The last of the PCs I actually got to play for V&V that I'm willing to share (there was one more who was part of a wildly appropriative campaign concept from one of my best college friends that didn't last past the first session...), this one for a game where my friend Jesse - the one who ran some sessions in my campaign world for a while - started his own campaign world. He really wanted to focus it down so that every hero had a single clearly defined power. Everyone got 4d6 drop low for basic characteristics and a power roll of 2 (so we rolled 4 times and had 2-3 'powers' + possible weakness) and you needed to end with either 1 power and skills or multiple powers that clearly went together.
Jesse was a big fan of Strikeforce: Morituri, the comic where humans got eventually fatal super powers to fight off aliens. When he was running games in my world he had aliens invade where the alien race, having no metahumans of their own, were volunteering to become temporary superhumans to aid the conquest of Earth. I this game, the approach of the alien fleet was producing an energy field that gave some humans super powers - some of whom became heroes and some of whom were recruited by a shadowy alien advance team.
On the surface it was standard super hero stuff, but kinda like homefront golden age comics where the villains were 5th columnists undermining our world. The alien agents had access to some hyper-tech, which gave them an edge as we were still getting our act together - if it had occurred to me I would totally have gone Brainiac 5 super-intelligence as power to invent the crap out of things, but it didn't. Instead I had
CODENAME: Lazarus (Sterling Stryke)
Side: Good Experience level: 1
Affect/Gimmick: 1980's action hero with regenerative powers. Just imagine he's being played by Michael Dudikoff from any of his Reagan/Bush 1 era films, but that he's also even more dearly impossible to kill. He's an expert soldier, force recon for jungle ops, undercover urban agent, martial artist, weapons expert, and ladies man.
Status: tactical leader of the Project: BARRICADE Earth Defense Team.
Powers:
- Revivification (modified): This gives Sterling the following superhuman abilities
- if incapacitated he will appear dead, and "revive from the dead" one hour later with full HP
- If Killed, once a week he returns from the dead 23 hours after his death. This is at 1 HP and 1 Power point. As long as he has 1 Basic Hit remaining he will recover.
- Regeneration as the power, but he heals every 5 minutes rather than every turn. This makes it an out of combat only ability. He cannot heal from damage caused by magnetic fields.
- Heightened Endurance +7
- He can hold his breath and operate normally for 7 minutes.
- Heightened Expertise: +4 with all modern military weapons, including unarmed HTH. This also gives a +4/+20% bonus on any military tactics or strategy tests.
Inventions: None yet, but he always had an array of modern military gear on hand based on the mission.
Background/Origin: One of the top black ops agents of a government intelligence agency known as Project: WHIPPOORWILL, Sterling fought against Soviet agents and Central American drug cartels until the approaching waveform gave him impressive regenerative abilities. Once he discovered these he stepped forward and was integrated into Project: BARRICADE as the team's tactical leader, which has been... challenging to say the least. Fortunately his survival based powers give him time for second chances.
I played Lazarus, the few times we got to play, as a caricature of an 80's action hero - his favorite schtick was Gorden Liddy-Like shoving a knife into his arm just to prove it didn't phase him - and getting by with firearms and a Ka-Bar knife would get him to low superhuman damage ranges. At the time the game stopped I had just recovered one of the enemy flight packs for possible reverse engineering, and it was the sort of game where all the PCs might have had access to them in time.
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