of my head you had 0 XP in the tank (we spent your remaining 3 points from last go around on +1 Supernatural Resistance), and you gained 4 XP in this last session, so...you can't afford a 4 point and also a 3 point power. Now, if you like, given you haven't actually used that +1 point of SR as it did not come up in the session, I'm ok with bumping your SR back down to 5 to free up 3 points, leaving you with 7 XP to spend...your call. I want you to be happy with where your character is at.

Reunited, the five Hunters reconvened their partnership. Drew cast an experienced eye around the area and pointed out a snipers blind for Killroy to support a plan of luring Dai out of the building into the front courtyard so that Killroy could take the shot while the rest of the Hunters took up supporting positions. Drew wanted the easy on the eyes Baretta to play bait, going into the building, getting Dai's attention, and then running out to kite the vamp into the open. Baretta was having none of that idea and suggested they send the supposedly invulnerable kid, Joey, in instead. Drew took exception that she'd send a kid in, and the two resumed their already contentious relationship. Not wanting to see the group fracture again, Joey quickly volunteered to be the bait and the argument was grudgingly settled...aided by a nearly silent electric luxury sedan pulling up behind the building on the other side of the studio. Joey and Drew noticed it, but the rest of the group had their back turned and did not. Joey pointed it out and the team sprang into action mode. Joey and Drew made for a window on the front of the building while Murgatroyd took up a position nearby at a corner, and Baretta tactically jogged towards the other corner where the vehicle Joey and Drew had spotted allegedly was. Killroy snapped in to support Baretta. Murgatroyd got Drew's attention and conveyed via pantomime that his detection spell indicated Dai was on the other side of a boarded up window by the also boarded up front door. Drew turned and fired without hesitation, the bullet luckily finding a gap between the boards, shattering some remaining glass, and could then be heard to ricochet off of something indoors, followed by an improbable "OW! WHAT THE $#*%!" from inside. Nearly simultaneously Joey plunged through the window he had been aiming at, shattering the board over it. Killroy refocused his attention in that direction. Drew noted some of the shards of wood as potentially useful makeshift stakes. Around back, Baretta could see that there was indeed a fancy luxury vehicle parked behind the building and that one of the board sections had been pulled down off a open window...presumably the driver of the vehicle had gone inside. She pulled out her cell phone and snapped a picture of the license plate and sent it to SAIC Harker. Inside the studio Joey could hear both Dai in the front lobby, and someone else on the other side of a wall towards the back of the building. Running towards the front lobby, he came out near Dai and leveled his shotgun. Finally! He'd get to shoot it! Dai, seeing some kid wearing a "I {heart} LA" t-shirt (which Drew had bought him earlier at the first crime scene to replace Joey's blood-soaked original shirt) and pointing a shotgun at him, stared menacingly and said "Like...just...GO AWAY, MAN!" with the full force of vampiric influence. However, though not entirely unaffected, Joey proved to be resilient to this type of control and said, "Uh, no...", and prepared to shoot. Dai, startled that his most reliable trick hadn't worked, activated vampire speed and blurred out the window Drew had shot him through, bursting boards, took a swipe at Drew forcing him to dive for cover, and finally...conveniently...ended his movement smack in the middle of the courtyard and Killroy's sights. Drew and his damn improbable plans that somehow work out way more often than they should at play again, perhaps? Killroy didn't hesitate to ease his rifle's trigger back, and a third round from of his dwindling supply of consecrated bullets exploded Dai's head in a geyser of blood and flung the corpse several meters to thud against the side of the building. "Dammit, we needed him alive!", Drew muttered. With Dai gone, Joey ran further into the building to find the other person he had heard and rounded the corner, shotgun at the ready, on a frightening looking and much more menacing vampire...who stared Joey in the eyes...and that's the last thing Joey remembered, locked in some kind of a mental mesmerism. Unknown to him, the vamp then pounced upon Joey and started to try to feed, but the vamp was rather dismayed to discover that his fangs could not penetrate Joey's skin...like, at all. The vamp, who was none other than Slip, was just starting to realize that he might be in a bad situation when Baretta leaned in through the back window and saw some vampire trying to feed on a seemingly helpless Joey. She aimed carefully before unmercifully blowing the back of Slip's head off with one of her own limited supply of blessed bullets. Four decades of dodging some of the best Hunters in the business as well as other enemies came to a close for Slip, shot from behind like Jesse James. With no further threats remaining, the team regrouped and called it in. SAIC Harker was "not happy" that they had managed to kill all the known vamps and thus known sources of information. He ordered them to sit on the bodies and the car and he would helo lift to their location. Thus endeth the session.... Part 2 >>

Murgatroyd worked out the details of a functional detect spell for Dai using a profile photo on one of the dead vamps phones, and with the crime scene under control, Drew was comfortable leaving the rest of the cleanup to others. Saddling back up in the loaner black SUV, the trio headed towards Van Nuys guided by Murgatroyd's spell. Meanwhile, actually already in Van Nuys, Killroy and Baretta found Dai's residential address easily, half of a duplex in a lower rent neighborhood. The side of the duplex they were interested in was possibly vacant, though a dim light could be seen behind the front window's curtain. Uncertain if Dai had possibly turned neighbors, the duo proceeded cautiously. Finally, after some cell phone communication back and forth with SAIC Harker and Drew & team, they decided that the place was probably deserted and moved in via breaking a corner of the front window and opening it for ingress. They found a shitty, poorly furnished and not very tidy bachelor apartment, abandoned. Upstairs in the single bedroom on a beside table Baretta found a kinko's copies cardboard box about half full of band flyers for "Maximum Carnage", apparently the name of Dai's wannabe metal band. The other three vamps that were killed by the team earlier appeared to be the rest of the band. According to the flyer, the band was celebrating being picked up by Slip It To Me records with a "one night only" appearance at the Lush...the club where the vamp attack had occurred. On speaker phone with the rest of the team, Baretta told them the url for the band's website, which Joey looked up...and from there dug into Slip It To Me records, and its parent company Glitterglam Industries. Various clues about the adventure were thereby revealed. Meanwhile, Drew's expert driving was leading them inexorably to an abandoned music studio in a rundown industrial area of Van Nuys...Music Town Studios...Joey looked it up and discovered that the abandoned building was still listed as being owned by one Samuel Phillip Wilson...owner of Slip It To Me Records and Chief Operating Officer of Glitterglam Industries...hrm...The group surmised that Samuel Wilson is likely the vampire called "Slip" who is known to have been hanging around LA for nearly four decades but somehow always avoids capture or destruction. He's as slippery as his namesake. Between that and Murgatroyd's spell clearly indicating that Dai could be found inside the studio, the group was sure they were in the right place. Killroy and Baretta rejoined them soon. While waiting, Joey's program finished processing, and he reviewed the findings. A clear pattern emerged of normal dumb ass wannabe rock star behavior between the three vamps and their social network, and then several days ago a marked change in who they were communicating with (or more to the point, weren't) and what they were talking about...it was obvious when they had been turned. The main thrust of conversation that emerged was that "Slip" wanted them to do something violent to someone called "Vincent", and back and forth conversation about whether they actually would. From the tone of the conversation, they were working up their courage. Joey relayed all of that to Drew, and Drew called it in to Mathews and asked for analyst support.

Baretta and Killroy rushed over to help Joey, and Baretta pulled a first aid kit from her backpack. Killroy provided his belt, and working together they managed to get a real tourniquet in place. Joey carried the nearly-dead-for-real vamp to the back of the SUV and climbed into the back with him while the rest of the group tried to think of a way to restrain the vampire should he recover. Various increasingly unlikely scenarios were explored, but finally accepting that there wasn't much they could to do restrain someone who could rabbit punch a car door completely off its hinges and send it flying, Drew ordered Joey to just sit on the vamp and use his own superhuman strength to restrain the perp. Killroy and Baretta ran down a couple of cell phone video tapers to confiscate their phones as evidence. Drew pulled ID's and cell phones from the victims, called in their drivers licenses, found a phone number for the vampire named Dai on one of the dead vamps phone, and called that in for directory lookup. In the back of the SUV, silently the vamps regeneration had kicked in and healed him enough to put up some fight. Throwing Joey off of himself with tremendous strength, the vamp tried to escape before realizing he was missing a leg. Joey bounced off the inside of the SUV but was unharmed and kicked off the interior wall to land a devastating punch on the vamps sternum in an attempt to regain control and prevent escape. Unfortunately, the badly injured vamp could not sustain that kind of force...the tourniquet was burst from the pressure as the vamp's chest caved in. Bleh...dead for real this time. Murgatroyd had bailed from the backseat of the truck what with all the brouhaha going on which got Drew's attention and he returned to the truck...seeing the situation he just sighed and handed off the cell phones he had pilfered to Joey to data dump and sift through. Meanwhile using the cell phone number Drew had called in to get billing records, analysts texted Drew an address for the last known residence of Dai, and he shared that info with the team. Baretta and Killroy wanted to immediately go check out the location, while Drew insisted the team first lock down security footage and secure the scene. Tensions between Drew and Baretta were immediate and they were unable to agree. Thus the team split, with Baretta and Killroy driving off to Van Nuys while Drew managed the scene by calling things in and putting arriving law enforcement to work, Murgatroyd paged through his field spell book for a detection spell and Joey wrote a grepping script to sift through the data he gained from the dead vamps' phones looking for keywords, patterns, and hopefully some kind of a timeline of changes in behavior as gleaned from texting and calls.

Moving interesting bits of the arc described previously in the Dark Champions forum to here for organizational purposes...the notes from the adventure were later generalized for reuse as the vignette The Tears of Tierrasola _________________ Over the course of two sessions, the highschooler Joey and the salty retired SWAT Lt. turned Monster Hunter Drew began an unlikely partnership when caught in the middle of a Revenant attack in the sleepy suburb of Tierrasola. After killing a bunch of Revenants, the dynamic duo tracked the source of the revenant outbreak to the Tierrasola Memorial Hills cemetary up in the hills bordering the suburb, eventually finding the Black Wizard Antonio Aguilar in a many hundred year old marble crypt from the days of Spanish rule, using a powerful artifact in an attempt to resurrect long dead ancestors, powerful Black Wizards of centuries ago, in an attempt to return his diminished family to power in occult circles. In the innermost chamber, protected by a lethally dangerous mystical circle that was proof against mundane intervention, Antonio had been chanting away for nearly an hour struggling to bring back the souls of his long dead predecessors; the necromantic emanations of the artifact radiating outward caused the less long-dead corpses in the graveyard to rise as revenants as a side effect. When the PC's arrived in the chamber, Antonio ignored them, confident that his magical dome would be sufficient to keep them out, and indeed Drew's bullets were unable to penetrate the warding circle...literally disintegrating upon contact. But the superhumanly durable Joey experimented by sticking a pinky into the barrier for a second, and while it did singe his skin his healing factor immediately erased the damage. In a moment of heroism, Joey leaped thru the barrier. His clothes, hair, and carried items were evaporated and his skin was singed much like a bad sunburn, but he healed it almost immediately. Inside the circle with Antonio and the two bundles of bone the Black Wizard was attempting to resurrect, Joey tried punching Antonio several times to disrupt his casting, but Antonio continued to ignore him and chant, demonstrating personal magical protection from harm. Finally Joey shoved Antonio as hard as he could, and managed to push him out of the circle, breaking the spell and bringing down the protective dome. Though the players didn't yet know it, all the remaining revenants dropped inert at this moment, no longer animated by the necromantic energy of the necklace. Drew, who had maneuvered around to get a clear line of fire, immediately snapped off a head shot that should have killed just about anything, but the bullet failed to penetrate the Black Wizards head, blocked by his mystical protection. The whiplash and impact still seemed to get his attention, and Antonio responded with a cone of black tendrils that blinded Drew for a while. Meanwhile Athyric Surges zapped out, punishing Joey with powerful mystical shocks. Joey wound up for a haymaker, and with a little bit of luck (Drew's Extreme Luck applied to his roll), clocked Antonio with a staggering slam. After that, the Black Wizard was on his back foot, forced to buy time. He tried to erect another barrier, but Joey grabbed and threw him (aided again by Drew's luck) away from it. Antonio responded with life draining energies, stealing some of Joey's essence to heal himself which bought more time. But Drew's vision returned, and he started to harass Antonio with a series of lucky shots with his pistol. Finally Joey body slammed the Black Wizard to the ground and locked in a grab. As Drew prepared to deliver a coup de grace, Antonio surrendered, offering to make a deal with Section M in return for clemency. Drew duct tape gagged, and blindfolded the Black Wizard, and took away his artifact. Joey, still naked, took Antonio's clothes as they were about the same size, and then they zip tied him for good measure. About twenty minutes later the established Hunter Garrett showed up with his Hunter team to handle cleanup, Antonio was handed off, and after some blah blah blah, the PC's went their separate ways. It was later revealed that Joey's adoptive parents were among those killed by rampaging Revanents, leaving him an orphan once again. Drew agreed to let the kid crash on his couch until he graduated high school in a couple of months, then all bets were off...supposedly.

You want that instead of the Variable SFX?

10 or 11, for a short period of time, during the year or so I was running D&D 3e after it was released. I can't even remember all the players...various players brought other players and significant others into the group and suddenly we had too many. I felt like less the GM and more the Ringmaster. I pared that group down to 8, which was a size I was comfortable running at back in the day. These days I prefer exactly 2 players, or between 3-6 players and will run a different style of play based on the actual number. The main problem with large groups is there is an increasing % that at least one player will be unable to make any given session, and within a session there is proportionately less time for each player to take focus.

You could do that, but IPE would be more direct. If you upgraded Variable SFX to Variable Advantage w/ Arcane Blasts over time, you could swap out for whatever was most useful in the moment...IPE, 0END, AoE, Variable SFX, whatever...it's in the future at any rate, so we can figure it out when / if it becomes relevant. I wouldn't worry about it in the meantime.

Nope, its not a spell...it's a learned ability. You can use the ring normally OR as a full phase action and +2 END you can use the ring w/ Variable SFX applied. As a side note, I let you get away with a free Invisible Power Effects with the UV is not visible to the human eye bit as it was fun in the moment, but it isn't completely invisible to sight...the black light effect on everything in its path is visible. However, it is certainly much less visible and "wow that's obviously supernatural" than a ray of magical energy would normally be, so it also offers a sort of stealthy ghetto IPE in a pinch...particularly in daylight and particularly particularly in California where most people wear sunglasses with UV filters during the day...even vs targets that are not vulnerable to UV.

@Durzan Malakim If you are looking for something to spend your 4 XP on, you might consider buying an ability something like this... Ring Mastery: Variable Special Effects (Limited Group of SFX; UV, Fire; +1/4) for up to 45 Active Points of Blast (11 Active Points); OIF (Ring; -1/2), Increased Endurance Cost (x2 END; -1/2), Linked (Ring of Arcane Blasts; -1/2); Real Cost: 4 That would save you the hassle of wasting VPP space and action econ to cast a spell to get that effect. As time elapses, you could even dump more XP into that and upgrade it from Variable SFX to Variable Advantage. It would look something like this (quick pass): http://www.killershrike.com/HereThereBeMonsters/Characters/durzan/Murgatroyd/159/Murgatroyd.HTML

Drew got on the SUV's PA system and ordered all civilians in the area to depart immediately due to extreme danger, lethal force authorized, etc...and using cop lingo, confident authority, plus the pure decibels of the PA system (and maybe a little luck as well)...he convinced most people to do just that. A couple of die hard cell phone users further away from the action were unswayed however, and began filming the incident. There were also doubtlessly security cameras in the nearby shops, and less visible looky-loos with recording devices. Drew was already worrying at that problem in the back of his mind and coming up with a containment plan. Stopping a bit further down the road, Baretta Colt exited her vehicle, slapped leather to get the cold steel of her custom 1911's into her hands, and put a round through the back window of the upside down Civic to blow a chunk out of the trapezius of one of the vampires, who howled with anger and a predatory promise of vengeance. On the other side of the Civic, Killroy wasted no time stabilizing his sniper rifle on the passenger door's window frame and taking a booming shot to completely blow the shoulder off one of the other vamps with one round from his small supply of consecrated bullets. Murgatroyd rolled down his window and extended a knobbly fist, pointing his fancy signet ring at the now one-armed vampire Killroy had shot, and emitted an invisible-to-the-human-eye burst of arcane energy arranged in a mystical latticework meant to emulate ultraviolet light. The vampire's flesh blistered and peeled away immediately, and the young vamp emitted a horrifying shriek as he caught fire and died. The vampire shot in the trapezius by Colt sprang from the vehicle and rushed at her, one arm limp but the other poised to strike. She snapped off a high shot to stop the creature, but missed! Killroy's big gun boomed again and the vampire's torso literally exploded, burst by the consecrated large caliber round. Luckily the round was consumed by the release of mystical energy and did not continue on to strike Baretta who was directly in the line of fire. Joey jumped out and ran towards the upside down Civic, eager to get to shoot his new shotgun, but the third vampire...the driver...burst free from his seat belt and knocked the driver's side car door clear off its hinges and thirty feet or more away with one hard burst of strength. Then he launched himself catapult-like from the vehicle straight at Joey in a mighty leap, landing just short. Drew had opted to depart the SUV and braced across the hood of the vehicle; he snapped off a shot at Joey's attacker deliberately targeting the knee with the intent of taking the vamp alive for interrogation. Drew took the shot, and hit the back of the vampire's knee with perfect accuracy as planned. Unfortunately, the 10mm round caught a bone, ricocheted around quite a bit, spalling horrifically, and ultimately blew the leg clean off just above the knee. The vampire's blood gushed out in a massive spurt, coating Joey, and the vamp fell to the ground nearly drained of the mystically infused blood that allowed his undead body to persist...and thus nearly expired. Baretta yelled out, exasperatedly, "don't kill that one! we need to question him!" and Killroy relayed that info, but not knowing what to do Joey hesitated. Finally he put down his shotgun (still unfired) and clamped on to the vamp's thigh, squeezing the truncated leg with superhuman strength as a sort of half-assed tourniquet.

The Hunters: Part 1: Having slain Nikolai and liberated the Heart Stone from his corrupted possession, our beleaguered hunters prepared to exit the Cthonic realm. Aaron Fitzgibbons opted to remain behind in his home dimension with the noble goal of trying to drive off the Elder Thing encircling his world; he is surely doomed to fail but it is certainly heroic of him to make the attempt. He may not have been thinking clearly after consuming an entire bottle of vodka found in Nikolai's drawing room. The alluring dagger Drew had clutched so possessively upon finding had been destroyed in the act of killing Nikolai...almost as if that exact thing were the purpose for which the dagger had been crafted in the first place. The rest of the arcane bric a brac littering Nikolai's manor was deemed too potentially dangerous to dick around with by Murgatroyd so the Hunters kept their hands to themselves. Joey picked up the Heart Stone itself on the premise he was the most likely to survive any unforeseen magical backlash, but he was unharmed. Murgatroyd pulled forth the beacon spell he had been given before departing his own dimension and portentously intoned the incantation scribbled upon it. Everyone tensed up in preparation of something happening...but nothing happened. A tense few moments elapsed. Murgatroyd squinted closely and realized he had mispronounced the last syllable of the last word of the spell. He intoned the spell again, stretching that last syllable properly...and a rift formed in space right there in front of them in dead Nikolai's study. "Ahem...magic is mostly a matter of repetition...", Murgatroyd said. Exiting the cloying rancid sweetness of Nikolai's dimension and entering the dry arid heat of Las Vegas was an unimaginably uplifting improvement in life circumstances, but each of the four survivors...Drew, Joey, Killroy, and Murgatroyd, were permanently changed in some small way by their time in that doomed plane. A harried Agent Mathews of Section M awaited them. Though surprised all of them made it, he was alarmed when the attending "specialist" Abernathy observed that the four of them were "different somehow...marked by some alien magic". A tense few minutes followed, and it was starting to look like Section M might decide to quarantine the hunters until they could figure out whatever was going on with them, but Agent Mathews got a text message that superseded small matters such as whether or not to allow potentially Cthonically corrupted individuals to wander around freely. Apparently, a vampire attack had just occurred in public on the Sunset Strip back in LA and he had to get back lickety-split. He took the Hunters back with him via the teleport circle down in the dining room of the split level house on the fringes of Las Vegas in whose attic the Cthonic rift had been opened in. Emerging back in the classified Section M facility near Riverside, CA which Mathews works out of in an eye blink, the Hunters were told to stand by while Mathews went off to get apprised of the situation. Returning forthwith, Agent Mathews seemed rattled. SAIC Harker, a very senior Section M Agent with decades of experience and a well-earned reputation for being an aggressive loose cannon applied by the Bureau only to those problems where extreme measures are expected to be taken, had arrived at the facility unannounced. Apparently he was running a black op against a vampire infestation in the LA area, without Mathews or anyone else in the field office knowing about it. A pack of newly turned vamps Harker's field agents had been trailing in hopes of being led to a master vampire or at least a bloodsucker higher up the totem pole, had frenzied and killed around 40 people in a night club on the Strip. One of the field agents was dead, and the vamps were in the wind. Harker was demanding resources from Mathews' field office to contain the situation. The hunters were the only team on hand ready to go, so Mathews asked them to step up and go deal with the vamps. After a few moments of thought all four agreed. Mathews ushered them in to meet Harker, but was visibly nervous and practically begged the hunters to "not embarrass" him as "this guy can end my career". He also warned them to not mention Waco. "Seriously, we do not talk about Waco around SAIC Harker. Just...don't, ok? Trust me on this." Harker immediately displayed his "charming" personality in full force, gave them an incredibly terse summary of the situation, sent Drew a coordinate tracker for his "agent in the field" who was in pursuit of "between one and four fleeing vampires", and launched the four of them out into the action by sheer force of angsty will. Mathews met them in the parking garage on their way out, as they were trying to decide whether to take one of Killroy's or Murgatroyd's rentals or Drew's personally owned vehicle, an unremarkable sedan. None of the cars were well suited to a high speed chase or any sort of tactical situation. Mathews gave Drew the keys to one of the FBI black SUV's, and hurriedly handed out some specialist ammo and gave Joey a shotgun. Which Joey immediately looked down the barrel of, prompting Drew to snatch it away from him and give his young ward a quick primer on shotgun loading, unloading, and general operation. "And don't point it at me, kid". The four then piled in to the SUV, Drew driving, Killroy in the passenger seat, Murgatroyd and Joey in the back. Drew demonstrated his cop driving skills, eventually putting the siren to good use, and hauled ass by every means available to him through relatively light near-midnight traffic. They were able to make good time towards the blinking blip of Harker's field agent's GPS on Drew's phone. Eventually a HiPol fell in to the SUV's wake and tailed them to their off ramp. As they exited the freeway in front of where it looked like the GPS signal they were following would eventually end up, Drew pulled off the exit ramp and waited. Their HiPol tail pulled up and wanted to know what the hell was going on; Drew flashed credentials and his retiree badge and gave the patrolman the basic situation and asked him to get back on the freeway, loop back around, and close off the exit ramp for thirty minutes. The patrolman was hesitant but called in Drew's FBI consultant license number and was told to comply with Drew's request. A few minutes later, a shitty Civic with three tweaked out punks in it drove by the SUV, followed by other vehicles, and then by a small sports car which seemed to sync up with the GPS signal on Drew's phone. Pulling back onto the road, Drew maneuvered the SUV around to pull up abreast with the sports car...windows were rolled down and our hunters met fellow hunter Baretta Colt. A shouted conversation through the windows established the situation...the car full of tweakers that had driven past first was three of the vamps from the club attack. Drew indicated understanding and then pulled ahead, lights flashing. In Drew's head, what would happen was the erratically driving wigged out bad guys would reasonably and rationally assume the siren spinning black SUV pulling up on them was just a cop trying to pass them to go somewhere else, which would allow Drew to get in front of them and bar their path. What actually happened was the vampire doing the driving panicked, recklessly tried to veer off the road, lost control of the vehicle, and ended up flipping the getaway car in a rolling crash ended by slamming into a civilian car. A pileup ensued. Drew's tactical driving skills proved useful again as he was able to bring his large vehicle to a sliding halt, somehow avoiding collision and also luckily ending with the SUV's headlights pointed directly at the upside down getaway vehicle of the three vampires Baretta had been pursuing. There was a brief pause as those involved took stock of the situation. Then all hell broke loose.

Having survived the cloying tendrils and tentacled horrors of the Cthonic dimension of Nikolai and taken the Heartstone by right of conquest, the hunters returned home...and were immediately called upon to intervene in an emergent vampire outbreak at a club on Sunset Strip. Joined by three time survivor of supernatural horrors turned monster hunter Baretta Colt, and a lay brother of the Roman Catholic Church's ancient brotherhood of vampire slayers, Jack of the Ordo Sanguine, Murgatroyd, Killroy, Joey, and Drew careened off into the streets of L.A. to bring the final rest to any bloodsuckers they could run to ground. They didn't know it yet, but our intrepid Hunters were about to make a very powerful new enemy in the form of a shadowy society of elder vamps known as L'Éminence Nocturne...but that's a problem for later. First they must survive this long bloody night... Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

I allow All Skill and Overall Levels to be applied over Maxima up to 17-. At these point levels 10-12 points is a major investment so I make them worth it. So if you have Hermetic Lore 14- and an Overall Level you can apply the OL to Hermetic Lore for 15- If you had a All KS Level and Hermetic Lore 14- and were attempting a roll with no penalties, it would still be 14-; if there were a -1 penalty for some reason (perhaps doing a Hermetic Lore task in less time) you could apply the All KS level for a modified 14- (-1, +1). I'm a reasonable guy; if Murgatroyd had an All KS level and wanted to switch spells in his VPP faster than normal, and you wanted to apply the KS level to offset a situational penalty for rushing, I'd let you do it with the understanding that if you fail the Hermetic Lore roll, you have to start over on switching out the spells...and as you've experienced I keep the pace rapid most of the time so you often wont have time to start over in practice. But 14- is 90.7% so odds would be in your favor.

I'm using this thread to track the character's progress, I'll be starting up a separate topic for the adventure itself. As people tell me what they want to spend their XP from last night on, I'll be using this post to keep track of the updated sheets...WilyQ and Scything told me what they wanted on the drive home after the session, so I've updated Joey and Drew. After recalling that lack of light penalties are a pain, WilyQ wanted Drew to have a flashlight or two, so we bumped up Drew's gear pool a bit to accommodate a cop-style flashlight and also an under-barrel mounted flashlight attachment for his pistol. He also recognized the threat of the pouncey-grabby behavior of the vampires thus far encountered, and thus Drew also recollected some old grappling training he hasn't had to use in a while but "used to be good at" (we added an escape maneuver to his CQB martial art, which he's "always known" but not yet had reason to demonstrate knowing...nothing to see here, just a bush, move along citizens... ). We also swapped a maneuver he's never used (Nelson!) for a very similar maneuver which traded 1D6 NND for Target Falls (Ground & Cuff) which suits Drew's style better as actually played. Future XP will likely see Drew starting to carry zip ties or cuffs, but no room in the budget currently. @WilyQuixote Scything was happy with finding a niche of being "the tech-savvy" member of the group, so he fleshed out Joey's Computer Programming skill. @Scything Murgatroyd mastered a new trick with his Ring of Arcane Blasts, tuning the beam of energy to take on other properties...such as emulating UV light for the pragmatic purpose of giving vampires sunburns. @Durzan Malakim Baretta has a new fitness trick that allows her to push herself to a heightened response time, but it tires her out (limited SPD). {still under negotiation, so subject to change prior to her next appearance} @Steve

I'm going to try to make some time to get up on this. I was huge into CoH from launch to shutdown (with a few gaps of play over the years due to life events). I had so many max level'd characters I honestly can't remember them all. Spent WAY to much time playing the game, STILL miss it years after shutdown.

A couple of past players took the time to write up Dossiers for their characters...you might have the start of one there... http://www.killershrike.com/HereThereBeMonsters/Campaigns/WeTooUntoDarkness/JonBregg/Dossier.aspx http://www.killershrike.com/HereThereBeMonsters/Campaigns/WeTooUntoDarkness/MilesHendricks/Dossier.aspx

Keep in mind vs some threats, he's the _most_ survivable.

Ya...I vaguely recall seeing a "reverse shadowcat" ability like that as well...but I cannot remember the source.

5e Champions page 18 sidebar: Uncontrollable Eyebeams: The character’s eyes constantly emit beams of powerful energy, making him a danger to everything around him. He can control this power through the use of special high-tech glasses or goggles, but if they’re taken away he’s in trouble. (This power requires the GM’s permission because of the way it partly buys off the Always On Limitation.) Energy Blast 12d6, Reduced Endurance (0 END; +½), Persistent (+½) (120 Active Points); Always On (-½) (total cost: 80 points) and buy off the Always On effect (40 Active Points); OAF (special glasses; -1) (total cost: 20 points). Total cost: 100 points.