Category: Supers

EXCESSION: Session 1

Excession is a new low-to-mid powered superhero game using the Year Zero Engine.

Session 1

Excession is a privately owned non profit organisation that seems to have unlimited money and a private army.

Louis and Jana are two hard chargers for the Excession organisation. Louis is a German-American with a real love of animals and an equal love of his well groomed porn-star moustache. Jana is a matronly experienced soldier with no need to prove herself. They like to get in quick, hit hard and leave the nerds to come in and tidy up. They’re both relaxing in the Ready Room when they feel the whole building, all 19 storeys, shudder. A shadow falls over the building and over the comms there’s the sound of gunfire and panic. Both grab their webbing and weapons and bolt up the stairs as the Evac siren sounds and the office workers begin to spill out of the offices and to the stairwell.

Taking the steps 4 at a time, they arrive at the roof and take cover behind an aircon unit to see a tall (3 metres tall!) silvery armoured figure directing energy weapon fire upon a fire team on the roof. They’re pinned down behind a pipe. The energy weapons fire is coming from a suspended black disc, perhaps 3 metres wide. But above it, in a seeming haze, is the ‘impression’ of a much larger vessel, perhaps cloaked.

Louis bolts for the stairs and leaps over the bannister, plummeting two floors to the upper armoury and grabs a LAW (Light Anti-Tank Weaton) and an AMR (Anti-Material Rifle) and then starts climbing up the stairs again, meanwhile Jana unclips a frag grenade from her webbing and lobs it at the silvery figure. The grenade detonates with seemingly no effect. Arriving back up, Louis hands her the LAW and he cocks the AMR. Both take aim and Louis makes an abdomen hit while the LAW round hits the being in the chest. This seems to stagger the being so they signal for the fire team to depart. One of them isn’t so lucky, Hank gets grabbed by the being and thrown off the roof….

Jana reports this over the comms and luckily there are two Enhanced on their way up. One is codenamed Jade Dragon, a superlative martial artist withthe ability to transmute objects and people to jade. The other is Strobe who has limited control over his personal space time – in effect he can stop time for a few seconds. Strobe hears about the falling Hank and detours to a window, grabbing a firehose as he runs. He shoots out the window and dives out, stopping time as he begins to fall, allowing him to catch up to the plummeting soldier. He grabs him roughly and the hose goes taut, slamming them into the side of the building three floors lower.

Meanwhile Jana and Louis pump more AMR rounds into this thing and lob grenades – which seems to stagger it. It raises a hand and there’s a pause ….and then the black disc rains heat death rays upon the rooftop. Hair singed, they barrel into the stairwell and begin to descent the stairs as quick as they can as the plaster cracks and the glass melts. They’re met by Jade Dragon on his way up who can see that the whole top three floors of the building are going up in smoke. He leaps over the balcony and falls five floors before deftly grabbing a railing and throwing himself to safety.

The vessel, slowly moves off….

Fire marshals and first aiders are checking everyone at their assembly points outside the building and the four, Strobe, Jade Dragon, Jana and Louis are approached by an elderly man, one of the trustees. They know him as Arthur Joyce. He mutters that “They’re back….” and instructs the team to go find Zachery Ackermann. When they ask him how, he says the address is with his secretary…

Switch To:

November 1945. The back of an Army truck. Sergeant Roy James and Corporal Curtis Cox have been seconded to Excession. The third man in the truck is wearing a white suit and they know he’s a Brit by the name of Arthur Joyce who made his name in the SOE during the war. They’re driven to an airfield and put onto a transport plane which flies them to the heart of Kansas. Then two more hours of driving and they find themselves in the middle of a cornfield looking at a furrow caused by a fallen meteor. But this meteor seems to be made out of silvery metal. Joyce orders Corporal Cox to jemmy open the thing and he does while Sergeant James covers with his rifle.

The capsule opens and there’s a rush of strange smelling gases. As the mist clears they see a hairless small baby, white in colour with no nose, looking at them. They tell Joyce it’s just a kid and he suggests they’ll have to deal with it. “After all, it’s an invader”. Corporal Curtis picks it up and as his flesh touches it, the baby shifts colour to his skin colour and develops a human nose and a patch of dark hair on its head. Within seconds it’s indistinguishable from a human child. Joyce again uses his horrible euphemisms about killing and the two soldiers take a stand. They ain’t killing a kid and, heck, even Nazi babies aren’t born evil – they reckon they can raise this kid. Joyce concedes and tells them to get married – if they can find a woman who’d stoop so low. Curtis asks what they’ll call the kid. Joyce interrupts, “Call him Zachery”.

End of session 1.

New Project: Beyond Human

New? I’ve been working on this for a while.

2008. I wrote that in 2008.

The project has advanced. It’s now 70 pages which puts it as the largest book I’ve made to date.

The premise is that it’s a grounded superhero game. I mean, as grounded as superhero games can really be. It’s got a lot of backstory in it because it’s the same game world that I’ve been playing in for decades. Not going to put all of that into the game – only the interesting bits.

But it’s a grounded superhero game. With a Mythos background.

So I asked an artist to sketch something.

That’s Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.

Silver Haired Sentinels: Superheroic Role-Playing in the Retirement Age

Take on the reigns of a retired superhero living out their lives in a retirement home with other seniors. Try and relive smome of your glory days while fighting authoritarian wardens, the rigours of modern life and a family that would rather they didn’t have to visit so often.

Silver Haired Sentinels is a roleplaying game about the residents and staff of a Continuing Care Retirement Community. That would be interesting in itself but some of these Residents have a lot of history; they’re the surviving members of a vigilante team responsible for putting down villains and stopping global conspiracies in their youth.

They’ll be a core team and there will likely be visiting or replaced members. There’s an opportunity to relive past glories, revisit old rivalries and maybe even get some closure on things that didn’t work out in the past.

This game is directly inspired by:

Watchmen (Comic and Movie)
Kick The Can (from the Twilight Zone)
The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (from Cloud Atlas)
Brindlewood Bay (roleplaying game)
New Tricks (TV series)
and by the general realisation that I’m closer to 70 years old than 25 years old.

The name itself is referential to Silver Age comics (and the name of the RPG Silver Age Sentinels).

Latest Project: Silver Haired Sentinels

I’ve been working on this for a while now – and just waiting on a few art pieces to be finished.

So, what is it?

Silver Haired Sentinels is a roleplaying game about the residents and staff of a Continuing Care Retirement Community. That would be interesting in itself but some of these Residents have a lot of history; they’re the surviving members of a vigilante team responsible for putting down villains and stopping global conspiracies in their youth.

They’ll be a core team and there will likely be visiting or replaced members. There’s an opportunity to relive past glories, revisit old rivalries and maybe even get some closure on things that didn’t work out in the past.

This game is directly inspired by:

  • Watchmen (Comic and Movie)
  • Kick The Can (from the Twilight Zone)
  • The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish (from Cloud Atlas)
  • Brindlewood Bay (roleplaying game)
  • New Tricks (TV series)

and by the general realisation that I’m closer to 70 years old than 25 years old.

The name itself is referential to Silver Age comics (and the name of the RPG Silver Age Sentinels).

So, it’s coming soon!

WatchTower: The Game

After many games of WatchTower played using rules from other systems (primarily the classic Marvel Super Heroes game), Matt and I have knuckled down to start writing the actual WatchTower game. We were planning to start a new group and play a Supers game (Godlike was the original proposal), and before you know it we had 12,000 words and all the major system components in place. This will be the first game we’ve written together, and the third published under LateGaming. For me, it’s the one I’ve wanted to write most (it will actually be my first full game, and Matt’s sixth!).

So, what is it?

Matt wrote the background for a supers game back in mid-90s when we played the first iteration, and then a quick primer for a new group that we kicked off in early 2007 that’s a good overview of the background. Most of the blog posts we’ve written under the WatchTower category are about games we’ve run or thoughts we’ve had along the way. It’s a labor of love, because we’ve played the characters and backgrounds multiple times, with different groups, in different countries. It resonates with anyone who enjoys the genre.

What makes it different?

As with all of our games, we value simplicity, flexibility and storytelling. This game reflects those values, and will allow gaming groups to play as any super (or Exotic, as they are known in-world) that they might want to, while having to remain grounded in dealing with real world consequences of what it really means to have powers, and to live in a world where powers exist. The background spans the last 100+ years, allowing for different flavours of game experience, based on the era in which you choose to play. Different classes of campaign are possible also, based on which powers are available in that era and what power level of Exotics you choose to play. The mechanics of character creation are simple and fast, while still having plenty of nuance to allow for interesting stories. This also works in favor of the GM – creating NPCs is a snap, allowing you to focus your energy instead on the flow of the narrative.

When will it be ready?

Ah, the big question! We are getting the mechanics ready to game with our group starting in the next few weeks, and use that as the main play-test. Meanwhile, we (who am I kidding? Matt) will be writing the background material, explanations for the powers, and useful descriptions of the game mechanics. We’ll be commissioning art for our favourite heroes, villains and scenes from the games we’ve played to tie it all together, and that can be the longest turn around for getting the book finished. So, the answer is: 2021, sometime ?

Stay tuned!

Glowing Eyes

Over the weekend I watched “The Darkest Minds”. A movie of the YA novel of the same name about some kids who gain superpowers (there are very few kids around as the ones who don’t gain superpowers tend to die). So it has shades of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a little Wild Cards (edited by George R. R. Martin) and a little J. Michael Straczynski’s “Rising Stars”. Yeah, there’s a passing similarity to “The 23rd Letter” too – especially as we use a psi symbol on our cover too. But I digress.

It bothered me about the glowing eyes. A lot of stuff about superhero fiction and radiation emission bothers me. To have glowing eyes, you have to have actual light emitters inside the eyes. And that’s weird to me. Weirder than psychic powers anyway.

A few years ago I wrote a superhero background where every superpower had a basis in biology. Some people had poisonous touch or acidic spittle. Some people had enhanced strength or reactions, others had increased resistance to harm. But there was always a trade off. A reason for their power. We had flyers, don’t get me wrong, but these were people with enhanced nervous systems who could control the flight surfaces on experimental jet packs. Every super power had to have some sort of sensible grounding. After a fact. And it was a lot of fun.

No glowing eyes.

Superheroics

I’ve been reading a lot and prepping my ‘superhero’ game and though I love the concept of GODLIKE and Wild Talents, it’s really turned into an exercise of accountancy.

I don’t like point buy systems which encourage you to minmax.

I’m frustrated by this because I can’t therefore find a system I want to use. And that means I’m going to have to stop procrastinating and write my own. I’d already done some of this before, then lost all of my notes, and now have to almost start from scratch.

I think using the basis of the 23rd Letter is probably a great idea. What say you?

23L Superhumans

Having some spare time yesterday evening I resurrected some of my notes for ‘superpowers’ in T23L. It wasn’t part of the plan to have 23L superhumans – though I was accused by Jeremy of writing my own ‘supers’ game when we published The 23rd Letter. We did have quasi-superhumans in the form of the Furies and the Terata but nothing was ever done with them.

Some of the thought process for the superhuman system was taken from the Amber system. I quite liked the way their stats were arranged:

  • Human – covering the full range of Human ability
  • Chaos – stronger than any human
  • Amber – stronger than both Chaos and Human
  • Ranked – allowing you to be a stronger Amber-ite, perhaps even the strongest.

For 23L/Supers, I envisaged a triple scale over and above the abilities of Humanity.

The 23rd Letter has a range of 1-7 for human endeavour. Given the media it is trying to emulate, I expanded this to 1-9 so that there could be some decent Batman/Captain America/peak of human ability in there. The rationale obviously was that someone with Strength of 1 would be weedy and weak whereas someone with Strength 9 would be sprouting muscles on their muscles!

I added a second level, Superhuman 1 (also called Basic) which covered the range from 11-19, inferring that even the weakest superhuman was still stronger than the strongest human. All individuals with Strength at Superhuman 1 would be of similar strength ability – the second digit giving you an idea of the amount they had ‘worked’ it. Someone with Strength 11 would probably be able to press a ton and could be thin and unmuscled. In comparison someone with Strength 19 would be heavily muscled or, at least, tremendously toned and should, in theory have better control over their strength.

I then added a third level, Superhuman 2 (also called Advanced) covering the range 21-29 and a fourth, Superhuman 3 (also called Master) for very high level supers.

This also extended to the Powers they would have. And even within powers there were powers that may not be available to all superhumans (essentially the first generation superhumans had access to some powers and could get very competent with them, later ‘model’ superhumans had access to better powers but didn’t have as much opportunity to become skilled with them). The Powers were in broad categories like ‘Flight’ or ‘Coordination’ or ‘Strength’. Each power would have a description of ‘Basic’, ‘Advanced’ or ‘Master’ and were meant to be built as packages, e.g.

  • Basic Flight – the character can fly up to 70 mph.
  • Advanced Flight – the character can fly at up to Mach 1. He also gains modifications to his body to better enable this, skin toughness and resistance to wind chill and friction. The player can buy Basic Coordination at half cost.
  • Master Flight – the character can fly at virtually unlimited speeds. He is resistance to the effects of this travel, gaining Basic Resistance for free. The player can buy Basic or Advanced Coordination at half cost.

Like in The 23rd Letter, the ‘powers’ were tied into the game world so that someone with Basic Strength (boosting them from Strength of 1-9 to Strength of 11-19 as well as other benefits) would be called Achilles-class. Someone with Advanced Strength would be Talos-class. A Master-Strength superhuman might be Heracles-class. A Heracles-class superhuman might have other benefits too, like being virtually impervious to harm.

This was the basis of the system of ‘More Than Human’ which was on the LateGaming site for years (since about 2001 when Jared put together the first edition of this web site) but now comes uncomfortably close to the as-yet-unreleased ‘Beyond Human’ touted by Eden (which will undoubtedly come to market around the time we release whatever this game turns out to be – if history (Zombi vs All Flesh Must be Eaten) is anything to go by.

I’ll post more on this later.