Saturday, July 25, 2015

Destruction and Explosion is their middle name!

A couple of days ago, I ran my second session of Worlds in Peril, a superhero PBtA system hack created by Kyle Simmons. I'm going to recount what happened in the first and second sessions. As always I'll try to keep it as short as possible. However, before I retell the accounts of massive mayhem that the PCs caused, I need to let you know that this was played using Roll20, an awesome tool for online tabletop gaming. Due to situations that were out of my hands the two sessions had to be run with two different groups of Superheroes.

Let's start with the first day. Picture this: a telekinetic/telepathic high school girl, a trained ninja assassin (covered in a cybernetic suit) and bus driver with time-slowing powers. An unlikely team answered the call, albeit by chance, of a bank robbery in Lantol City. They converged on the scene, although each one in their unique way (the ninja ran up the wall of the building, the girl levitated towards the rooftop, and the bus driver walked through the broken windows of the bank).

The bank was overrun by mercenaries carrying military grade weaponry, and who also employed military tactics. The bus driver, Stone, was overrun by the mercenaries, but then was saved by the ninja, named Ronin, who rushed inside the bank, without any regards for his own safety, and took care of most of the bad guys. At this point, the telekinetic girl, named Mentalista, came upon the scene to protect the hostages inside the bank (creating force fields around them, but not all). After all was said and done (after a few bad rolls), the heroes saved the bank, and at the same time completely destroyed it in the process.

(Somewhat of an example)

The second session took place a couple of weeks later after the bank robbery. This other group was composed of the same bus driver, Stone, a morphing girl, Annie Morph, who works at a coffee shop, and the old Greek God Dionysus, who came back from the dead. They were all witnesses to an explosion that destroyed two floors of a skyscraper in their vicinity. This prompted them to rush in to help people escape from the falling debris. It was here that Dionysus saved a woman, in such a heroic way, that he threw her out of the way, she flew and hit a car so hard she fell unconscious. In doing so, he took the debris head on and it broke one of his arms in two places. 

Following this, the heroes noticed the bad guys escaping the building with the use of a zip line which led them to the building in front. All three gave chase and followed them all the way to the roof, but when they get there, the bad guys had escaped on helicopters. Annie Morph threw a cinder block to hit, or at least slow down the helicopter, to keep them from escaping. It worked, she destroyed the tail end of it, which the made the helicopter crash onto another building and explode into a fireball, and then fell to the ground. Once it hit the ground, it made nearby cars creating small explosions that caused mass panic among the citizens.

(Again, somewhat of an example)

Now, while all this happened they fought a survivor from the helicopter (their first Heavy Hitter), who gave them a little bit of a beating, but they managed to survive. He escaped, but the question is: did they hurt him enough to become a threat? Or, did he let them live? Those are the questions that they are asking themselves while they recover their wounds and wait until the next situation creeps up on them.