Serial Numbers Filed Off: Bad Neighbors

CthuluTech: Scare Where

Dude, your next door neighbor is a Dhohanoid.

Those are myths, man. Everyone’s just pissed at the Chrysalis Corp because they overcharge on stuff. They’re not secretly run by monsters.

Really? A high ranking Chrysalis Corp executive moves in next door to you, people start to go missing, and he’s obviously renovating his apartment into a fortress. He’s clearly up to some shit.

This is the New Vegas arcology. There’s a giant rift to who knows where thirty miles south of us. People are going to go missing. They probably went outside and got eaten by a monster. We’ve still got gene scans to get inside. Occam’s Razor.

Sure, they slapped this thing up as an evacuation center when the rift opened and it ballooned into a full arcology in six months. You think they didn’t leave holes in the security? Look, I know this guy, Peter Vincent.

The guy who stars in the Migou Fighting Action Hour show?

That’s just his cover. He’s a member of the Eldritch Society.

Myth.

They’re not a myth. My cousin in Atlanta got saved from a bunch of cultists and monsters by a freaky other monster that didn’t eat him. It’s the worst kept conspiracy in the world. Monster superheroes.

I’m not going to go break into the studio wing, tell a local celebrity that I think he’s a shapeshifting vigilante, and ask him to deal with my neighbor just because a crazy guy claims he’s a Dhohanoid.

Your funeral, then. Better hope he doesn’t come after your girlfriend or your mom…

 

Serial Numbers Filed Off: Sins of the All Father

D&D: Thor’s Legacy

Asgardians, I know you have questions. You came here seeking Odin, the All-Father, missing from Asgard these many years. You took the Rainbow Bridge and found yourself here. It is not any of the realms you know. Odin made it, a pocket realm on a far-flung branch of Yggdrasil. He hoped what he learned here would provide a defense against Ragnarok, until he was betrayed. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When he made this world, he did not make it alone. He created two young godlings, mighty Thor and wise Loki. Your powers are reduced here, as far as you are from the heart of the World Tree, but the three of them together were able to shape and direct this world. The people here are strange, but perhaps the denizens of the other realms were similarly strange in the first years after they were formed by the gods. Odin did not know exactly what he sought here, but the runes had told him to build, and so he did. Under the gaze of Odin, the protection of Thor, and the cunning of Loki, the people of this world were forged into a mighty society in an eyeblink of mortal terms.

Then, something miraculous happened. Some of the denizens in the second generation were born as Valkyrja, blessed by death. The All Father believed that they were the secret that he had been sent to discover: for in the oncoming death of the gods, what greater allies than choosers of the slain? Yet on that day of celebration, as all the new Valkyrja assembled, Loki revealed his true colors. He believed that this world was proof against Ragnarok, and was content to rule it himself. In a master stroke he defeated Thor, drove Odin out into the wilderness, and began to purge the Valkyrja.

We have been on the run ever since. Loki cannot contend with the guile of the All Father, but he controls the only access to the Rainbow Bridge. And now you are trapped here as well. Were you back in Asgard, you could harness your might and smash any threat in this world like a bug. But, here, your only advantage is fighting skill and rune magic beyond the capabilities of the natives.

My name is Hela, and I am the last of the Valkyrja. I can take you to Odin, though the way is hard. We must assemble what allies we can, break Loki’s power base as best we are able, and, ultimately, fight our way to the Bridge. The death of the gods is growing ever closer, and if your race is to have any chance of survival, you must escape and take me with you. Together, we can defeat inevitability itself. But only after we first defeat the god of deceit.

Serial Numbers Filed Off: After Earth

Any system with High Tech rules: The Bulwark

Hey, you, kids. I don’t know how you got in here, but it’s your lucky day that you did. Maybe you thought you were squatting in an abandoned construction project… but you were actually stowing away on Earth’s last space station.

Humans didn’t get off Earth in time. We defunded the space program, convinced ourselves that FTL was impossible, and decided it wasn’t worth the bother to try to colonize other worlds. Centuries of fabulous technology never brought us any closer to getting all of our eggs out of one planetary basket. And then the apocalypse came.

I don’t know what happened. If you look out the window, you’ll see what’s left of Earth: a slowly drifting arc of asteroids. It doesn’t seem physically possible for something to just tear it into chunks in place like that, especially without reducing everything on it to dust first, but there it is. Maybe it had something to do with the companies trying to stabilize the major fault lines. Maybe we mined out too much of the guts holding everything together. Maybe somebody set off a doomsday weapon. We may never know.

My grandfather built this station. It’s designed to be self-sustaining for decades, solar powered, armored against meteors, and fit living space for a couple hundred folks. It was also so heavy, everyone laughed at granddad about the impossibility of ever lifting it into space. Turns out that gets a lot easier when the very chunk of ground you’re sitting on is suddenly free of the planet and has negligible escape velocity. Still can’t figure on how the structure, much less us, is still standing.

If the apocalypse down there was gentle enough in places that we survived, maybe some other people did, too. Other shielded facilities like this likely have scientists and technology. We’ve got some short range spaceships here, including one that can tow the best pieces back. We’ve got micro-manufacturing plants that could turn newly exposed chunks of metallic core into more machines. We could turn this little station floating just a bit closer to the sun than the rest of what’s left into a new bulwark of society. At least for a while.

See, that’s the real plan: now that we can’t just sit on our butts and allow the universe to pass us by, maybe we can once again start looking up at the stars. Humanity has one last chance to escape into the galaxy, and nothing left to lose if we take it. All we need is to gather together enough resources to make it possible.

You kids up for it?

Serial Numbers Filed Off: Inking a Ghost Story’s Memento

Any Game System: The Twist at the End

All of those television people that claim they can talk to the dead are liars. No, I’m not saying there’s no such things as ghosts, or people that can talk to them. It’s that each of those TV scammers like to tell you about what your dead relatives have been doing since they died. But it doesn’t work like that. Ghosts exist backwards.

Yeah, it’s weird. When you die, you go to the spirit world, and time there moves in the opposite direction of time here. Maybe it’s because our universe does actually have enough mass to eventually reverse physics and rewinds as it pulls back in. Maybe it’s God giving dead souls a chance to make sense of their lives before moving on. Whatever the case, ghosts get to watch the world in reverse.

Not that the well adjusted ghosts do much watching. There’s a whole society of spirits out there that have moved on, and don’t need to relive their pasts. It’s only the ones still wrapped up in their lives that tend to watch the tape again. And it’s only the really messed up ones that try to do anything about it.

Yeah, some hauntings are real. An angry enough ghost can affect the world in a moment of stress, at least a little bit. The funniest thing is that most genuine hauntings are you haunting yourself. Ever notice that peoples’ lives tend to be terrible around the time of a haunting? And the stress of the ghost just makes things that much worse? Ever hear of self-fulfilling prophecies. You freak your living self out trying to warn him, and only make the thing you’re warning him about even more tragic.

And that would be where we are: ghosts powerless to affect the world except to make it a little scarier. But there are real mediums out there, and they can play merry hell with our futures.

You see, being able to talk to ghosts (and actually have a conversation when everything is moving backwards: it’s a really complicated talent) is exactly like being able to predict the future. A lot of mediums tend to trade favors with ghosts: they’ll attempt to stop some tragedy in the past in exchange for useful information about the future. Then they trade those favors with the living, or take care of stopping the tragedy themselves, and reap the benefit of the prediction.

As you can imagine, there are quite a lot of spirits that hate this. In places where mediums are active, from the perspective of the spirit world the timelines are completely shredded. Things from their past don’t stay happened. Imagine a ghost that lived a long life, died when he was 90, and has been active for 70 years on the other side… only to suddenly find that someone changed something that resulted in him dying as a young man.

So for every desperate living person over here trying to track down a medium to change the future, there’s a dead soul mostly happy with his life trying to make sure no ghosts talk to mediums and ruin everything.

And we’ll never really know which side is winning until we die.

Players alternate (or two groups compete) between two sets of characters: the living and the dead.

The living characters exist in forward time, and are each driven by a need to improve their circumstances by getting a leg up on fate. They are in contact with a medium that can offer them insights into how to improve their lives… if they can accomplish seemingly unrelated tasks to meet the requirements of the medium’s spiritual allies.

The dead characters exist in a staggered backward pace. They are aware of the future as it was meant to be, for it is their past. Every time the living group changes something, the dead group snaps (for them) back in time, Memento-style: they now have to proceed from a different series of assumptions about their own past. They have a limited time to track down the hungry ghost that spoke to a medium and changed things, and keep him from talking. If they succeed, suddenly the living players’ sure prediction of useful events falls through, and they’re back to helping out the medium for the next favor…

It will likely get very weird, very fast…

Serial Numbers Filed Off: Unexpected Kick!

Miscellaneous Systems: Inspired by Sucker Punch with a little Inception

Players make three versions of their characters in progressively less realistic/gritty systems.

The primary character is built to unexceptional human standards in something like GURPS or BRP. This represents the character’s real identity (so far as he or she knows). This character is trapped: either literally (locked in a prison, committed to an asylum, stranded on an island) or metaphorically (dead end job in a city with no opportunities).

The secondary character is made in a less realistic but still “human powered” system, likely in a world similar to our own but different enough to feel like an escape: Shadowrun, World of Darkness, Aeon, etc. This character is an exaggerated version of the primary character, with strengths and weaknesses somewhat magnified and expanded into the new rules. Here, the troubles of the real world take on a more melodramatic significance (e.g., a local bully becomes a prophecy of a terrible evil threatening the character), and the space in which the real characters are trapped is remapped into a more appropriate confines for the new setting.

The tertiary character is from a much more high-powered system, like Champions, D&D, Mechwarrior, Nobilis, Wushu, etc. This character is the primary character’s incredibly exaggerated idea of “awesome me:” how the primary character dreams that he or she would be if dropped into such an exaggerated setting. In this setting, there is a very unclear sense of space: small but related issues within the secondary world become sprawling encounter areas without much connection to others.

Whenever the characters sleep on any level of reality, they wake up back in the primary world. Play here is slow and mundane, but sometimes rife with creeping danger. Whenever each PC has a core problem of the day, play progresses to the secondary world, where these problems are woven together into an overriding threat to the group.

In the secondary world, the PCs have a greater range of agency, but what are often “molehill” problems in the real world grow into “mountains” in the melodrama. The issues wrap together to create a much more complex threat that cannot be simply defeated. Instead, the characters must tackle it in segments, and each segment requires a plan. As soon as the PCs have developed a plan for dealing with part of the problem, play progresses to the tertiary world.

In the tertiary world, the PC’s plan is vastly expanded into a series of encounters where the original points of the plan become nodes within an only vaguely related adventure. Once the adventure succeeds or fails, the PCs revert to the secondary world to view the outcome of the plan there. Whenever the characters finally reach the end of the day (possibly having solved the whole issue or at least several segments of it), they sleep and wake up in the primary world to determine what this all really meant.

Ultimately, this should have a “Kill Puppies for Satan” vibe, where largely flawed individuals trapped by their own issues tend to describe fairly mediocre accomplishments and failures as superheroic victories and epic tragedies.

Serial Numbers Filed Off: Super Soldier Serum

D&D: The Last Avengers

Though it has only been a few years, it feels like forever ago that the lich lord rose, his bloody skull becoming a nightmare throughout the lands as his army of monsters emerged to support, and then to supplant, the purely mortal soldiers of the Iron Kingdoms. He wielded great magics and led forces regarded only as fictions from the Age of Myth.

The ancient elven adept, Brahim, master of the Ur Skein, had spent years unraveling history through magic. He had learned that an age of great wonders had ended long ago, and sought out ways to restore the heroes of the past. The man who would become the lich lord captured him, stole his notes, and proceeded too quickly on his quest for the phenomenal might of legend. His first spell cursed him with undeath and drove him mad, and he has created more and more variants of his bastardized ritual, transforming men and beasts into twisted monsters meant only for war.

Brahim escaped and reached our side. He worked for months to improve his spells, to eliminate the terrible flaws that had made monsters rather than heroes. We were specially selected to be the first to receive the gift: a company of heroes in the style of old. In a world of adepts, we would practice true sorcery and channel the full might of the gods. In a world of warriors, we would become fighters, rangers, and paladins. In a world of experts, we would become rogues, bards, and monks. He chose us for our honor and our conviction, not for our power… but augmented by his spells, our new might would allow us to strike at the very heart of the lich’s empire.

We were meant to be the first, but we were the last. Moments after we were raised up, Brahim was struck down. A storm of fire from a lich’s pawn consumed him and his notes, his knowledge lost. It was our small company left to lead the armies of men against the foul horrors our enemies had become.

It feels like forever, though it has only been a few years. I have seen friends struck down and lost, and others raised again and again to return to the battle. Our presence has turned the tide, for we have the might of whole armies amongst our small company. But we lose more and more beyond hope of resurrection every year. It is now time… time to make one last desperate strike to destroy the lich once and for all, scatter his notes to the wind, and break his army’s ability to make monsters.

Though we might not live to see it, we can give the last great empire of men the chance to win this war and once again push back the darkness.

Serial Numbers Filed Off: Assassin!

Not exactly a whole campaign idea this time, but certainly something that could fill several sessions of a Mist Cloak and Vibro-Dagger style game.

Fading Suns: The Urther

No, no, don’t explain it to me. Part of hiring a Scraver information broker is that I don’t ask you why you need an untraceable, concealable, long-range weapon that can kill a target through an energy shield. I’ll just assume that you’re upstanding folks and there’s some big evil that you can’t take out any other way. Maybe a Sathraist that’s got thralls, or a demon possession, right? Right.

Anyway, you’re in luck. Right here on this very planet of Severus is the answer to your hopes. They call him the Urther. Because he’s from Urth. Real creative, right? It’s apparently a big deal for someone from the holy planet to join the Engineers, much less turn that training to becoming a hitman feared across the Known Worlds. I hear he was bad news during the Emperor Wars, and kept going for a while after that.

But he’s more or less retired now. His last mission went wrong, and he’s been laying low. So all you have to do is find an aging Urthish assassin somewhere on the planet. That’s not entirely sarcasm: he does stand out, and I can give you some leads.

The catch is, he’s paranoid as all hell, and with good reason. The Imperial Guard would love to bring him in for war crimes, a bunch of Muster have been trying to get him since the last job, and the Jakovians want to take him out to make sure he doesn’t let slip any Decados house secrets. If you come straight up to him, you’re likely to get shot by one of the best assassins in history.

But it’s not hopeless. He loves nature, so he doesn’t always stay cooped up in his bolt hole. He’s too much of a romantic and has a thing for the ladies, which is part of why his last mission went so bad. Plus, he loves a challenge, so if you can give him something interesting to make, he might be willing to deal.

So, to sum up… wish I could just get you hooked up with your weapon, but for what you want, there’s really only one choice. He’s the best mechanic of death I know of. Good luck.

Serial Numbers Filed Off: Aging Penalties

D&D 3e: Gray

Godric Brightshield was one of the most effective adventurers we’ve ever had. He defeated witch kings, dragons. Hell, he toppled kingdoms. Yeah. He was truly gifted.

Why was he retired?

He got old.

But now he’s back?

Him and his whole party. Some moron decided that he was a threat to imperial security. Now they’re coming for us.

I’m not worried. We’ll defend the emperor.

What level are you? 13? Yeah, you’re badass vs. the locals. These guys are into the epics.

But you said they were aging…

And let’s really hope that penalty makes a big enough difference in effectiveness… or we’re all dead.

Serial Numbers Filed Off: The Rise of the Supervillain

Yet another superhero concept: Behind the Mask

Oh, hey, welcome to my home! I’m glad you guys could make it out today. No, Mr. Nigma’s my father, call me Edward. Can I get anyone anything to drink? So Lex sent you guys to me, right? You’re looking to get into the game, and want some pointers… oh, you need the basic elevator pitch. Alright, let me get a Coke and we’ll get started.

The role of the villain is a long and traditional one. The first thing people tend to ask is what separates a villain from a common criminal. That requires a lot of unpacking. You really need to consider one thing: if you’re smart or powerful enough to be a villain, you could have a comfortable life way easier than going into crime. Have you seen the rates you can get from lots of private firms for any kind of ability to channel energy in ways physics can’t fathom? If you can sneak into a bank vault, you can make top dollar working as a completely legit courier for mega corporations or get the CIA to pay out the nose for you to contract. Hell, I have no powers other than my own towering intellect, and I could easily be pulling down millions a year from the markets or making triple-A video games. No, if all you’re interested in is getting rich, there are far safer and more lucrative ways for the gifted to pursue that goal than simple crime.

Being a villain, on the other hand, is a grand calling. It’s not about getting rich, it’s about becoming immortal. No, I don’t mean schemes like what al Ghul has going, though that’s a frequent side effect, I mean achieving such notoriety that your very image becomes legend in your own lifetime and beyond. We villains become iconic forces, defining our own myths by setting ourselves in opposition to those Campbellians in tights. Virtually every hero of any talent quickly becomes a legend, and we sort of, well, tag along. And it’s way easier than trying to be a hero yourself. As a hero, you’re at the beck and call of society, you’re constantly having to fight both criminals and villains, and you rarely make any money doing it. As a villain, you set your own hours, you often earn enough to live in fabulous comfort between visits to Arkham, and, most importantly, the only people you get in a fight with on a regular basis tend to have a deeply held aversion to killing. Seriously, look at me: run of the mill criminals are terrified of me, and the Bat has caught me dozens of times at this point and the worst I’ve gotten is a few broken bones when I really pissed him off. As long as you stay on the good side of the other villains in town, you have almost nothing to worry about other than sanitarium food for a few months a year.

So have I gotten you on board with the concept and you’re ready for the how-to? Excellent, let’s proceed…

Your first step is, of course, to find a likely hero to set yourself against. Ideally, you want someone just a little more skilled than you, and with something thematic you can do within your powerset that makes you a clear opposite. There has to be thematic resonance to get you into the myth, you see. Imagine if, say, Captain Cold and I traded places. The Flash would have me in jail in seconds, and the Bat would either accidentally be dead or have to call in the Justice League every time the Captain popped up. There’s just a power imbalance. Plus, thematically, there’s nothing I could do where my intellect proved a reasonable foil to a guy that’s all about speed, and, well, the Bat already has a cold-related villain with a much better backstory link to his own past. But against the world’s greatest detective, I totally have a niche. And freeze rays are excellent at making fast things slow down, so the Captain’s set as well.

Now, this step may be harder for you if you’re committed to being a team. You’ve got a few options. You could each pick a solo hero in the same region and make them team up to fight you regularly. You could set one of you up as the main villain and the rest as his lieutenants, then pick a more powerful hero. Or you could see if you can find a likely team to set yourselves against. Maybe the Titans or one of the minor League spinoffs as a start?

Once you’ve got a hero, you can come up with an identity. Part of this is a costume and name, but the biggest part is an agenda, methodology, and “insanity” that will really get the hero’s goat. (I highly recommend pretending to be insane, by the way, Arkham is way nicer and easier to escape from than Blackgate.) Take me as your example once again; my whole schtick is that I have to do crimes that prove I’m the smartest man in the world, and I can’t resist challenging the Bat to prove me wrong. The irony is that it’s more the other way around: he can’t help himself but to drop anything else he’s working on to make sure nobody can ever say I actually outsmarted him. You’re going to need to do some surveillance on your guy for a while, or at least make friends with the rest of his Gallery: you can’t be an effective villain if the hero, and the public, isn’t interested in your concept.

That’s the next step, the public. You can’t just start doing crime like you’re hoping to get away with it. No, you have to regularly challenge the hero, in full view of the public. Start out messing with the police and politicians, maybe. Leave cryptic clues in the newspapers if that’s your thing. A lot of the newer kids are testing out blogging and social media. But, at the end of the day, you want TV cameras rolling on your latest atrocity and, if you can swing it, on the brutal melee between you and the local caped vigilante. These days, with the 24-hour networks, you might even go global on a slow news week. You ever notice that villains always burst out of the front of a bank, right into the police and news van blockade, just as the hero is flying up? It’s all about the free press.

Anyway, I’ve rambled at you long enough. If you’re ready to be a proactive entrepreneur in the field of immortality, this is certainly the gig for you. Questions?

Serial Numbers Filed Off: Doctor Doom Can Assist You

The Superhero System of Your Choice (Marvel Setting): Unheroik Jurks

My name is Nicholas Fury and I’m putting together a special team, and I need me eight superheroes. Eight American superheroes.

Now, y’all might’ve heard rumors about the S.H.I.E.L.D. counter-terrorist surge happening soon. Well, we’ll be leaving a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into Latveria, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwhackin’ guerrilla army, we’re gonna be doin’ one thing and one thing only… killin’ Doombots.

Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I sure as hell didn’t come down from the goddamn helicarrier, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half of the Secret Invasion and jump out of a fuckin’ air-o-plane to teach Victor von Doom lessons in humanity. Doom ain’t got no humanity. He’s a Richards-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and he needs to be dee-stroyed.

That’s why any and every every son of a bitch we find wearin’ a Doom costume, they’re gonna die. Now, I’m the direct descendant of the mountain man Jim Bridger. That means I got a little Injun in me. And our battle plan will be that of an Apache resistance. We will be cruel to the Doombots, and through our cruelty Doom will know who we are. And he will find the evidence of our cruelty in the expurgated, exploded, and executed bodies of his robots we leave behind us.

And the Doctor won’t not be able to help himself but to imagine the cruelty his Doombots endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and our powers. And Doom will be sickened by us, and Doom will talk about us, and Doom will fear us. And when Doom closes his eyes at night and he’s tortured by his subconscious for the evil he has done, it will be with thoughts of us he is tortured. Sound good?

YES, SIR!

That’s what I like to hear. But I got a word of warning for all you would-be warriors. When you join my command, you take on debit. A debit you owe me personally. Each and every man under my command owes me one hundred Doombot positronic brains. And I want my robot brains. And all y’all will git me one hundred robot brains, taken from the heads of one hundred dead robots. Or you will die tryin’.