So the annual M&M Halloween game drew to a close the other day after the last part of it (the final battle) had to be delayed until this morning after we lost a player last night to the dreaded "adult responsibilities."
Halloween isn't really a thing in Australia, but its a good enough excuse to get together and play, even if it is only digitally, via headset & web cam.... The Halloween game has become a bit of a tradition. This year it was just a four PC game & for a change of pace, this year I didn't do the clichéd Halloween themed adventure. Previous years I did one fear themed game (ala Scarecrow) & for the last two years "Attack of the Jack O'Lantern", adventures about the machinations of Jack O'Lantern. This year two of my players were a little disappointed not to be getting another shot at Jack (having failed to capture him the last two years running).
Instead this year I ran an adventure of the Redeemers, which are my universes version of the Suicide Squad. The players got to play PL10 villains, who have been incarcerated & have been volunteered for active service on dangerous wet works covert missions.
This year the players built:
Amp: Japanese American meta human with electrical powers. (Think DC's Electrocutioner)
The Recluse: A stealthy street vigilante, with martial arts skills, but who leans more heavily on his costume full of gadgets. The character found Zen religion in prison & became a pacifist.... Guess how long that lasted in play. (Me thinks someone watched "Batman: Assault on Arkham" before building this character)
Zero: A sword wielding assassin, who reads human body language like a book. She wears a complete body suit, has combat skills that cross the border into super-human & she only ever speaks in statements of intent, ala "decimate guards" or "objective complete." Not exactly a conversationalist. Rumour has it that Zero is not just her name but also her promise, as in its the amount of contracts she's ever failed to execute. (This player had never played M&M before, but she is a long time comic book fan. I have a feeling this character was based on Batgirl as she was when she was undercover in Justice League Elite)
Hailstorm: A
human with a weaponised ice generator costume & related do hickeys. (Drawn from my own personal collection because the player couldn't make the pre-game construction meeting due to having family obligations. This character is kind of like Captain Cold but cooler because I built him to be a villain for character, so his range of ice related powers is wider than Captain Colds)
The adventure was a simple one
0. Introduced to Director Bridges & the Redeemer Project. Where the control implants are explained.
1. Track down the source of the super weapons coming in to New York,
2. this lead to a supplier,
3. which lead to an Oil Rig in international waters,
4. were they left a swath of destruction (and I mean corpses),
5. before discovering its actually a Colony Nest (Think of the Colony as AIM, by way of HIVE),
6. tripped an alarm while trying to plant bombs
7. which brought down a communication dead zone that three of the players used to remove the neck implants they were told were bombs
8. getting caught on the main deck as they tried to escape
9. had to fight there way out only to find that Zero had disappeared having apparently gone off mission
10. only to discover that she had been given a secondary mission to free an imprisoned meta-criminal the Colony had taken prisoner (The French villain from Morocco, The Rhino)
11. only to show up for the last fight against powered operatives of the Colony
12. fought a fighting retreat while this other villain went on his own rampage
13. to finally have the entire shebang explode as the teams extraction vehicle showed up
14. at which point the three players without implants tried to mutiny & kill the extraction agents, only to discover what they had removed was a dummy unit.... All except for Zero who wasn't fooled by the fake & refuse to mutiny.
15. Woke up in jail again.
16. Until next time they are needed at least.
Not bad for 8 hours of gaming over a day and a bit since the last part really went on for a while, as players were chewing up the scenery, trying ever combination of powers they could think of in the form of power stunts.
A lot of fun was had.