New Centurions, Issue #11: Fear in Provence

Last Saturday was the latest game in Clint’s BASH campaign. I was hoping to have something ready to take over and GM, giving him a chance to play, but work has been kind of insane the past few weeks, so it didn’t happen ((This time. I’m working on it, Clint!)).

Anyway, the session started with us interrogating Nightshade, a villain we had first met waaaaay back at the beginning of the campaign ((When it was run using the Icons system and we only had three players.)), when he took Queen Celeste hostage and freed the holographic Dr. Methuselah from his… stasis, or whatever it is ((We still don’t know, and I’m waiting for the other shoe to hit us squarely in the back of the head.)). He had turned up again during the Illithid Invasion, when an ally of ours captured him robbing a jewelry store during the panic.

Now that things had settled down somewhat, we decided to interrogate him. He turned out to be a cape-for-hire, very much like Lady Crimson, except not completely psychotic. After some negotiation, he revealed that he had teleported out of the Century Club with Dr. Methuselah to a location he didn’t know the location of. Somehow, he had been given knowledge of how to teleport to it, without actually knowing where it was. Also, his employers had given him a magnetic stripe card that allowed him to interact with Dr. Methuselah ((And presumably the other frozen, insubstantial folks in our lobby.)) as if he were solid, but he had left it with Dr. Methuselah when he delivered him.

We agreed to release him, in return for teleporting us to the same place he had brought Dr. Methuselah, and then let him go ((S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. wasn’t very pleased with that, as he was a criminal in our custody. However, by pitching it as giving Nightshade a head start before we came after him, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was somewhat mollified.)). There was some discussion of just S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. going along on the first teleport, to get a GPS fix on the location, but I pointed out that this might mean S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was teleporting alone into a very dangerous situation, and it would be better if we went in force.

This turned out to be a good idea: whoever had built the place where we arrived had lined the destination room with high-powered lights, dispelling the shadow, giving us serious sunburn, and rendering Nightshade – who relied on shadows for his power – useless, as well as just about killing him through his vulnerability to bright light. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R.’s resistance to heat and radiation helped him stay active, and we got Nightshade wrapped in Queen Celeste’s coat and hunkered down behind Widomaker’s force field, while everyone went to work smashing the lights.

I gotta say, it was an ingenious, challenging, and flavourful supervillain trap, and I tip my hat to Clint for coming up with it ((Especially as I discovered later he wasn’t really expecting us to go this way, and came up with the trap on the fly. Kudos.)).

Once we had defeated the trap, we climbed out through the ceiling to explore the rest of the complex. My locators told me we were in southern France, in the Provence hills, and the tech of the installation looked to be WWII-era. We found a whole bunch ((Forty or so.)) of robots from that era that activated and attempted to attack us. I spent my Hero Die at this point to have S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. use his radio connection as a power stunt to shut them down, and then we got out of there.

To Paris.

There, Nightshade left us. Widowmaker doesn’t have the range to teleport us all the way home, so we called Aegis, and got them to arrange a safehouse for us. That gave us a chance to examine the footage of the robots, and we determined that they seemed to be modeled in a chess motif. There was no record of such robots being used in WWII, and the co-ordinates we had for the complex turned up no record of military or scientific installations there. Satellite imagery showed only an old barn on the site.

So, after reporting in to Shannon and getting a little rest, we headed back to the site, via Widowmaker’s teleport ability. We popped right down to where we had left, and found a number of Pawn robots, along with a Knight robot, ready and waiting for us. This time, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. couldn’t shut them down, so we had to do it the hard way.

By the time we finished that fight, it was around 1:00 in the morning, so we called it there.

One other thing worthy of mention: After our discussion last time about the Hero Point Economy, Clint went out of his way to keep them flowing out to us, and I think that really helped the game move along, and get people doing riskier things. Something for me to keep in mind for tonight’s Feints  & Gambits game.