Elena Turduck and the...

The mechanics and characters in place Jim and I started the game. We've run 4 sessions to date, which to me is a good time to look over the mechanics and see if they're providing the right play experience. (This is the problem of having a game tinkerer as a GM - I will gladly rework the car while it is in motion.)

Session one (Elena Turduck and the Lost Pearl)  was the group introduction. Everyone converged in the peaceful hamlet of Clearbrook where Elena had grown up, a town that was making preparations for her sisters wedding. Bella was there since the town had wonderful water for baking and was on the trade rout for Odessa grain - needed for her mad quest for the prefect red velvet cupcake. Nadia has lived there for months as Elena's secret security detail. Lt Adler and company are present surveying the town's unnecessarily large but convenient for running around and fighting ins ewer system. And Katya was hired by the Dread Bandit Sorin in advance of his raid. Raid happened, adventure ensued. Nadia got to be seducy and sneaky and dangerously ambushy. Alton and company got to duel with Sorin's men, racethrough the sewers and lead a town milita rad on a military encampment. Katya got to free the captive bride and groom and act generally creepy. Elena and Bella got to act crazy and repurpose Bella's insane kitchen equipment into a bread launching steam calliope. In the end Alton mopped up the bandits while everyone else fled to Bevelsburg

Session two (Elena Turduck and the Night in the Storm) was the first GM swap where we went from silly action to outright farce. The fleeing heiress and her company ended up in the house of my PC, Jahn Pava, to escape a nasty storm. Also arriving over the course of the evening were, functionally, the cast of an entire Marx Brothers movie. There were agents of three different intelligence services between the PCs and the cast of crazies, along with opportunistic thieves and cunning con men. A grand glorious farce. In the end Jahn handed the women a carriage and money to help them set up in Bevelburg with a promise to follow.

Session Three (Elena Turduck in the City of Gears) has our ladies of action in Bevelburg where they trade a rebuilt (and subtly(!) improved with flashing hypnotic lights and customer attracting sirens) bread hearth for information, hit one of Nadia's caches for supplies and borrow Jahn's apartment for a place to stay. They then try to hammer etiquette and decorum into Elena so she can be a princess while Elena hits the local library to find out what really happened in the rebellion 16 years ago. Anton, meanwhile, is in town having been told his company is chasing Sorin, but actually to try to locate our ladies, who are now persons of interest to the Junta. And Sorin is in town, and looking for payback on the Clockwork Girl who betrayed him, Dates are interrupted, dancing lessons held and explosive fights occur on the city's cablecar network as our ladies are eventually forced to flee the secret police and Anton continues his hunt for Sorin.

Session Four: (I'm afraid I don't recall the title): Our ladies have hidden out in one of the caravans back and forth to Odessa, passing through Turduckenstan via Bella's ingredient trading network. Jahn has learned that the Junta has identified Elena and rushes to warn her. The group eventually finds each other and books passage on a dubious vessel run by a scruffy nerf-herder and his hulking, furry first mate who are finishing one job and looking for the next. Said vessel turns out to be a large submarine captured from a mad Spark, but it will get them through the Bosphorus unnoticed. Or it would have if the last job wasn't dropping off smuggled energy weapons to Sorin. The ensuing dockside battle blows up all the energy weapons, all of Bella and Elena's newly purchased scientific supplies and forces immediate flight into the Mediterranean towards Paris.

USS Carter 12

12: Battle for the Burning Nebula

Synopsis: The joint Federation-Betazed fleet moves in to engage the Klingon stations in the Burning Nebula. To their surprise, the conflict is shortened by the appearance of the Tholian Assembly, who have claimed the center of the Nebula as a territorial annex. The Tholains yank the Klingon ships, along with the USS Petrov, into the interphase. Only the Carter has a chance to get the Petrov back by following them through an interphase rift and negotiating with the enigmatic silicon life forms.

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11: Passion

Synopsis: While mapping the Burning Nebula the Carter rescues an Andorian merchant and his passengers - Deltans, whose pheromones, empathy & open sexual mores play hob on the bridge crew's interpersonal relationships. In the midst of this The Deltans racial aptitude with navigation helps the Carter locate the hidden Klingon base in the nebula.

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10: Maris Ue

Synopsis: The Carter is hit with a blast of energy inside the nebula, knocking Bernie into a coma. He is replaced at helm by a new Lt. - Maris Ue - as the Carter is sent by Star Fleet to a diplomatic mission of vital import: convincing a race inside the nebula to turn from the Klingons - before the Klingons attack! The mission goes badly, but Lt. Maris saves the day at every major juncture. Actually, she's an energy being feeding on the skills and emotional highs & lows, and can best be defeated by convincing her she is just a voyeur & parasite.  Some signaling needs to be done that players can expect one of their PCs to be sidelined relatively early in the scenario.

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9: Stellar Nursery

The Carter, in its search for Dr. Knox's slowboats has finished its survey of the Virtuous Sector, and the ship has started doing the long slow survey of the more widely spaced targets in and around the Burning Nebula. Star Fleet has also asked that the Carter assist the Sagan Observatory in its research. Sagan has requested that the Carter - which just finished checking a lifeless, overheated Venus-like planet - add a week or so to its route to get some readings on a stellar nursery inside the nebula. Again, there will be a Captain's Log for Asha that explains all this.

USS Carter 8

8: Gamma One

the Carter, in the face of mounting threats from the Klingon/Orion and now Terabian alliance, re-enters the Burning Nebula to discover a staging area planet that not only houses Klingons and Orion Syndicate members, but also the Gamma I survivors *and* remnants of the Silicon Empire. Everything comes to a head in this season finale!

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7: Bones of Eden

At the heart of the starless expanse, the Carter finds the spatial anomaly that threw the slowboats so far off course, and learns that it can send ships through time. They must chase Lt. Vandermar, whose returning to 1960's Earth's to stop the birth of Kahn accidentally unmakes the Federation! But what are the moral implications of allowing the Eugenics Wars?

Hook

"After weeks in the Long Dark, I still can't believe that we're only halfway across, and that this is the fastest route back to the Sagan. Still, it is the fastest route, and at Warp 6 we're making good time. And finally, at least, we have something to look at: the Heart of Sin nebula is looming before us, and even if Dr. Cotton at Sagan hadn't asked us to give it a thorough going over, I would anyway, just as something to do. The Andorian ships salvaging the Aristophanes are nearby, and Sigfried has arranged a swap of entertainment broadcasts to give the crew some new diversion. Andorian drama is decidedly strange, and awfully bloody. Apparently Crewman Rey likens it to Hong Kong Police Drama of the late 20th century, where honor is avenged with gunplay. What a strange and dangerous time.”

I assume there will be any number of questions about the nebula their scans will reveal a very strong distress signal coming from the Gamma 1 – the slowboat they were looking for back in the first episode! It shouldn’t be anywhere near here! Further scans show that there are pockets of dark matter and subspace fractures inside the nebula. That slowboat was picked to make sure there was no chance the players think the thing is actually in there. Once they get the whole message they’ll hear that it’s the Gamma 1’s captain broadcasting a signal about the ‘bump’ that they hit, which corresponds with the message they pulled out of the wreckage in episode 1

Plot Turn 1

Further research will show that the nebula is not a standard Idari Class dark matter nebula, but a rarer Mar-Obscura class nebula - the sort that has temporal subspace fractures! They'll find this out when their scans start echoing back at them, and they begin picking up radio chatter from other ancient ships, including subspace ones from the frequency that the Andorains used during their first warp flights. I figure once they spend some time doing some research they'll get the following data based on how well they roll:

History or History  - Federation: "The Gamma One's radio call matches the designs of the time, and the other signals match similar slowboat ships from the timeframe, and are likewise distress calls about hitting a 'bump'. The other calls match the records of various other ships, dating back well over 200 years.

Communications/computer use A: "That's clearly the Gamma One's signal, but there is no way that it could be here. We must be dealing with some sort of echo. Digging through the static, there are other, less well defined signals. The most corrupted one I could salvage made reference to the Yena Kolari, or Greater Orion. That's the term for the Orion empire back when they *had* an empire, and the last time they used that term for it, Terran Pharaohs were building pyramids. 

Computer use B: "Combining the normal effects of both nebula and dark matter with these rifts makes the entire Heart of Sin into a non-causal area. By going through records, we've found 6 distinct cases of timekeeping errors recorded with ships passing through the edges of the rift. It's not a constant - there are 22 such transits, now counting ours - and none of the timekeeping errors were significant. But then, none went in far.

Space Science A: "The Nebula isn't an Idaria class, as it had been designated. It's a Mar Obscura class, only the second of its kind found in Federation space. These care classified by not just pockets of dark matter, but by a high occurrence of subspace rips, similar to the one we encountered in the Burning Nebula. It's impossible to read whether those rifts exist just in the outside edge, and what measure of safety there is in the center of the nebula.

Space Science B: "These rifts differ in that they are non-casual fractures in subspace - whatever generated them, they existed both before and after the instant of generation. Functionally, each rift serves as a hole not into just subspace, but through time.

Space Science C: "Given the nature of the transmissions and our scans of the area, this non-casual event is reaching its terminus. It exploded from here some time ago, and it's compressing back to this point. That's not a totally accurate image - imagine a sphere in space-time, and this nebula is its bottom pole. Now, fill the sphere with liquid, and say the subspace fractures were shaken into the liquid, but had a greater density. They have all now settled here.

Space Science D: "What could have caused this remains a mystery, but a careful reading of the starcharts indicates that the Sin Expanse might not be natural. The Nebula might be surrounded by empty space because whatever created the Nebula destroyed everything nearby. The force must have been enormous.

I figure this as being in the conference room, after the various departments have analyzed the data. This cross department analyzing will give sufficient time for Vandermar to find out what's going on and how he can use it. Towards the end of the meeting, the communications officer will get a message coming in from the Andorian ships, asking for one last conversation before they depart the area. 

Pinch 1

Vandermar, one of the crew members picked up from the slowboat in episode 2 and a fugitive from the Eugenics wars, becomes aware of the nature of the Heart of Sin Nebula and sees it as an opportunity to go back and prevent the Eugenics wars. He enters the shuttle bay, clocks the security guard with a surprise shot, grabs his phaser and stuns the other man in the room – if there is a PC security officer or a cadet then he can be here, but make it clear that this is one of those ‘this has to happen’ scenes and that Vandermar is spending drama points or their equivalent like water to assure that. Vandermar will then fire a couple of shots into key conduit panels, knocking out the ships systems temporarily. With their ability to stop him limited, he steals a shuttle and heads into the warp.

The bridge crew will find out about this when they suddenly drop to emergency power and the shields go dead. Sensors will register damage amidships, but the exact information will be confusing. There should be some good panicked minutes of repairing the ship and trying to figure out what happened, with a sketchy screen view of the shuttlecrat vanishing at warp speed into the nebula.

To add to this mess the comm officer is in contact with the Andorians, who are still some distance away. Once the Horus disappears into the nebula, the message shifts suddenly from an offering of aide to a threat from a fully armed Adorian ship!

Midpoint

Midpoint here is them going from investigation of the nebula to an emergency of having to fix the altered timeline. Since they were in the Nebula they were unaffected by the time shift, but now they have to decide what to do and how to do it. The Andorian ship, well, the new Andorian ship has enough firepower to pose a serious threat to the Carter even if she were in peak condition, but is an hour or so away. The damaged system can be repaired quickly by some creative rerouting of power conduits, so there should be no longer term sense of dead in the water.

I wonder if the players will as readily realize what happened – if they don’t some history rolls will make it clear that somehow the Eugenics wars didn’t occur, humanity never made first contact and the Andorains and Vulcans, without humans to act as a social lubricant between them, never joined forces. In any case, they have till the Andorian ship turns up to figure out what to do, and try to guess exactly what occurred. The Carter can certainly survive the travel back through the Nebula’s time rifts if the Horus did, but they might be concerned about that and start making emergency preparations for the voyage.

One thing that will come up is the research on 20th century earth that the historian has been performing with Rey (the other 20^th century slowboat refugee) and Vandermar, combined with local records. That should open things up for a few possibilities of where he'd go. 

A complex History test reveals one record that a 'Superman' made, commenting on their being the scions of Brahmins. As we all know, Brahmins are the highest Hindu caste, which fits with Kahn's Indian heritage.

Of course, as time goes on Knox, knowledge will give her a growing sense of the timetable. I'm abstracting from Gre Cox’s Eugenics Wars books here (Gary Seven vs. Kahn; they’re worth reading), but the project itself should take place in India, in the late 1960s. In the early 1960's the scientists involved were still in their various institutions, the core of whom were doing work in the New England universities.  Dr. Singh is still at Harvard.

Vandermar is following the Brahmin reference in its colloquial sense, and is tracking down likely biologists/biotech people in the Boston region. This will fairly quickly connect him with Dr. Singh, who will likely think she's being stalked by a mad killer.

Which, on a certain level, she is.

Pinch 2

This is the trip through time – at least I sure hope the players think they have to follow the Horus -  which should feel rough and tumble, not something worth repeating except to get back and generally shake the crew up, but not too much. Some damage to the shield, a panel shorting out, and if they roll really poorly have the eps conduits go down again. However, they are able to track the Horus' trail through the rifts back to Earth, Spring of 1963. May 15th, to be exact.

A time when all the eyes of the world were on the sky, and they run into some good old fashioned Air Force or Nasa Interference They nearly hit Gordon Cooper, in one of his 22 orbits of earth in Mercury 9 (the faith 7 capsule) between the 15th to the 17th. This should make their arrival a little problematic, but the subspace rift they need to return through is just beyond Saturn. This is a chance fo the helmsman and science officer to show off, but even a failure means they make here, just with a damaged ship; a critical success means one panel shorting out and some cinematic bouncing around.

Plot Turn 2

The sensors on the Carter pick up the signal from the Horus, but they aren't anywhere near India - they're in New England - specifically the wilds of Maine. What the heck is he doing there, you may ask, or you may just throw dice at me for a really bad pun. In any case, there is evidence that he dropped off somewhere and sent the ship on autopilot to here. He was dropped off near Boston, some 36 hours ago.

Armed with this new knowledge, the PCs will have to track down the people that Vandermar is tracking down, and that takes them to beantown. They'll have to confront various types of legalistic hurdles and informational ones to get the info they need, as well as one massive moral dilemma:

This is open ended of the GM, as any group of players is going to approach this differently. In my case we had a) a medical officer who was a fan of baseball and the Red Sox in particular (sad news, Red Sox Nation – the Eugenics Wars interrupted the timeline enough that the Sox never broke their World Series losing streak…) and the PCs parleyed that into a chance to win some money betting on games with her 20^th century souvenir $20 bill. The PCs will likewise have to find a way to get the resources they need. If there are PCs who aren’t people who would be commonly accepted or afforded respect on the streets of Boston in 1963 then the GM should work in a scene to address that, given that this is Star Trek.

Resolution

The whole of the game from here on in is pretty loose, based on what they do, but it should ultimately lead them to Dr. Singh's offices at a science facility outside Harvard. There is some fairly tight security, but depending on where the Carter is they might just be able to beam by it. I leave it to player ingenuity, and the only thing I want to have is an encounter with students trying to get them to join the equal rights movement, hoping that they can change the world.

The final scene of this should involve chasing Vandermar or somehow interrupting him in the offices of Dr. Singh. They will have to be extra careful that she doesn't realize what's going on, but instead take this insane intrusion as a reason to move her facility elsewhere. Like back home to India. 

As per the laws of Star Trek the return time trip is small potatoes but they might have to figure out what to do with Vandemar, if he’s still among the living. 

USS Carter 6

6: Lysestrata

The discovery of the trader Aristophenes inside the Temptation nebula exposes the Carter's crew to a disease that kills anyone with a Y Chromosome. An away team needs to comb the freighter to discover the diseases' cause while Dr. Mark struggles to keep the men of the crew alive, and the men face their impending mortality.

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5: Writ in Tooth and Claw

Sensors detect a potential terran settlement orbiting a variable star, but the planet's EM fields blocks transport. Their shuttle damaged, the away team explores terran and native ruins to learn the field is artificial, has expanded to cover the Carter and causes emotional instability in terran life! Dr. Knox's team must deal with transplanted terran predators and the Carter must fight a Klingon scout, all while on the edge of sanity. Some signaling is needed to the players to let them know what this this is a physiological test adventure, not a combat or ambush, to keep the right feel.

USS Carter 4

4: The Only Tar Who Ever Jumped Ship From Vanderveken’s Crew

The USS Carter is at Hope III when it discovers a stellar anomaly in the nearby Type D Star: it has a ring that is only occasionally visible. Investigation reveals that this is not an actual stellar occurrence but a lost Terran slowboat, trapped in the star's gravity and perpetually accelerating in it's hydrogen atmosphere - it is now orbiting at .9999c! The crew must find some way of freeing the ship from this predicament, but when they get on board they learn that the combination of radiation and time dilation sickness has driven the crew a off-kilter, and they will react violently to the presence of outsiders, posing a whole new problem.

USS Carter 3

3: The Stars Overhead, the Stones Underfoot

The Carter arrives at the Sagan Observatory just in time to rescue it from a Klingon attack. During the attack Dr. Knox discovers a strange sensor blip from Charity V. This proves to be the drive compartment of a terran slowboat with records that the crew compartment was launched into the Burning Nebula some centuries ago. Their plot should be easy to track, and the nebula will have slowed them down -- can the Carter rescue them?

Universal Comics Movieverse 11

11: The Rest of the Movies

The creation of a shared cinematic universe is very new. The idea of standard old super-hero sequels go back to the Christopher Reeve Superman films, but the idea that the sequels should form some sort of coherent ‘arc’ for the character is also pretty new. Movies – outside of the James Bond franchise – have real problems with iconic characters. Robin Laws defines Iconic as the heroes who change the lives of the people around them while they don’t substantially change. Bond is a great example in that in each movie Bond is, well Bond and there’s little to no change to his character and techniques.

(They broke this rule with the Daniel Craig films to date, in which they flet the need to do an origin story to get Bond to being Bond over 3 films; one wonders what they’ll do next, other stand start over again. But I digress.)

Movies, as we discussed earlier, have their love of origin stories because of their strong through lines and obvious character growth. Unfortunately a lot of comic book heroes are iconic, and there isn’t a ton of room for what screenwriters consider to be character growth before they stop being who they should be. As Christopher Nolan explored in his Batman films one of the ways for Bruce Wayne – who spent his life training to be one specific thing – to meaningfully change is to stop being Batman. So he does, bot at the start of Dark Knight Rises and at the end, but I don’t want to see Bruce Wayne not be Batman. But Hollywood has no interest in the other changes Bruce Wayne might make. While we making games that should feel like movies that doesn’t mean we have wear those same blinkers when it comes to our sequels. Those blinkers include

·         The hero loses his powers (or control of same) in the second act and has to recover/relearn how to use them – i.e. rerun the origin story.

·         The hero has a new romantic interest (and the old one has vanished) so we can rerun the romantic subplot.

I had started talking about the need for trilogy plotting but decided against it as the math just isn’t there. Therefore I caution you against thinking that way, but will probably example things out like that anyway.

The cinematic universe conceit means that after we get through the next cycle of solo movies we have another team up film, but as long as we have the same connective ideas we established earlier (and perhaps add new ones) the films don’t have to have very strong links to each other or to the next team up. It’s much more important that the underlying Power Metaphor, Universe Origin and tone from the core hero’s first movie stay in place. The first two help link the shared universe together, but the last keeps the hero’s own continuity and style intact. Here are your check points for the sequels

·         Any supporting cast that can return should return

·         If people don’t have PCs; consider taking a secondary hero from the team up film, or creating a new secondary hero.

·         Continue any emotional arcs from the first film – love stories should advance, rivalries should deepen, etc…

·         If a secondary hero with powers similar to the main hero is introduced we might want to have their origin story.

·         Mine the original publication history for one or maybe two bad guys. If you go with two consider having one planner and one tough guy, or figure out how the villains might also be at odds.

Again, examples would help

Captain Nostalgia II

Now is the time to bring in 6E as an agent of the Ad Astras, and Nostalgia has a supporting cast of pretty capable people with similar powers (he, Buzz & 6E) in terms of the willpower, combat training and (for Nostlagia and 6E) the physical advantages, so the Frequency rules are important. Since the Ad Astras are worldwide organization we should take advantage of that. Hollywood would love to have the inherently optimistic Ad Astras actually have a rotten core as the villain but that runs absolutely against the Nostalgia tone. I think that Ralph Crabtree was the villain in the Conflagration and he had ties to Ad Astras, so we kinda did that already. So any tension should be about the Ad Astra repurposing of the Uberjaager training to make 6E but that’s just a character bit and not the core of the plot.

My idea for the plot therefore is the Ad Astras fighting a world wide conspiracy that is something of their opposite number, trying to control scientific advancement and restrain human development (something like the Four from planetary). That lets us start with a murder mystery in the first act (this is captain Nostalgia, after all) that turns into a round the world thriller. All we need now is the fourth PC, and Dave asked to bring in Adam Prime, a Universal Comics character who is an albino gorilla who mastered a universal sign language and served as a G-Man in the 1930’s. His origin started with a murder mystery, and his odd science background works with the Ad Astras. This movie will probably end up feeling like a later era James Bond film.

Aeaea II

Aeaea needs a large new supporting cast, but we can keep Aldebaron. Someone asks to play Glenda, Fairy Princess and that pretty much nails down the villain as being evil Faerie. However the GM wanted to do something with the cold war soviet villains. Solution – Potemkin Villager is now working for Baba Yaga. Finally we can introduce a new love interest since Karnak is gone and not coming back.

First act is some stuff with Aldebaron and Aeaea dealing with routine magical issues that bring them in contact with whoever Aeaea’s new love interest is as well as Glenda. The first act will pull them all together fighting some magical event that is being orchestrated by Potemkin Villager, who is as creepy as we can make him, and who is a cat’s-paw for Baba Yaga, who is aiming for Russian dominance of the bay area’s high magic zone, in part to fight an even bigger threat. If the Nostalgia movies are world spanning mysteries the Aeaea movies are tinged with horror; the inclusion of a magic shoe girl will not change that.

Phoenix: Red Sky Diary

Phoenix’s key supporting cast member, Freddie, is still around, and the player asks to tap into the story arc of Amanda hitting it big in the music scene, becoming the new guitarist and back up vocalist for the band Red Sky Diary. This moves her out of the struggling NYC scene and into the worldwide music glitterati, and Freddie’s job expands to helping her keep her head (yeah, good plan) in the new environment. The other two supporting cast members can be the other band members, one of whom is a romantic interest and the other one is a secret villain, said secret villain is a conflagration victim who happens to show up in the cities that RSD is playing.

I kind of like the idea of the origin story for this movie being the member of the band slowly undergoing a bodily metamorphosis into Chimera, and since Chimera is a shape-shifter we can easily have a fake out villain. Phoenix isn’t really a detective hero so we can string this out long enough. This one feels a little weak, but that’s somewhat common for the second movie….

Doc Toltec II: True Nurse Adventures

Since Ralph Crabtree became the villain and Dr. Robinson died we’re now at the status quo for Doc and Nurse Betty. The other two PCs are a police officer who had been at best a secondary character in the original book an Bill Jackson, who is now a tech guy as he is in the TV show. The movie takes things down from the cosmic level to have Doc Toltec fighting organized crime in Chicago. There’s a war going on between the old school mobs and ONI, who have taken on something of a Tong aspect but with their weird high tech magic. At the end ONI are just a bigger threat and the third act should be Toltec teaming up with the mob to defeat them, and then arrange a sting to capture the core mobsters as well, cleaning up the city in one fell swoop.

In this three way war we see the rise of one particular mobster, Johnny Deuce, who has the hots for Nurse Betty (and come on, who doesn’t?). We could also set things up where Deuce is the 4^th player character. In any event the movie should end with Deuce in charge of the remaining Chicago mobs and set things up for the next fim.

Crossover II

And it’s time for the next big crossover movie. The villain in this one is ONI, who are revealed as being the agents of the Chilean Mandrinate, villains from the Aeaea book originally who have been populating the Doc Toltec movies and staying in the background in Aeaea. The Mandrinate’s big plan is to steal one of the existing time machines (ideally Doc Toltec’s time platform, but it could be from Ad Astra) to go back to their own founding and uplift themselves. This means midway through the movie the Mandrinate become vastly, staggeringly more powerful as they have 600+ years of technological and magical advancement as well as improving their own bodies with stolen 23^rd Nazi eugenics techniques. Plus they suddenly unveil a colony on Venus and unleash an army. Ideally at the end of the film Phoenix makes a sacrifice play that makes it look like she’s dead but in fact she’s thrown to a new arm of the galaxy.

Captain Nostalgia III

Eztra-Diimensional Nazis appear!

Aeaea III

Mandrinate Clean Up, I expect. I really don’t want to have the HIV demon come back.

Phoenix: Map of Stars

It’s the “other side of the galaxy, getting home” arc

Doc Toltec III

Doc and Johnny Deuce fight Vampires!

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10: The Inevitable Crossover!

I’ve been hinting at this for a while, but we’re here now – the movie in which we link together the other films.

Now, in theory we should have had teaser sequences linking one film to another (a good reason to sketch first acts in advance) but nothing is immediately coming to mind. In theory we should also have another movie – either Captain Nostalgia 2 or Aeaea 2 – before the big film to fit in the Iron Man 2 movie, but I’m skipping that. Yes, I could probably use the screen real estate but I also have to take into consideration spotlight time issues.

Universal Comics Movieverse 9

9: the first film sequence, part 2

Now to detail the other movies in the first sequence:

Phoenix, the Movie!

As discussed last time the PC structure of this movie, along with the basics of the Phoenix stories, is a parallel story that focuses in one part on Amanda and Freddie and the other part on Robinson and Sun. In both cases the threat is Manticore, one of the classic Phoenix villains from the NYC era. To make sure these tie together Abrowski can be Freddie’s uncle (not his father – that might reveal that he has a last name!).

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8: The First Film Sequence

With the first film out of the way we should look at the other films in the first sequence. Timing wise I’m of two minds on this – do you have this conversation while you’re talking about act I of the first movie, or after the first movie has been gamed out? – but I think some discussion while you’re thrashing out Act I is best.

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7: Supporting Cast and Screenplay

Now we transition building the supporting cast and the plot

Last time we discussed the ideas behind a core hero’s supporting cast – how it gives the character someone to play off of for characterization, rounds out their weaker areas (though unlike team heroes the core hero is probably not wholly deficient in any area that matters for his stories) and give the other players a chance to work with secondary/NPC archetypes that can be fun to tackle as a player as long as there is equitable sharing of spotlight time.

Castle Mordha 12

12: The rest of the dungeon

I’m going to move to a slightly more abstract discussion of the levels because I’m not sure how interesting it is to read the room by room discussions, especially since I don’t have the maps up yet. That’s proving much more time consuming than I expected – the degree of pre-work needed for a dungeon is much greater than other games. I’ll have to see how much it pays off in actual play, but it did feel more labor intensive.

Castle Mordha 11

11: Level 2 West
More requests for the players to not read further.

Castle Mordha 10

10: Level 2 East

More stuff the players shouldn't see

Castle Mordha 9

9: Mordha’s Town

It’s time, I think, for a little bit of detail on the immediate world. Mordha Town is notable for a few things: first, it’s the place that hired the PCs to deal with their bandit problem, which is why they’re here to begin with (and since the bandits are trapped in Castle Mordha the PCs will very likely fulfill that contract. The official terms of the contract were room, board, 5 silvers a day and any loot from the bandits (a strong incentive for the PCs to catch them, and it solves the problem of trying to return the loot to its original owners).

Mordha’s Town contains about 300 citizens, not a backwater even if it’s not huge. It survives based on three factors:

·   First, it is on the overland route between Shankill and Alboling., the other major settlement on the island, and there are still some people or objects that are better transported overland; Mordha’s town is a logical stopping point

·   Second, there are several jungle-provided products that are hunted and farmed here and sold to the coastal cities for profit. There are several other inland towns also act as aggregating points for the hunters and small plantations (here they’re banana farm, or more precisely plantain plantations, plus some coffee and chocolate). This gives the town a second income stream rather than just being a way-station.

·   Third, there’s inertia in that the town was here, has an existing infrastructure (including sewers) and enough natural resources to support a population. People are nothing if not resistant to change, and this is as good a place as any.

Since two of these three depend on trade the bandits are a real problem, and therefore the hiring of the PCs.

I start getting into plot stuff after this, so I'll ask the players to stop reading here.