Last Friday was the latest episode of Clint’s New Centurions game. We picked up pretty much exactly where we had left off last time – about to take a bug-bus into another dimension to face the invaders on their own turf.
Our expedition was delayed slightly, as we met up with a few of the emerging heroes in our world, such as Captain Vitality ((Here’s an interesting little bit of GM trickery for when you can’t come up with a good name: come up with a bad name, and make it obvious that it’s a bad name. Case in point: Captain Vitality was somewhat abashed about his name, as it had been given to him by a fourteen-year-old. I did a similar thing in a D&D game when I created a magic sword studded with blue gems that I then named Vermillion. Viridian was the word I had actually been looking for, but I messed up, so I made the sword touchy about the fact it had been named by a colour-blind enchanter.)) and Kid Dynamo ((Not, apparently, named after the song by The Buggles.)), and also to rescue some civilians being mind-controlled by the invaders’ parasite-firing guns. But eventually we managed to head off to the portal to the alien realm, leaving our new allies and a warrior made of rock to guard our way home.
Along the way, in the chaos of the invasion and the dozens ((Perhaps hundreds.)) of attacks on civilians, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. ((Y’know, I thought the acronym thing was a neat idea when I made it up, but it’s really annoying to type t properly. And I’m enough of a curmudgeon that I refuse to drop the capitalization and periods. A cautionary tale for creating names.)) became aware that his mentor and tech specialist was no longer online. This rattled him enough that he made several less-than-heroic suggestions along the way, garnering a set-back die for the GM to use.
Once through the dimensional portal, we found ourselves in empty space. Queen Celeste was able to lead us to the voidship that our bug-bus came from, and we attempted to sneak in with the bug-bus’s recognition codes. We made it all the way to the docking orifice, but then got locked out. When there was no instant destructo-beam deployed against us, and we saw the invaders walking around on the surface of the voidship with no breathing apparatus, we decided to jump out on the surface of the ship and try to make our way inside to break stuff and generally make the bad guys stop with the invading.
The voidship proved to be the same kind of organic tech as the bug-bus, but much larger, of course. As we made our way through the cysts, polyps, and giant hairs on the surface, we woke up a large, nasty worm creature that apparently lives in the flesh of the voidship. It swallowed Paladin, but Widowmaker teleported up onto its head and used her gravity smash to pummel it while Falkata and Queen Celeste cut into the thing’s belly, meeting Paladin cutting his way out. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. managed to use his advanced predictive algorithms to get the thing to impale itself on one of the tree-sized, spear-like hairs ((Using a hero die to do a power stunt.)), and then the others finished it off.
We crawled into the thing’s burrow, and made our way inside the ship, and that’s where we left things for the night.
I have to say, after a rocky start, the campaign is really starting to click. The major difficulty was the whole switching-systems thing, but we players are starting to get the hang of how to do things in the game, and how to make exciting, heroic choices. Clint’s mixing comic book sensibility with Cthulhoid flavouring in the current scenario to create an interesting, exciting adventure, and the larger questions in the background are keeping the mystery and interest levels high.
It’s a fun game, and I’m looking forward to the next issue.
I was particularly pleased with throwing Nightshade at the Centurions when the group had no opportunity to interrogate him, and in fact had to figure out what to do to secure him while they dealt with the Illithid Invasion. And in case any of the Centurions is reading this, now you have his name.
Your welcome.
BTW, The Defenders, and the characters Captain Vitality and Kid Dynamo are not mine. They can be found in this fine product, brought to you by Basic Action Games:
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=81091
I liked the characters and the Golden/Silver Age names so much that I had to use them. But I backdated Kid Dynamo even further [1920s] so that he could fit the game world and advance plot. And He gave Captain Vitality his name, and it stuck. So When the Centurions met him, Captain Vitality introduced himself, and then felt the need to explain his moniker.