We just finished playing our latest Armitage Files game, but I need to talk about the last New Centurions game, which we played last Saturday, so I don’t fall too far behind on these things.
So, we picked up the storyline a few days after fighting off the dimensional invaders, in the aftermath of what they had done to the city. Before play actually began, Clint talked with us about how he wanted to handle gaining new abilities using the experience system he rolled out last session. I still don’t have a real handle on how I want to advance S.P.E.C.-T.E.R., so I haven’t spent the experience yet. We also talked a bit about the Hero Point economy of the game, and whether we needed to tweak it for our purposes ((The answer to this is that we’re looking at trying one or two slightly different tweaks: during the game, Clint decided to hand out two Hero Points at a time instead of one, and after the game, he sent out some e-mail suggesting that spending a single Hero Point provided a bonus d6 result modifier, rather than a single point result modifier. Other suggestions included making Hero Points worth a two-point result modifier, and other options to get more points in the hands of the players, so that they get used for more cool stuff. Our experiment is ongoing.)).
And then we jumped into the actual game. Paladin was out of the city ((Which is to say, the player couldn’t make it that night, on account of having a life or something.)), on assignment with the new government agency that had taken command of the new problem of superhumans, called Aegis. While he was out of the picture, Aegis made the New Centurions a real sweetheart deal – substantial funding and material, in return for being able to call on us from time to time to deal with supervillains.
Given the climate of corruption and lack of government response in the city, we were somewhat skeptical ((Okay, we were too skeptical, really. But there’s a real trend in the groups I game with to distrust any sort of patron, because it’s kind of assumed they are going to turn on you eventually. That’s a standard trope in comic books, too, but it’s also rich story territory, so when I realized what I was doing in looking for traps and loopholes in the agreement, I stopped doing it and jumped on board.)) at first, but they value they were offering was such that we would have been insane to turn it down. So, we agreed, and the New Centurions are now associated with Aegis.
And that’s when the dinosaurs showed up at the NYU campus.
Little bit of background is required here. Clint, who runs the game, is married, and has two kids. His wife and his daughter both play in the New Centurions game, but his son, who is younger, doesn’t. But Clint runs another BASH game for his wife and kids, and wanted to give his son a chance to play with the rest of the crew. In the last session of the family game, which is set in the 1940s, Dr. Tempus used a time machine to escape from the heroes, but Thunderbolt (Clint’s son’s character) and Monkeydude (his sidekick) followed him into the timestream, ending in a nice cliffhanger.
Thus we had our first guest-star in the New Centurions: Thunderbolt and Monkeydude, who had followed Dr. Tempus through time. The megaraptors that appeared in our present were a side-effect of the time travel ((At least, that’s what Dr. Tempus said when S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. asked if the dinosaurs belonged to him and threatened to cite him for having let unlicensed sauropods loose in the city.)). The battle was fun – everyone kept throwing dinosaurs onto Dr. Tempus, until Widowmaker managed to corral them all with her forcefield. We turned Dr. Tempus over to Thunderbolt, who was sucked back to his own time when the time machine in the NYU lab activated.
That was pretty much where we left the game, with some thought about the next session, when we hope to finally interrogate the man who (we think) freed Dr. Methuselah from the weird time-trap/hologram/somethingorother we found when we discovered our headquarters.
We may finally learn what was up with that. And maybe even be able to free the original Centurions. Unless they’re just images. Or something.
But it’ll be fun, anyway!