The New Centurions, Issue #16 – City Under Siege

It’s been some months since the last installment of The New Centurions – what with some travel, some work responsibilities, and general life interference, it took some time to get everyone in one room to play again. Even so, Falkata was unable to join until later in the session. But we were happy to get back to the game.

We picked up the game right after our last victory against the corrupted citizens and the recovery of the tower fragment. One of the local heroes popped up to return Paladin to our group, and then rushed off to deal with a heavily magical threat in the South End ((We didn’t accompany her, because S.P.E.C.-T.E.R., Widowmaker, and Paladin are all pretty heavily technologically dependent, and the magic aura interferes with our abilities. Sometimes severely, as we found out later.)). After some futzing ((Huh. How about that. “Futzing” is in the WordPress dictionary.)) about, we managed to teleport ((“Teleport,” however, is not in the WordPress dictionary.)) the bit of tower back to the site of the explosion. We then proceeded to roam about, trying to gather the other extant bits of the tower back together before they did too much damage.

And that’s when we saw the dragons.

Like any self-respecting superheroes, we made a beeline toward the dragon attack. Widowmaker tried to teleport us there, but the magic interfered enough with her powers that we wound up scattered individually over a few blocks. We all rushed to where the dragons were, assuming that the rest of our group would be doing the same.

Once we got to the scene, there was another surprise for us tech heroes. We immediately had to start making the equivalent of Soak rolls with our Mind stat to resist the magical interference. Failure imposed greater or lesser penalties on our actions, depending on how badly we had failed. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was able to use his predictive algorithms to maintain functions by rerouting critical systems through undamaged portions of his neural network and anticipating and incorporating mechanical interference and glitches into his actions ((In game terms, I spent a Hero Die to get a power stunt allowing me to use my Mind Boost for Clairvoyance to make the save.)). Despite the difficulties, we managed to trounce the dragons and continue trying to recover the tower bits.

S.P.E.C.-T.E.R.’s predictive algorithms, coupled with Death Nell’s knowledge of London, led us to the London Stone, which seemed to be growing as the magic in the area increased. Inside it, we saw an army mustering, apparently for an invasion. The heroes were able to disable the portal, but not before a huge warbeast made its way through to begin rampaging through the city, with a squad of monsters mounted in a large howdah on its back.

It was getting pretty late by that point, so we called the game in the midst of the running battle with the creatures on the beast’s back. Next time, we need to finish off the crew and then figure out how to stop this 70-foot-tall horror.

It’ll be fun.