I’ve been a busy little beaver – and if my keyboard hand’t crapped out on me at the beginning of the month I’d’ve had a lot more done. As it stands, I feel pretty good at the state of my campaign (s). I’ve add another team to the roster (C-Team) and I’ve almost completed everything I need for my face-to-face game (A-Team). I’ve had a lot of help putting all of this together and keeping it together. In particular my co-GM (+Ann LS ), and two “GM’s Assistants” +Hal Batty and +Travis Ellis. +Kyle Norton and +Douglas Cole cool get a shout out here for helping maintain my wiki and/or writing up session reports. Thanks a ton, guys,
I’m doing something rather unique (I think) with my latest campaign – Aeon. Aeon is essentially a supers campaign, except that it’s not. I suppose at its heart it is a giant “What if…?” (What if superpowers were real?). More meta-gaming: What if I ran multiple simultaneous campaigns and see if I can tie them together? What if I create a diaspora in a role-playing game? One driven almost entirely by player characters? To me…that’s huge. I haven’t attempted anything like this since almost 20 years prior when I ran two Shadowrun games at the same time or the sprawling LARP of over 40 players from all over the World of Darkness.
The idea is pretty simple: put together multiple online and face-to-face campaigns and then cross them over. Imagine the possibilities if I could make this work. “Okay, Doug, Zephyr and Arc Light are helping out A-Team, but in return AEGIS sent you two of their best operatives to help you track down that human trafficking ring.” Seriously, think about it. A pool of players that know in advance that they are going to be a part of a larger campaign with dozens of other players. It makes my mind swim.
(And if anyone is interested in actually running in Aeon to add to said diaspora, hit me up. We can talk about it.)
So here I am, thinking outloud on my blog about the various teams I’ve put together. First up: A-Team!
State of the A-Team
This actually ended up a bit messy as we went (as a group) through three sets of characters until we found something we all liked. Then my brother decided he was going to be unable to play and then he could play and then he couldn’t and finally we are back at he can (for sure this time – life is omnomnoming him). Add that to the fact that our mutual friend wanted to play but was hospitalized due to kidney failure and damn near died… So things have been hectic for my face-to-face group. Still, in another couple of weeks the first game is going to happen and man I’m really excited by that. Since the inception of Aeon I’ve always known the A-Team were going to be the “Avengers-level” supers. That they were going to work with or for AEGIS in a similiar capacity in handling problems that are otherwise to dangerous for normal people or other metahumans. After conferring with my players over a span of a couple of weeks we mutually decided that they might not start out from that point. They wanted to do a kind of origin story that started a year or two after the Transatlantic Pulse. This presented a problem to me for several reasons, chief among them was to achieve the power levels I was looking at I couldn’t start them there. Now, I could easily accelerate the amount of points I give, but that could lead to artificial inflation of some traits which was why I decided on using buckets of points to begin with. So the idea I came up with was to halve their starting points and build “high school” versions of their characters. The high school “prequel/mini-series” would last 3-6 sessions at which point in time “Season 1” would start and carry on 10 to 14 sessions, and so on. At the end of each major arc I’d let them add 20% of their starting points to their characters (for the mini-series) and another 40% for Season 1 and Season 2 plus whatever they earn in game. This will hopefully allow me to tell the story I want to tell while giving my players what they want. Overall, I’m very pleased with the tie-ins from the B- and C-Teams and I’m looking forward to seeing how it players out.
Details
Scale: Escalating (starting out as neighborhood, then borough, then city, then nation, then international).
Basic Campaign Concept: “First Generation” metahumans coming to gripes with their powers and the world around them.
Point Range: 1,000 points to 2,000 points (tolerance of ±50%)
Roster
The A-Team consists of 5 players and 1 NPC ally.
Aysella Shinjitai aka Marionette (played by +Ann LS): a telekinetic with the ability to animate objects by imbuing them with Kyberian Energy. She can also detect kyberian energy traces (e.g., “power signatures”), possesses a moderate amount of TK, and can dampen or boost other metahuman powers. She’s also a skilled hand-to-hand combatant and related to the Commander (his third cousin or some such, it’s distant, but they were pretty close growing up). Overall high attributes – but not super-high.
Hobs Ini-Herit aka The Alchemist (played by +Christian Gelacio): a straight-up matter controller with super-strength (he has two power-talents: Hyper-Strength and Matter Control). He’s a brick that’s flexible enough to pull off all kinds of tricks – including the Absorbing Man‘s shtick to mimic a materials atomic structure. He’s also quite strong and has a high enough HT that it’s doubtful he’d die until he hit -HPx5. He’s also a natural athlete, moderately wealthy, and a wizard when it comes to chess (grandmaster by the time he was 12).
Roth Reynard aka Red Zone (played by +Troy Loy): a super-genius with flame powers and a fear of heights. He has a unique ability to summon “pseudo-elementals” of fire that do his bidding. His powers are mostly heat-based, but he can chuck a fireball too. He practically wrote the encryption for most modern security services. High IQ and HT.
Samuel Donick (no alias yet) (played by +Curtis Johnston): A really interesting character. Samuel Donick was actually killed during the TAP, but his body remained in a vegetative coma. Unbeknownst to anyone, his neighbor – a retired Nobel-Prize winner (as of yet unnamed) as a metahuman and when the TAP hit his powers – Telepathy – activated. It also destroyed his body. His mind went into the comatose body of Samuel where he stayed in a coma for an entire year. When he eventually woke up he realized what had happened and did his best to act like how he assumed his teenaged body would. Samuel is a massive telepath with the ability to cloud minds, read minds, communicate with them, knock a target unconscious or paralyze them, and so on. High IQ, high Will, moderate physical stats (his new body was a quarterback).
Unnamed Character (played by +Thomas Phelps): Still working on this one, but so far the character is a florakinetic (he controls planets) who was raised in an orphanage. Unfortunately, the administrator of the orphanage is corrupt and a part of the criminal underworld. Because of this Thomas’s character is forced to commit crimes (including growing various plants with narcotic properties and robberies). More mysteriously, his character’s powers manifested before the TAP…. (His actual stats have yet to be determined, I’ll update this when they are.)
Picking Over the Bones
I’m really rather happy with how this one turned out. I dislike it when I have false starts of any kind, but it really bugs me when I do it while gaming. This line up and what sort of concepts we’re going to explore seems like its going to work just fine. I’ve also already tied in some of the characters from this campaign (Marionette and “Sue”) into the B-Team and look to explore the origins of some characters from the B-Team in the A-Team’s game. We’ll see how it goes
So this is your RPG version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Multiple campaigns but one world?
That's not a bad analogy.