Ascendant DC Campaign Log. Justice League: Caribbean

Hello! Welcome! I am going to be reposing a somewhat long running campaign log for an actual Ascendant game I’ve been playing in for in the ballpark of years at time of this first post. These reports have initially been uploaded to the Autarch Discord Server and have somewhat of a following over there. There being reposted here as the forum is a more permanent home for them, and the campaign is winding too a close in the nearish future.

That said, please bear in mind, when these are intitially getting typed up, it’s in the Discorder Server, by me, trying to remember everything that was relevant that happened the previous night after often not a whole lot of sleep. So, mistakes are bound to have been made for spelling and the like. I’ll correct them when I catch them in the reupload, but expect plenty to get through, fair warning.

Beyond that, there have been instances of interaction with other users during these logs. In cases were they are applicable, I will try to express the broad strokes and any critical points made, but I will be withholding Discord user handles to make sure I don’t inadvertently make trouble for someone years down the line. Call it an abundance of caution on my part.

Outside of that, you may notice some things are at the time your reading them a bit out of date. They were current at the time of the original discord posting. Time marches on, but please under stand that that is the reason why, particularly in the early parts.

That all said. Let us begin.

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So, been running in a campaign for some sessions now. Archon helped a bit with initial set up and Teleros has been helping since then.

Teleros has suggested I post some various updates on the happening’s here going forward. Thinks everyone might become amused by them.

So I’ll start with a bit of background and see how everyone’s feeling after that.

This is our groups first Ascendant Campaign. It’s a sequel to a Mutants and Masterminds 3rd edition game. We have 4 returning Player Characters, and a player that was running a 4th one returning as the GM, and the GM from the prior game joining in as a Player Character in this one.

The GM’s former character is an NPC currently. She’s off doing other things with a different team of supers currently due to story reasons but we do have the odd phone call and what not to get her involved in the banter.

We had another player in the prior game but some work schedules changed so even though that player had made a whole new character with a concept to go with it, that player hasn’t been in session’s really.

Game is set in the DC Universe and taking place in Miami specifically.

The Cast:

Wraith: A murdered Tokesatsu themed theme park mascot, killed attempting to save woman from what he thought was a cult sacrifice. Turned out, she was an actual witch, spells and all, and made him a ghost because rules of her magic obligated her to repay him, but she’s a vindictive ass so, she didn’t just send him about his life or something. Returning from the previous campaign.

The Buccanneer: Former Super Villain who, mostly with the odd exception (like trying to rob Wayne Manner that 1 time.) steals form super villains and criminals. On a Parole of sorts and working with us to keep that parole going. He’s got a magic Atlantian Cutlass from Aquaman and an array of other more conventional weapons. He’s, probably the most kill happy person in the party. The GM of the previous game is running this guy.

Nanosecond: Gothem City Native and severe alcoholic. He ended up getting abducted by aliens who went on an intergalactic bender with him and modifying him into a cyborg becasue they were piss drunk too at the time, and turning him into a speedster with some regen. Spent most of the last game trying to be not a drunken mess with super powers. By this game, he’s become a recovering alcoholic, not drinking anymore, and instead has dedicated himself to Ayn Rand Objectivisum. Which he rants about in character at any given opportunity. Returning character from last game. (We are cutting this player a lot of slack because last game was his very first table top RPG ever and he spent 90% of it getting a handle on game mechanics, and now he’s learning a whole new system for second go around. And he’s doing this will trying for his master’s degree IRL.).

Inquiry: One of our Miami Natives. Former Miami Vice Cop with the body of a 1980’s supermodel (as ya do.) who got subjected to Bang Baby Chemicals. She has Psycomitry via touch, and so far the only control she has is that it doesn’t seem to go off if she doesn’t’ have direct contact. She’s noticeably less kill happy than Buccaneer, but she’s willing to do it if backs against the wall. Shes not a power house in a fight but she’s precise, very hard to hit in the first place, and good at getting information. She’s sort of the team mom as the person with the most general experience. Returning PC form last game.

Zebraspider: My guy. So, he’s kind of a spider-man Expy with a few tweaks and the premise of “what if instead of a tech genius, he just had a nickles worth of common sense?”. He’s been super heroing in Miami the longest of the group. Has a few recurring baddies of his own whom are largely such small potatoes there not really known anywhere else. He’s also been the most hard-line about not killing the bad guys whenever possible. He’s got a day job he’s trying to juggle, relatives he’s trying to make sure stay looked after, monster guilt complex because one of them got killed back when he first got his powers because of something he has it in his head he could of prevented and didn’t. (Debatable how responsible he really was for this.) And his own J.J. Jameson stand in, Cat Grant, who rails about how terrible he is on the daily and uses him to bludgeon super hero’s as a concept routinely. Returning character form the previous game.

Honorable NPC mention’s:

W. R. Abbot:

Wizard, from the player that’s not returning, does a bit of Alice In Wonderland Imagery. very fond of killing enemy’s. He’s made a minor appearance as an NPC to consult but he’s not been in the game as his player had the scheduling conflict.

Lizard Woman:

This is the GM’s character from prior game. Rich beauty queen, Heiress and world class spoiled sweet party girl, who is also a living dumb blond stereotype. (As described by the player, often Very high Wis but VERY low Int in D&D terms.).

A chaos cult picked her as a sacrifice to bring back there ancient Egyptian chaos goddess and destroy the universe, got part way through the ritual, and then Dr. Fate burst in and wrecked it for them. The part way through left her with a 12ft tall body that’s over a ton of jacked up super muscle, scales, and bone, complete with tail. She’s very brick, strong, kinda fast, tough as nails, and regenerates, and has money and some societal influence, but no really polished skills. (While she’s strong as can be she’s got terrible form in a fight. Telegraphs movements a mile away, that kinda thing.) she’s also highly susceptible to mind control.

She’s not been around in game for hand wave reasons to justify “GM doesn’t want a GM PC in the game.”, but because she’s friends with most of the party, we still get the odd phone call conversation here and there for flavor.

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So, I didn’t start regular touch ins till about about session four. So there will be a lot of summarizing until then.

And when I did start getting updates it was mainly to figure out, at first, updating and rebuilding character sheets since the first pass was, evidently, not great work. (Bunch of noobies, bound to happen. Shrugs )

So there may be a bunch of focus on my character at first. This is why.

Alright, so, game starts with the newly elected mayor of Miami and his assistant, Beautia Sivana, daughter of Shazam/Captain Marvel (the real one.) Villain Dr. Sivana (note: That character is in town during the game having “reformed and gotten a presidential Pardon.” more on that in later sessions.) presenting us too a press conference as part of a new Justice League Local Out Reach Program (think half way between the 50 states initiative except less tied to a terrible story-line and half justice league unlimited.) that will be headquartering in Miami.

We don’t even make it through the introductions when we get an alert about a Metahuman staging a robbery at one of the larger Museums in town. guy named light weaver. (80’s Justice League minor lackey style villain. Can kinda do what green lantern does, with no ring, but not nearly as well.) So we take off. Nanosecond get’s there first, followed by Buccaneer and then the rest of the group.

This was unfortunate because while Nanasecond was beating on him and doing objectivist ranting at him in back and forth one liner format, Buccaneer got there and proceeded to lop his arm off. Granted. He’d been about to blast the door the rest of us, including the nearly vanilla human in the group, were about to come through, and he was doing that intentionally, but that still left us the problem of his arm was cut off.

So, we end up splitting the difference between investigating what was getting taken and getting him to a hospital before he dies so he can not die and have his arm reattached.

We meet the Museums new head, a one Dr. Margaret Sorrow, find out all the stuff getting swiped was Ancient Egyptian Artifacts. And from camera footage, that he was talking on a burner phone to someone about a buyer before destroying the phone before Nanosecond got there. Some of the artifacts we note, tie into our friendly NPC Coshka, AKA, Lizard Woman. By route of that cult that still wants to use her to finish summoning there ancient Egyptian chaos goddess to destroy the universe.

From there we have to detour too the Hospital and take care of things there. Before the bad guy gives Cat Grant a scewed version of events to succeed in Sabotaging us on day 1. My guy is doing a little game of “Don’t even let her get footage of me.” and as a result of evading it, meets a 5 year old girl who mentions too the costumed super hero that he saved her cousins life about 6 months prior. So he makes a little teddy bear out of webbing, tells her to have fun with it cause it will dissolve in an hour, and sends her on her way.

Most of the group is however stopped by a very, very uncooperative cop who doesn’t want to let us in. Wraith comes in clutch by just turning invisible, going in, catching that the bad guy is absolutely lying through his teeth about how it happened, and so, being a ghost, possess him for 2 minutes to make him mention the details he’d been holding back, so that now they don’t have nearly as much of a story and we can argue it well enough if we have too.

So, we use the stuff we got off the guy and Inquiry’s Psycomotry powers, along with what information we got at the Museum, to go ahead and start looking for Lightweavers Boss. This leads us too a Uhaul Location a bit outside town in the middle of the swamp.

We go out there to check it out, and it’s a trap. Force Feild to keep us confined inside the parking lot and office of the place, and 2 super villains waiting in Ambush. Copperhead, you know him if you watched JL and JLU way back when, and Painkiller. A bang Baby. Super strong, build like a 40K Space Marine, super tough, and he pumps you full of drugs on contact which screws with your balance, your ability to feel pain, your reflexes, all that fun stuff.

Both are highly Mercenary guns for higher. My character has fought Copperhead before, Few times. He’s in Miami semi regular.

We fight. Zebra Spider get’s beat down Hard and probably would of died if 4 of the 5 of us hadn’t focused him down from the word go and the weight of all those big hits hadn’t added up fast. Copperhead wasn’t that hard to mop up after.

I put Painkiller in basically a yarn ball of webbing with his face and nothing else sticking out, and webbed up Copperhead. Investigating and we, mostly Inquiry, Found out a guy named Snakey Doyal (a minor 4th world Mythos villain, with IRA ties.) and a local baddie named Slab (unique to my character. And my character blames himself, likely unfairly so, for Slab becoming a super villain in the first place.) are the one’s giving orders. Though Doyal is clearly the brains. (Note, might be spelling names wrong. Sorry.) At this point we know enough to know he’s got buyers, and he wants us dead so that will be out of his way. Media shows up, and that’s our que to Skidattle to take the baddies along. I do a bit of a prat fall but recover jumping onto the trunk of Inquiry’s car to carry Painkiller off so that they cannot corner me and stick a camera in my face and ask gotcha questions. After that, mostly uneventful hand off too the cops, aside form 1 last attempt to get them to maybe not do the super-villain thing which falls on deaf ears, but I tried.

Ok, so, we get back to the new home base we’ve not really had a chance to check out. Meet our support staff. Guy who’s name I cannot pronounce or spell on grounds of it being Russian.

He’s a relative of our friend Coshka. He’s volunteering. Or at least the league hasn’t told us anything different yet and he’s been reliable so far. He kinda does the Oracle thing. We call him Yev for short.

It’s a nice little local headquarters. Zebraspider uses the on site advanced med tech to get patched up, we do the tour. Before we get neck deep into comparing notes and brainstorming, Coshka Calls to just check in and wish us well. This is fun.

Now please allow me a divergence so that I can break down why Coshka calling is fun and well liked as a rule.
[8:32 PM]
Sooooo, first campaign was premised on being in Gothem City. Batman and his usual go too’s with the exception of Oracle were off in Deep Space due to Justice League stuff going on.

Maxi Zeus broke out at Arkham and broke a bunch of other villains out and has them working for him as his “New Olympians.” and because he’s nuts was going to build a lighting themed super weapon and level the city to try and become a god for real if we didn’t stop him and the others, whom in turn were all trying to play him.

The first one we went after was Poison Ivy.

She’d turned the park into her own private murder jungle, so we got the bright idea to send the speedster in to piss her off and then run right back out so she’d come and get him. He went in, mooned her, broke a few of her potted plants, then darted off yelling to catch him if she could.

She gave chase animating a tree Kaiju style to help her. That latter part not having been part of the plan. So we went in to deal with that.

While doing so, Coshka got hit with Poison Ivy’s Pharamones and mind controlled. So the normally straight Vally Girl was suddenly smitten with the red headed villianess and sent to go break the speedster.

Seeing this, my character just jumped on her shoulders and the conversation when something like this:
[8:33 PM]
Zebraspider: “Hey Coshka, what are you doing?”

Coshka: “Oh, I’m trying to kill Nanosecond so that I can get Poison Ivy to be more affectionate like she promised!”

Zebraspider: “Right, want to know an easier way to do that?”

Coshka: “Sure!”

Zebraspider: “Kill him with old age. He can’t out run that, and it means you can just go give poison Ivy a really big hug as a nice suprise right now!”

Coshka: “That makes perfect sense, thanks!”

She then proceeded to go run up to Poison Ivy from behind, give her a bear hug, and make poison Ivy black out from having all the bones between her abs and her shoulders turned to powder. (Super hero logic applied. She’ll get better eventually.)

And then the Pharamon’s wore off and we went on with the game having defeated that part of the problem.

I tell you this story of the Pre Ascendant game so that you will understand why Coshka is beloved by the party as an NPC. So while the calls are rare, they are enjoyed.

Anyway, we get into some brain storming as far as how were going to run down this Doyal guy when the mayor shows up to tell us in a few nights there’s going to be a prisoner transport of all there super powered prisoners up state. That ends second session.

Third session we hit on the idea as we are brainstorming that maybe the head of the museum known’s more/is more involved than we first expected. Evidence supports this theory on a circumstantial level at this stage.

Of note is that our Speedster was out for this session. Cramming for an exam. College life.

So we go do another check on the museum. Lot’s of magic artifacts. We figure out Inquiry appears to be the object of some flustered affection by the good Dr. So we start planning how to leverage this. We come up with having Inquiry show up with a “fan letter.” written in another language that Inquiry can honestly say she doesn’t read or speak but that the Dr. can. (French, as it worked out.)

Zebraspider wrote it since he’s, as set up for a running gag of which this is step 1, fluent in a number of languages. It’s a hobby. Anyway, she take’s it to the doctor, get’s invited clubbing, goes along. We follow but keep a safe distance and open coms just in case.

The night wares on, Inquiry get’s a lot of information about Dr. Sorrow. We, sadly, don’t get anything concrete. In fact we are basically giving it up and just going through the motions. Figure we’ve just misread the situation. So the guys go for a late dinner at a Cuban Place Zebraspider knows (fun aside: If you have ever seen the Gabriel Iglesious “Cuban Coffee” sketch, it’s that Restaurant. I thought it would be funny if I stopped a robbery there one time and so I know the 2 staff members from the story in character.), while Inquiry get’s the very drunk doctor back to her apartment and puts her on the couch.

So, as inquiry is leaving, the Dr. suddenly becomes very impossibly sober, her eyes improve an impossible amount, and she suddenly becomes a freaking kung fu master and lunges at Inquiry. And we finally find out:

Dr. Sorrow is minor Batman and Batwoman Villianess, Magpie. She’d moved down to Miami to try and get a fresh start, and she’s basically having an attack.

Magpie being a split personality, and Dr. Sorrow constantly trying to keep her restrained.

Inquiry, being no slouch as vanilla humans go in a fight, manages to force feed the Dr. her pills and get her back to her senses, while the rest of us come hauling ass and show up a bit too late to actually help.

Inquiry decides that she’s rather taken with the dr. by this time, so the Dr. and Inquiry are starting to form a budding relationship, and she’s become something of an ally for the party as far as a background person who can research stuff.

Of other note is that while at the club, we learn Whisper A’Dare, former Intergang higher up, is in town. Find out she’s in such a state on a full pardon in exchange for testimony and she held up her end of the bargan.

We also end up dealing with a minor ice themed bad guy who started shit when the cops tried to drug bust him called Iceburg, and find out he’s working for Sugerman, a meta human drug lord/mad scientist hybrid, who’s also in town.

We also end up introducing another contact of Inquiry’s. Lt. Frog. Picture even more dangerously persuasive but more localized Amanda Waller and you have the idea. We start putting her wise to the situation as we have it. In the hopes she can shake some more Intel loose.

Session 4 started the Prison Transport. We found out that Nanosecond bumped into this Chaos Sorcerere’s who’s part of that cult hunting Lizard Woman during the events in the prior session. He caught her off guard and incapacitated her, handed her to the cops. In turn, NPC police commissioner insisted we bring her. Lt. Frog and the group are against this as it puts too big a target on this. But he insists siting risk of collateral if she get’s out of thin restraints in the heavily populated metro area and that her medical status is so bad that they cannot even safely sedate her legally. End result is we get her hoisted on us.

So, naturally, we are ambushed a ways into transporting them.

1 Police Officer killed at that point. We find out the other 2 are shape shifter bad guys. One a villain known as Everyman, who’s working for Doyal. And so is the other, but she’s one of my creation’s. One of Zebraspiders local fodder. Another shape changer called Gelding. Shape Shifting Feminazi serial killer. Whom, we learned this session, has literally found a cult to join. Because her being a religious fanatic as well just makes her worse.

So of the 4 cops we left with 1 was alive and legit by the end, and only just barely because sorceress upon getting loose turned her into an Elric Saga Chronenburg Horror Chaos Beast to attack us, and we only got her turned back in time for her to not die form the shock of that by managing to drop the sorcerer’s quickly.

We did manage to recapture the Chaos Sorcerer’s, and we captured 1 of the other super villains, and then capture 1 of the 2 shape shifters that was involved in the break out. That being Everyman. All the rest, Lightweaver, Painkiller, Copperhead and Gelding, got away clean.

The part that’s alarming too my character that 1 of the shape shifters is a recurring opponent of his, and she wasn’t able to fool his danger sense in the past. This is the first time she’s managed that trick. And that worries him because she’s a serial killer and her being able to get the drop on him or other people is bad news. Add that he now feels guilty because he was riding with the Chaos Sorcerer’s and he’s got it worked out in his mind that if he had been a little quicker on the ball he might of saved the other legitimate cop. Once we get the one’s we do have locked up, we try interrogating Everyman. Don’t get much. And because he can assume your powers and form if he can make contact with you and Inquiry’s power’s require contact, we don’t get to do that. He does drop a cryptic threat about Dr. Sorrow’s safety.

(Minor aside, Live Wire is in the prison, and opts to try flirting with Zebraspider. This is amusing because Zebraspider is kind of a “business before pleasure always.” Kind of guy at this stage in his career so, he’s just trying to let her down easy.)

So we rush off too check in with Dr. Sorrow. Wraith, Nanosecond and Inquiry manage to find this Winnebago he’s been living out of that hes’ wired to blow, and disarm the bombs in time.

They also find a few clues but were still having most of them analyzed. The big bomb shell was that evidently, somehow, the baddies have been getting Magpie to come out with out Dr. Sorrow knowing about.

So, we pack the Dr. Up, pick up her sister who was coming down by plane to stay with the Dr. to help keep her leveled out after the prior incident, and get them too the headquarters and have them bunking there till further notice to try and deprive the baddies of assets and easy hostage situations.

Much to Yev’s annoyance as the stuff there is expensive and Magpie is a known thief.

Next session picks up with us trying to follow up on clues. Were getting some stuff translated out of Gaelic, having Mr. Miracle help with figuring out how to track all the teleport tech that’s been cropping up once we find out it’s New Gods tech, and then, we get trouble. It doesn’t seem to bad at first though.

Oh, and I called in a favor with flash to see if he could get one of his rouges to ID any of the unknown players. Captain Boomerang did so for me so next time Zebraspider is in Central City covering for Flash he owe’s Captain Boomerang lunch on the super hero at his usual diner. And we know that Poison is in town and someone is shipping a lot of that Chemical that created the Bang Baby’s into town.

Had an interlude too the investigation in the form of a skyscraper catching fire. We got in there, started evacuating civilians.

Found out that the skyscraper is a secret government facility doing research on weaponizing metahumans, using the big densely populated city to make it’s research more concealed by disguising all the power demands and fluxations. Also find out that super villains are raiding it to get the research files. So we end up dealing with them, easier said then done because 1 of them is an illusionist.

After preventing there full escape and recovering the files, we find out that there are 2 preteen Metahumans there who’s power is there bodies are natural nuclear reactors that can’t properly regulate themselves, and are rapidly going critical after the stasis pods the facility had been using got wrecked by the building getting lit on fire by the bad guys.

A big chunk of the session then became all hell breaking loose with us frantically scrambling to stop the City of Miami getting nuked because this shadowy government agency had illegally stuck this research facility in Downtown Miami of all places.

Captain Atom and Firestorm got called in. And in an effort to buy more time, Dr. Sorrow offers up Excalibur’s scabbard, which is on lone to her museum, to try and help stall for more time. All sorts of craziness.

We narrowly managed to get them into some cobbled back together stasis pods and restabilize the situation. Get some interrogation going, find out Count Vertigo ordered the theft because he though it was just going to be an office building processing paperwork and locking research files in safes, and didn’t know about the on site research.

So The Question shows up to collect the captured super-villains. And gives us some additional insight into what’s going on with the local players on the scene. Turns out the Police Chief and most of the Mayors appointments are Ghosts who have no history prior to showing up right after he won his campaign under suspicious circumstances by a narrow margin, and the media mogul who’s been running the network Cat Grant works for is a realllllly good buddy of his. As is Dr. Sivana and Whisper A’Dare, former known super-villains. High profile one’s. Whom are now conveniently pardoned. Almost like favors were exchanged.

And that because the mod activity is so beat down between Inquiry and Zebraspider hammering it, lot’s of other players are also going “Ohhhh! A Power Vacuum! I’mma fill it!”.

And then we end that session on all the TV Networks in town getting hacked, to reveal, Snakey Doyal, announcing that in 7 days he will publicly assassinate the Mayor. And the question points out how incredibly helpful a public super-villain assassination attempt of the mayor would be less than 2 weeks after the mayor brought in a Justice League affiliated Supers Team to Miami. At least, as long as it failed but got to be the public spectacle super fights at the scene of an attempted crime always turn into.

I will document up too this point Archon has been very supportive of the write ups, and did put forward the question of what power level we were at. At the time we were PL 22. The narrative purpose of the game at the time was that in campaign 1, which was run in a different system before Ascendant had come onto the market, we were a bunch of Z list nobody’s that were cobbled together by some league members to throw at a problem while the league was stretched desperately thin. This game was the gear shift to being competent League Members who could hold there own alongside League Members like The Question, Zatana or Aquaman.

I do have to note however, what I didn’t know at the time, was that in spite of Ascendant being designed for simulationist play, the GM had decided to heavily house rule it to try to use it in more of a narrative storytelling game style of play which is his personal preferred style. And you reader will see more of that down the road from this post, but, at the time I made this Discord Post, that was something I was not aware of.

So this post is the point were I was no longer trying to post catch up from weeks past after having been initially talked into doing this, and was instead posting right after sessions happened.

On that first session that got an immediate log update’s opening, Were brainstorming how we are going to try to run down Doyal after the assassinate the mayor threat. When I get a call from my characters grandmother, seems my characters little sister was suppose to come over with her boy friend to help her clean the garage out, and never showed. Not like her. Sure enough, within moments, we have a whole lot of oddity’s that warrant looking into, that lead us to one conclusion. My characters sister got kidnapped. So we spent a chunk of time dealing with that. While doing so we had to do some side investigation for another missing person, whom was an intern for the news company that hosts my characters answer to J J Jameson. (She had her producer call to try to ask for my help. And the only reason he didn’t hang up on her was he was busy with finding his sister, so, he wasn’t the one that took the call.)

We spend a chunk of time running around after that and eventually track it too a warehouse. We’ve got a few minor canon DC villains, most notably Selki, an Atlantian specialized in Siren Style Mind Control of all who find her attractive, and Cybergirl, a really obscure minor 80’s villainess who had like, 1 appearance I think. Along with a few other villains working with them that are none canon.

So we go in, and immediately everyone except Zebraspider get’s Mind Controlled. And because I’ve got my team now running interference on me because there simping super hard for the genocidal villainess, the bad guys managed to get the machine working to turn all the people into mind controlled super powered living weapons, and she teleported out.

While that did permit us to get the team back too there senses, it also meant my characters sisters serious boyfriend got turned into a nih-mindless killing machine with no free will and he failed to stop it.

So, yeah, he’s not having a good day.

Not helped by the cops showing up late, and the group and the cops deciding that he must be gay if he resisted her charms. (He’d gone in with a blind fold and was the only one who didn’t eat shit on the roll against the mind control power. )

This is particularly annoying to him because in the prior game, this was a running gag that people confused him with a minor Batwoman Villain called Wolf Spider when he first started out. Whom was very, flamboyantly Gay. (Lizard Woman actually redesigned his costume to help combat this.).

On the mild positives side, his sister lost the stable boy friend, but, at least she didn’t get turned into a mindless super powered killing machine herself. And the intern didn’t either, though, it will present an opening to tell his version of Cat Grant “Hey, so, you damn near got her subjected to a fate worse than death in order to hunt your white whale, all in the name of having at me, something you’ve gotten so blatant about all the various super villain factions on the planet trying to establish Miami as a comfortable base of operations knew they could use to play you like a piano. Just so you know.”

But then on the negative side, he get’s to be the one to tell his sister what happened to her steady boyfriend.

That’s were we ended the most recent session off on. Next one will be a week from this Friday. I’ll follow up then.

Man I wish I could quote my own posts on discord. Or at least I did when I first wrote that line as at the time, there was a lot of discussion in the Discord server room I was posting this in between sessions, that was related to other peoples game. And it made it so that the posts about the campaign log were spread. And discord had not rolled out that feature that I’m aware of at the time.

Anyway.

Alright! We had another session last night!

So, we opened with my guy going into the hospital in Civilian Clothing to sit with his sister until the rest of the family got here. And my characters answer to J J Jameson is on site. Complete with the same car that started it all with the 2 of them, with the same custom license plate, except at the end a “2” has been added but otherwise it’s identical.

He spends a bit of time talking too the cops and the doctors, can’t get much about the boyfriend, which worried him that he’d have to let someone else break the news too her. Does get told that she’s going to be fine in 2 weeks tops.

So, he goes in to see her in this hazmat suit to make sure the experimental stuff done too her doesn’t have anything to react too. And there is Cat Grant asleep just outside the room in a chair along with her staff. Because Cat Grants Intern that we also saved narrowly last session, and ended up as my characters sisters roomie for the hospital stay.

I get in the room, there getting on famously with one another. Seems there both into something my character doesn’t know a thing about called Warhammer 40K. (Inside Joke. I am not fond of 40K or Games Workshop for various sundry reasons, the GM is however a hugh 40K fan so doubtless found this hilarious. The other 2 or 3 40K fans in the party listening too this sure thought it was.) My characters sister asks the Intern to take a restroom break for a few minutes so we can have sibling talk, which the Intern is happy to do.

And then my characters sister looks my character dead in the eye and demands to know if I’m Zebraspider.

This, caught both the player and the character entirely off guard, and so I had a response along the line of “Well, you must of gotten hit in the head pretty hard, what on earth makes you think that?”

And then she shows a picture form Coshka’s (Coshka being Lizard Woman from the earlier posts.) Instagram Feed of Coshka taking a Selfie in Switzerland some months back.

On a weekend thing my character had done with her between 1st campaign and 2nd because, in the 1st campaign, she found out my character the born and raised south Florida native had never in his life seen snow, and decided this simply could not be allowed to stand! And that he simply must do a weekend trip to see snow, she insisted! (I should of noted here she invited the whole 1st game party and Inquiry also attended the little trip. Failed to do that when posting in Discord.)

Anyway, so on the trip she took a selfie and my character in Civilian Clothing can be seen in the back ground handing a dude at a coffee shop some Swiss Paper Currency to pay for a coffee.

And his sister figured out fairly quickly after that that he was not suppose to be in Switzerland with a relatively well known Super Hero (she’s probably the most high profile of us all because she was famous before she had super powers.), and that he started dropping off most of his free time and working odd hours right around the time Zebraspider in his first iteration came on the scene.

So, caught red handed, He spends the next several minutes insisting too her that he will have the conversion with her that she oh so clearly wants to have, but not with Cat Grant 20ft away from us. She pressed me for a bit but finally relents when the Intern get’s back in.

At which point the Intern starts flirting with him because I find out his sister had also taken the opportunity to play Match Maker for him behind is back because she’s going to get him to start doing some none work/super hero things one way or another. (In fairness, that has been part of his character arc is that he’s trying to workaholic his way through the problem and that is a questionable tactic.)

So I get out of the room about the time the characters grandmother get’s there to see there sister. Grandma is talking to Cat Grant about keeping his sister’s name out of the reporting on it as much as possible.

He’s partially involved in the chat but I play it as “Family Emergency, my mind is in a million places right now.” kinda thing. Which, ok, Cat Grant understands, or at least claims too.

Not that she misses a chance to get his Grand Mother on her side that this is 100% Zebraspiders fault that all of this happened and if he’d go away it would improve everything. Which Grandma fully agree’s with!

Oh, and Grandma get’s to guilt him abit about how much he’s been working and how little he’s been around, And Cat Grant breaks off with a warning about messing with her intern, to go take a call. Once he’s got Grandma Settled in he sneaks over too her Office too the outside ledge and listens into that call.

Turns out her Boss is very much looking forward to her getting an Interview with Zebraspider so everyone can watch them have a lovely shouting match because it will be ratings gold. Also, He’s totally cool with that not happening after we’ve saved the mayor because then it’s good news all around which is also ratings gold. So no matter what happens, barring us stopping Doyal’s assassination in a quite and not spectacular fashion, he’s coming out on top. Also get some details about his body guard who looks suspiciously like Inquiry’s Mother. Turns out she sounds just like her too.

So, I break off from that as they slip into very mundane business stuff, head in for work. Com the group to get them up to speed while I’m on my way in. Spend the day at work working with electricity with my eyes closed as much as I can, so that he can practice using just his danger-sense with out his eyes for the next time he get’s a shot at Selkie. We also figured out in character there is a 50/50 shot that Wraith can also resist Selkie. Or that he can’t and I’d just have to beat my way through 4 simps instead of 5 to clobber her.

Meanwhile Inquiry has a lovely training match with Dr. Sorrow and a long Shower.

Buccaneer makes himself useful by doing some underwater scouting in his private sub to see if he can find any trace of the 2 Atlantian super villains now in play. Instead he finds an Atlantian Pleasure Yatch on what is there equivalent to spring break. And get’s into a drinking contest that turns into typical spring break shenanigans, fade to black.

Wraith relays the information too everyone that I relay. So they do a few other things.

They check in on the leads with the alien tech, which goes largely cold, and only turns up that it’s a mixer of different alien techs cobbled together.

They get the calendar checked which let’s us confirm that Doyal has work going in form the Spyder Society and League Of Assassins, as well as Intergang, and some other group were not familiar with. Unfortunately, none of that helps us catch him directly, though we do piece together he’s probably going to have The Spyder Society go for the mayor and if that fails try to blow up the mayor and everyone else in the stadium when the mayor announces his re-election campaign using teleport tech we still can’t trace or counter.

So from there, they get 2 leads. They find out some officers are camping at the site of the near nuclear disaster we had to call a lot of help in to avert, because alien lizards are showing up and poking around it late at night. And Inquiry goes to lean on a lower level contact of hers for information. We don’t get anything for Doyal Directly, but we find out there’s creepy basement stuff going on in the Theme Park my sister was kidnapped at, and 3 clubs that an associate of Doyal’s, Sugarman, is doing business out of. So they decide to go for the Lizard Men first which is were I catch up with them, get brought up to speed, and fill them in on Zebraspiders evens in character. Inquiry notes that maybe, just maybe, he’s biased in his estimation of Cat Grants character and morals.
[3:10 PM]
And that perhaps he should try a softer approach. He’s, considering it. He’s not totally sold on the idea though.

So we get the party back together, Inquiry, former cop, is paling around with some of her former friends form the department, and then a bunch of alien lizards teleport in and demand something they’ve evidently already paid for.

And that was were we ended the session, to be resumed on the cliff hanger next session with trying to talk our way through this, or if not, fight them off.

During the interim period between sessions and posts this time, more Praise from Archon was heaped on the group for the story crafting and role playing, which the GM did respond he was very humbled by and by people’s enjoyment of.

In the meantime someone also posted about if anyone had done Halloween themed sessions in games, and asked what those looked like.

I gave the following information from Campaign 1.

"That campaign I have been posting about?

The 1st campaign, the one that came before we switched systems to Ascendant?

We spent October dealing with a haunted Arkham Asylum run by The Ghost of Hugo Strange, Scarecrow, and Professor Pyg.

Very Thematic.

Culminated in a game the night before Halloween were we fought Scarecrow, Hugo Stranges Ghost and Victor Zsazs, then latter of whom had been fitted with a Mad Hatter Style Mind Control Device, and pumped up on Manbat Serum and a bit of Bane Venom to make him physically dangerous enough that Coskha and Zebraspider had there hands full with him."

He responded approvingly and explained some of his idea for a session after brainstorming with his group, and I responded in turn with the following.

"Splendid. :slight_smile:

We spent a few minutes afterwords with Zebraspider going through the list of Arkham Inmates.

this started with them having to ask Calendar Man a few questions.

Ended with him thoroughly convinced in character that Gothem City is actually a Loony Toon that escaped it’s home dimension as a secret plot from it’s owners, the Warner Bro’s corporation, because it’s the only way that City and what it pumps out makes sense to him."

Alright, so, it’s that time again!

New Session last night!:

So, we left off with a bunch of alien lizard men showing up and demanding something they’d evidently already paid for. Some negotiations and some team huddles took place.

We worked out there from the Planet Thanagar, were Hawkman and Hawkgirl come form. And what they were promised was the 2 Metahumans that the government was experimenting on a few sessions back. The one’s that, because there containment got damaged, nearly nuked the entire city of Miami due to being utterly unable to control there powers. And that they were going to be using them along with some other stuff they already had back on Thanagar to genocide all the hawk people.

Well, this was not great, and turned out, Doyal had promised them the Metahumans, in exchange for a little over 100Lbs of stuff called Enth Metal, which is a metal you don’t really find on earth in setting but that interacts with energy in unique ways, and has some anti-magic property’s. This did help support how he was getting some of his techno-nonsense to work and thus, kept evading us.

So, we tried to get them talking to get the Swat team time to pull back and try to set up snipers. This, did not work, and they jumped to attack after something I said conflicted with something Doyal had told them. (a lie that I didn’t know about in or out of character that they had believed. I found this out later.) And all hell broke loose.

We did our best to keep them from wasting the swat team and we very, very narrowly succeeded. 1 Swat officer got shot with a laser gun that very nearly killed him but after the fighting we managed to stabilize him and get him into an Ambulance so it looks like he’ll pull through.

We ourselves also got banged up but good in the course of the fighting so, first thing after the fight was heading back to base. I took the liberty of warning Dr. Sorrow so that she didn’t kill me when Inquiry came in looking like she’d been in a meat grinder.

Also of note form this is that we captured exactly 1 Lizardman. The only survivor after wraith made a failed attempt to take over there vehicle and caused it to self destruct instead. We got some information from him that corroborated the calendar we’d found, And confirmed about the Enth Metal. Since it’s so rare and we now know Doyal has enough of it to stick out, were gonna pursue an angle on that.

Also Buccaneer is demanding an honor duel with Zebraspider because, during the stall for time keep them talking phase, in an effort to keep them from starting shooting prematurely that ultimately failed, I tried to persuade them that Buccaneer was harmless, really, and they didn’t need to start shooting for that reason. It didn’t work and the character feels slighted so he’s insisting they have a sparring match in the near future. (After a brief comparison of sheets we determined that Zebraspider would nearly certainly be the ultimate winner, but that Buccaneer was going to make him look like a slasher movie victim in the process, so both would need the fancy on site tech tech medical treatment stuff we had afterwords, or a lot of down time we simply don’t have. And will be handling it off camera in this way so as not to devolve into PVP because the player feels the character would be all together slighted but he as the player doesn’t want that. Which is a thing I can respect.)

Once patched back up Zebraspider detoured over to his sister, had another long chat with her while her room mate was off getting some diagnostic stuff done in another room. And having heard him give the least flattering version of events possible as far as how this all got started and the couple of other things he considered his world class F’ups, she advised him that she doesn’t blame him for it. And that running himself to death doing the hero thing isn’t going to fix it or bring anyone back, so he’d be much better served to learn from it. While going over prior events with her, she raised 2 useful points, 1 of which he did follow up on later and the other of which he will follow up on probably next session.

One was that from the way things seem to be playing out, there’s no way it’s just the blind fold and his berserk button being pressed that kept Selkie form mind controlling him. There had to be some sort of resistance involved. More on that point later in session.

The other, was that there is just no way Cat Grant hates him as much as she seems too simply because of what Zebraspider is aware of having happened. There had to be something else getting her goat were he was concerned. And since he’d already been mulling Inquiry’s insight into it over, he’s probably at some point next session or session after if there is time, going to have a little talk with her and see how that plays out. We’ve got 2 things we legitimately needed to communicate too her anyway, so me playing messenger doesn’t strain credulity too hard, and I can sandwich in something about the point his sister raised in the process.

With that done, we ended up splitting up and following 2 leads.

Buccaneer and Wraith go to one of the clubs that we heard about, which is a brothel disguising itself as a maid cafe. Shennanigans ensue, but, he does manage to not blow cover, and does confirm that Sugarman is running drugs out of the place. Ebon, a Static Shock Villain, stretchy powers, is handling the day to day transactions.

And the rest of the group goes and has a chat with Dr. Sivana. And instead of what we are expecting, Dr. Sivana Sr. We meet Dr. Sivana Jr. And his fiance. And, as is the joke with his dad, the 4’9ft goblin man is dating a well over 6’4ft German Fitness Supermodel who is also a scientist with a niche area of study (Intersection of magic and tech.).

They are however both Very keen to help us find Doyal, and we come to find out it’s because Dr. Sivana Sr. made a bet that we would succeed in foiling the assassination. Evidently so did Vandal Savage. We don’t know whom is betting against us but it is at the same time an impressive vote of confidence to have these 2 betting on us, and incredibly alarming that there betting on us.

But there helping us so in 12 hours game time, we will have a way to track the Enth Metal and if we catch a break? Will be able to catch Doyal outright. While meeting with them, I also brought up the point about how odd it was that I could resist Selkie’s mind control. And they took some readings and now Zebraspider knows he’s got really high caliber magic protection. He doesn’t know 100% the extent and upper limit of it, but now he know’s it’s there. (this lead him to the hilarious realization that the Library incident he had between games was in fact not just some kid playing around, but that he actually arrested Clarion The Witch Boy Lord Of Chaos, with out knowing it, and talked too him like he was a little kid.)

So, session is ending, were headed too the University of Miami to pick the brain of another scientist that’s there and see if he’s got any useful insight into what we are dealing with. The fact that said scientist is a hyper intelligent gorilla is incidental.

We also commed the Justice League Watch Tower to try and give Question the info we have. He’s not available but he’ll get the message. This is notable because, Plastic Man answered it. And the GM decided to have Plastic Man be Plastic Man if Norm McDonald had voiced Plastic Man. We are now all sad that that will never actually happen.

Zebraspider, while doing this, coms Oracle and let’s her know about the breach with Coshka’s Instagram feed, and because he’s thinking about it and has time, decides to text Coshka while he’s at it. This results in him getting a weird semi-astral projection experience that they have installed in the mean time as a security feature for people reaching out to Coshka. So, he’s experiencing it as if he’s there, even though he’s not, and he can be seen and heard by everyone else, not just Coshka. He comes in on Powergirl tutoring Coshka on hand to hand combat and how to shift quickly between using a lot of control of super strength so you don’t accidentally kill the close to vanilla human enemy’s, and going full out so that if something that can really take it is at you, you can deal with that. She’s teaching because she’s got a lot of experience with this and is tough enough that if Coshka makes a mistake, she’s unlikely to Injure Powergirl. And he can even feel basic low level contact like a hand shake.

So they chat and he finds out that The Justice Society are running around Europe right now dealing with The Forth Rieche. One Genetically Enhanced Nazi Super Soldier left over form the 40’s and a bunch of wanna be super powered Neo Nazi’s (most of whom are Wonder Woman Villains.). and the problem there having is they keep hit and fading the group and they can’t figure out how there doing it.

I point out how Doyal seems to be doing it, and while Coshka doesn’t understand it really, because anyone else in ear shot of me could hear me just as if I was standing there in the flesh, Powergirl at least should of heard and understood it. Kryptonian Scientist that she is. So word will probably get too the team to compare notes. Conversation is cut short though since Coshka’s team get’s called to deal with them again.

Though not with out the parting bit that a new team mate of hers, a Spanish Vampire red Head, comes in to let her know that that’s happening and makes a pass at Zebraspider right before the magic throws him back to were his physical body actually is.

Zebraspider relays this and Inquiry decides to help herself too some visions to compare notes with. And the fact I got to see Powergirl in the flesh has absolutely nothing to do with that she swears.

Though she does note that “Wait, you’ve got a smoking hot Vampire Chick into you now?”. So that was funny.

Oh, also, the group found out he’s never seen the 80’s Deathwish movies. So there planning to do Movie night with him once all hell finally stops breaking loose.

After the post Archon continued to express how impressed he was with how wild the sessions got, and all the not just combat stuff but all the lore focus and actual role playing and narrative focus we were managing to get. His expressed sentiment at the time was he was seeing us get much better play, using his system, than he himself get’s from his home group.

I seem to recall it was around this time that the offer was made from the GM to run something for Archon once schedualing clears up.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, we had another session last night and Oh Boy was it a doozie.

Quick advisory we had 1 PC, Wraith, not make the session. His player ended up with IRL things to take care of and couldn’t be there for this one.

Ok, so, we opened on effectively getting diverted form going to University of Miami to the prison. A brilliant Idea was had to change tracks and go try to pump the enemy’s infiltrator for information. So, we went for that.

With a slight detour to let Zebraspider and Buccaneer kick the crap out of one another at Buccaneer’s insistence and then patch themselves up off camera so that the GM didn’t have to adjudicate PVP that absolutely no one but Buccaneer wanted. Oh, and a round of voting on the course of action and some debate now that we were all mentally fresh.

So we get too the state prison, out tech tech support staff NPC suggested a trick the speedster could do with the car so that we could get there in about 30 minutes because we had a speedster handy. And upon arrival we note that it’s late and for some reason an Exterminator Van is there. We are instantly suspicious and this is quickly validated by an NPC guard coming out, and asking if we were already done talking to Everyman because we’d only gone in like 10 minutes prior.

Inquiry shakes his hand and get’s a vision of a passable impersonation of Zebraspider, Buccaneer and Nanosecond being done by 3 dudes, and an exceptional impersonation of Inquiry being done by someone. So, we go in there, get the place locked down and sure enough the prisoners are all expecting a mass prison break as soon as they see us and put 1 and 1 together. This is particularly humorous with Puzzler who’s done jobs with Buccaneer before and doesn’t much like him, and Livewire, who’s decided she’s rather into Zebraspider at the moment from her cell. We also find a guard pinned to the wall by giant metal shuriken shaped like Swastika’s.

Inquiry does a read on him, finds out he got suspicious and got shot by the Zebraspider Impostor for trying to radio about it. The Zebraspider impostor who could remove his arm to do that. We call, get lock down going. Inqury also sets up a code word for us to use to keep our dopplegangers from waltzing out of here passing as us and get’s the League to send someone down to prevent that, and then the Nanosecond impostor comes out and takes out 2 swings on Zebraspider, one of which hits for substantial damage. And then Everyman comes out of his Cell, along with the Robot versions of Buccaneer and Zebraspider, to back him up. And shortly after that, a dude whom we roll too recognize as Edouard Laslo: The Poser. A former Nazi Party official (whom was always there because he was press ganged into it on threat of what would be done to his relatives if he refused, not because he was a believer or willing participant.) who has shape-shifting powers that let him mimic looks but not powers, and has an unnaturally long and healthy life span.

So fight breaks out.

Mirror Match as The Poser is largely mirroring Inquiry’s Shoot Out fighting style, and everyone else has a doppleganger with powers and gear to match theirs, and were at a disadvantage because they got a sucker punch in on the heavy (me) and they have a back up Heavy (Everyman, whom was able to assume Painkillers form.)

With some lucky rolls, and a LOT of hero points burned through (Hero Points that the villains have successfully had us run ragged on and thus prevented us from doing heroic things that don’t pertain to the plot so we can recoup Hero Points, making them a premium resource.), we manage to come out on top. Sort of.

Nanosecond got hit with Painkillers ability that if he hits you, he get’s you super high so you can’t fight effectively and got sideline for the next bit as a result. And because a sparking robot head fell in front of Livewires Cell, she could use her powers to get free.

I should mention, Nanosecond was on his last legs by the end of the fight, Buccaneer was more than half dead, and Zebraspider took his absolute worse beating to date by percentages. That was with us spending Hero Points like Candy. The fight had assumed the whole party, and with 1 person down we were at a steep disadvantage.

So, Zebraspider goes after Livewire. And finds her messing with some electrical equipment near the entrance but not actually leaving. And then she tells him she’s sending signals too the control van outside, which was the exterminator van, to make them think the Robots are still active and fighting us and slowly grinding us down.

They banter some, she comes onto him, he counter offers with a deal, she counter offers the counter offer.

What they agree too at this stage was she’d help us get this mess under control and then go back to her Cell with out a fight. We’d get her transferred to a facility she’d like better in the short term by pulling league strings, and use those strings to get her either Parole or a Pardon as soon as possible after that. Leaving her free and clear to go about her life long as she didn’t start doing the super villainess thing again. And, Zebraspider would owe her 1 date somewhere nice, he’s buying.

So she keeps up the signals, and blows open the door so we can get the medical staff to come out. We needed the Medical Staff because, while this was going on,

Inquiry used her powers on Everyman and we got a bunch of information that was handy, and that I’ll elaborate on in a moment, but it triggered a kill switch of sorts inside Everyman and started, well, killing him. So we get medical staff too him, and they start doing stuff, and tell us we need a blood sample form someone with a healing factor to use on him and make him copy it. We end up using the Chaos Sorceress and she wants Internet Access and Chicken Tenders in exchange, which will put on the to do list once all hell isn’t breaking loose, but we get it, and he lives.

Inquiry also uses her powers on The Poser, and get’s a lot more information, and Buccaneer finds Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb, a pair of hired muscle goons, in prison, and they give him a letter form the second Mad Hatter. Not the one that does Mind Control.

The one that can put on a hat of someone’s and copy there skills nearly too there level even if he’s got no prior training or experience.

Inqury got a read on the letter.

So, We found out that the Robots are the work of one Maxwell Tremayne, an Elderly Nazi Scientist who was sold on the idea of giving taking over the world another go by Albrecht Krieger, a Wonder Woman Villain who goes by the name Captain Nazi. You might recall he was messing with Justice League’s Europe Teams, Dr. Fate and a handful of Justice Society Members that includes Coshka, the former party member turned NPC by attacking Nuclear Plants in Europe in Hit and Fades that appeared to be using similar Boom Tube Tech and Tactics to what Doyel has been running our group through. Maxwell Tremayne is suppose to have been dead since like, the 50’s.

That Krieger also Press Ganged The Poser into it by threatening to murder his whole family and out a past he’s worked for about 80 years to make up for and distance himself from to destroy them on every level possible if Poser didn’t do as he wished.

And that Krieger is also working with Ra’s Al Ghoul, and that Ra’s had Mad Hatter 2 kidnapped and has press ganged him into helping to manipulate the patients of his Psychiatry Practice by threatening to to murder Mad Hatter 2’s 6 year old daughter in cold blood if he didn’t comply.

All of which drops like a bombshell naturally.

So, we find out that Plastic Man has shown up to let us out of the facility, and he’s got whomever is in the control van locked down. Pass-code get’s used, we get out there, and find Maxwell Tremayne, in the flesh, controlling the robots because he didn’t have everything he needed to do perfect mimicry of Zebraspider, Buccaneer and Nanosecond otherwise. Inquiry get’s more info off of him, and we find out,

That this Alliance between Captain Nazi’s 4th Riech and Ra’s Al Ghouls League Of Assassins has people inside the league. They have at least 1 covert operative on Themiscara (Zebraspider is betting it’s Gelding but can’t confirm just now.),

And, worse,

They have replaced Mera, Aquaman’s wife and Queen Of Atlantis, and Diana, Princess of and heiress too the throne too Themiscara, better known as Wonder Woman, with a robot as well. Robots that can copy there powers perfectly. Can pass as them perfectly, unless and until they don’t want them too anymore.

We also confirmed that Morgan Edge, Cat Grant (you’ll recall she’s my characters answer to J J Jameson.)'s boss, has also done business with him. Hired a small army of these super robots to act as a private security force who will protect him form super hero’s or villains that get in the way of his plans. They all look like Inquiry’s Mother because back when she was in her prime he was taken with her but she didn’t go for him.

During this Buccaneer has to be restrained to keep him from beating the 100 year old man to death who’s already surrendered, been disarmed and is giving us information. He also ends up inadvertently giving Livewire the go ahead to just take off and escape and we were not able to deal with it fast enough to stop her. So she’s completely loose now so that will be a problem later I’m certain.

So, we lock the 2 Nazi’s we’ve captured up, and take the tech tech to Miami University to talk to the Scientist there we were going to talk too from Gorilla City. Buccanner also puts in some calls to contacts to get another specialist involved who’s going to meet us there since Gorilla City Gorilla’s have some teleport tech for themselves.

A humorous pit stop at the manner and to pick up Banna Pudding for them on there request later, and we are on the way.

Plastic Man is going to quietly get the update to Batman. It’s got to be done hush hush now because we can’t risk Mera or Wonder Woman finding out about it now that we know they are compromised.

Inquiry does a group picture at a red light of everyone in costume, and sends it to Coshka’s Instagram on Zebraspiders recommendation.

This get’s Dr. Fates wife doing the not quite astral projection trick again and because she’s a top shelf sorceress in her own right, and using the sanctuary of The Lord Of Order himself, she’s got the kind of magic security for communications even Wonder Woman and Mera wouldn’t be able to break.

We relay every relevant detail too her. Buccaneer, because Inquiry’s actual visions get played out for us, see’s that he actually stole some of the tech for Maxwell Tremayne that he used to upgrade the bots now compromising the league so he had a “oh shit.” moment about that. Also we all get to see what Inquiry goes through with her powers.

So, all the updated information, including a detail I just realized I forgot to put in this post, that Doyal is also working for these guys along with all the Intergang affiliates we’ve been running into, get’s to her. She’s going to relay it to Dr. Fate, and too the more Tech Savvy personnel he’s working with like Powergirl and the more tactically and strategically minded people like Black Canary. Since we now know what they have been dealing with are distractions meant to keep them busy till something else happens. She’s going to get a message to both versions of The Question as well. We also found out that the Vic Sage Question’s assessment of our little motley crew as that our biggest strength was also our biggest weakness. That we are paranoid. That’s hilarious considering. (Zebraspider contends it’s not Paranoia if he can literally point to advertisements for a bounty that’s out on him and he can.). Between that and Batman being put into play on the compromised league angle, we have done everything we can for now with that, and proceed onto the university.

Oh, one other detail I just realized I missed form earlier. Mad Hatter 2 is Magpie, aka Dr. Sorrow’s, Psychiatrist. Since he through no fault of his own is compromised, and we know the Interns are as well, we have a good idea how she’s been getting messed with now.

So, onto the University with offerings of tech tech we need to have evaluated for safety and Banna Pudding.

Sure enough the tech is confirmed safe, we get a way to keep in touch in case we have to further pic that scientists brain. We advise them to keep security extra tight for right now cause things are getting crazy.

The other one, who’s a Biology specialist we find out, get’s a blood sample from Inquiry to see if he can help her understand her powers better. Get better control.

Zebraspider takes that opportunity to point him toward his sisters Fiance and the 2 other people that Selkie had augmented against there will so that he could start looking into trying to help them get control and quality of life out of there changes if we can work out undoing the supernatural angle that’s causing them to not have free will at the moment. (Someone had to start helping them and we are clearly gonna be awhile before we can do that.)

We ended there, with about 5 hours left before the Sivana’s will be ready to help us run down Doyal, and 1 more lead to check before then.

The other 2 clubs. Which is what were likely to open with next time.

Archon expressed his further approval and favorable comparison from his group to this game, and that, inadvertently lead to the GM commenting that his group seems like a bunch of Murder Super Hobo’s and another server member commenting that he had a party of John Wicks with Dogs pre-murdered.

Which actually cascaded into a long debate about Superhero’s who kill vs Superhero’s who have a no kill rule and all the in’s and outs and merits there of that I am not going to spend the next 2 hours copying and pasting and instead am going to spend 2 minutes summarizing.

The most relevant parts too this is that at the time of Posting, Inquiry is a kill Superhero, but she’s an ex Cop. She will actively seek no kill options, it’s, just that if it comes down to him or me, or him or an innocent, she’s not going to loose too much sleep over not choosing him. And Buccaneer is a slowly reforming super-villain with issues, and no problems killing as a result.

Conversely Zebraspider is fairly stanch about not killing because 1 he’s in a death penalty state already, he doesn’t need to kill people, if they are provably deserving of death they’ll get executed, and 2, he’s doing this as a matter of penance, and generally speaking, killing a bunch of people in a premeditated fashion is not considered a good act of penance, and 3 because he does have issues with the idea of one person taking it upon themselves to be Judge and Jury and Executioner And Prosecution all at once, being that he also heavily looks up to characters like Flash and Superman.

It’s also noted that during game 1, when i was told it was going to be a street level game, instead of defaulting to the much more high power friendly concepts I usually run with in a supers game, I came down to either Spiderman Expy, Daredevil Expy, or a The Shadow Expy, and wasn’t in the mood for a Daredevil Expy. Because Inquiry’s Player described her as being very like The Shadow (she wasn’t in practice but that was how he described her the first time during character gen.) I decided not to step on his toes, and ran the Spiderman Expy idea instead. Had I gone with The Shadow Expy, this game would of gone very differently, as would the previous one.

So, we wrapped a bit early tonight. Poor GM was with out power and using phone charge packs to run from his phone. At the time there had been a hurricane in/around the neck of the woods 3 of the players live in IRL, so, difficulty’s were surely had.

Wraith missed a session as well tonight. Had IRL stuff happen again.

With that said. Tonight was more of a “everyone still processing the bombshells from last time.” kinda night. We discussed going in on kicking doors to the clubs open but decided to go talk to Inquiry’s Police Contact, Lt. Gertrude Frog, first. This resulted in a face to face meeting for her in her civilian clothing since Frog knows what’s up with Inquiry, and the rest of us deciding to go Patrol. Me to keep things discreet, and Nanosecond and Buccaneer because they were board. We did keep com’s open just in case.

So Inquiry had a chat with Frog about the fact that we are very certain Sugarman is operating out of the clubs. Frog warned that kicking the doors in would be a bad plan. Not least of which because they have an unknown number of Metahuman crooks guarding them. A bad guy who’s the son of a Man Inquiry’s father went after as a cop back in the late 80’s who now has Metahuman ability’s to absorb heat to the point he can flash freeze people on contact and might have super strength they are not sure, Ebon (You might know him from Static Shock.) and an unknown number of others, with unknown powers. The leader, the one who’s dad got killed while resisting arrest form Inquiry’s father, has a particular desire to murder her horribly.

She also let us in on the fact that if we showed up about 2 hours later at the one of the clubs, the one that use to be a secret U-boat launching station in Florida run by 5th columnists in WW2 before Wonder Woman shut it down, we might get a much cleaner shot at shutting things down and getting information we wanted. We figured we had time before the Sivanna’s wanted us back at the lab, so, we’d go for that. Much to Buccaneer and Nanoseconds annoyance.

Also of note was they fussed at Inquiry about this over the com so hard she took it out so we got a bit of a chat with Frog directly as a result.

On a similarly humorous note: Frog, who’s rather a cougar and rather a man eater by reputation, asked if Zebraspider was single. Seemed to reason the poor guy would not be that hard to rope in because he reeked of being inexperienced in such matters, and would make quite the catch. Seems Zebraspider has become very popular with the lady’s. A detail he blames almost entirely on the costume.

Meanwhile:

Buccaneer happened across a jewelry shop being robbed while the owner was out to lunch or something. He ended up making 1 guy feint after cutting the dudes gun in half, making the other guy have a full heart attack, and impaling the third guy. Lucky an ambulance got there because Yev, our techie, called one too that location the second the dudes stopped talking, in time to stop anyone form dieing.

Also the officer that road with them too the hospital to arrest them there had lost $20 on a bet that Buccaneer was going to kill the next thugs he fought. Buccaneer gave him $20 as an I’m sorry about that.

Nanosecond, having rolled poorly for what he encountered on patrol, ended up helping an old lady across the street. That’s it.

Zebraspider got a doozie of a roll however and had an intergalactic assassin come down to kill him, or capture him and drag him into the person that hired him. Guy by the name of B’aad. 4 armed dude who can take a real pounding and is a very space western high tech styled gunslinger. So, of course, a fight and some banter broke out. Zebraspider had an advantage and had taken 3 of the dudes guns out but he did take a whopping 200 points of damage form a hit form one of them. Which established they hit like shoulder mounted missile launchers.

So, of course, he takes a Hostage.

Buccanneer and Nanosecond get there, and I try to talk him into letting her loose. He claims he’s willing to do it if Zebraspider surrenders himself too B’aad. Talking doesn’t work but I do compare him to Clint Eastwood and he tries to figure out if he did the gunslinger thing in a poncho first or if Eastwood did. Though he spells out he’s not letting her go if Zebraspider doesn’t stand down for him.

Zebraspider is juuuuust about to offer to web his own hands up behind his head on a 3 count, with B’aad letting the hostage go in exchange, when Nanasecond came up form behind and came in absolutely clutch with a roll of a natural 1 on the D100 to yank the girl away from him with out her getting hurt. Which gave him a hugh “My Hero!” moment from the girl.

And left Zebraspider free to Jump on B’aad and take the rest of the wind out of his sails. I search him, take his toys, web him up, take a selfie. Throw a web net up for some neighborhood kids playing in the broken fire hydrant that got jacked up form a stray shot from the bad guys handgun that has more stopping power than some anti-tank-weapons so the kids can have fun, get called Mr.-use-to-be-a-villain-man by one and try to correct him that I’m a friendly neighborhood Zebraspider and get asked by the whole party to never call myself that again because they claim is make Zebraspider sound like a sex-pest.

This is something Something Zebraspider resigns himself too.

I do find out the B’aad is a lot older than Clint Eastwood but after negotiation, I find out who wanted me dead. Blockbuster. (You know him if you read Nightwing Comics.) Whom, it turns out, is a good friend of Buccaneer’s. But also hates me because I’ve wrecked his plans and publicly humiliated him twice now. Once in backstory, once in the first campaign. Turns out Blockbuster is offering the equivalent of my characters body weight in pure platinum for someone to either kill me and bring my head to Blockbuster, or, to haul me in alive, restrained and helpless so Blockbuster can kill me in person. We end up agreeing that I will give him his stuff back, peace bonded, and he will just teleport back to his ship, and leave, and never come back to earth again. Evidently between Buccaneer threatening to break his fingers one at a time, Nanosecond dropping out of left field, and Me being able to drop him in 2 solid hits and crush 2 of his guns in my hands like they were paper, Blockbuster was not actually paying what my head was worth. Least as far as he figured it.

Though because most of the banter, one threat none withstanding, with Buccaneer was positive, he did offer to do jobs with Buccaneer and Inquiry if there ever on the other side of Orion’s Belt.

So, we decided out of character as a mercy to the poor GM, to not go after the club this session and do that next session. My character heads back to base and takes the moment along while web swinging to Text Dr. Sorrow and suggest, in the interest of keeping her dear Inquiry alive, Dr. Sorrow should look at the fact that she’s got a very, very posh lifestyle she can afford herself and put some of that cash toward some good quality body armor for Inquiry, and be the one to give it too her so that Inquiry will wear it. Zebraspider is doing this because he’d really like Inquiry to not die because one time he was unable to jump in front of a hit for her.

Buccaneer decided too go shopping and have us have a conversation about animals we liked because he was going to buy masks from Payday 2 or something to have us go after the club with. Tried to pass it off as going under a tunnel then getting attacked by cellphone-reception-interference-man to not hear us telling him no.

We do eventually talk it around that the rest of us will not be doing that.

While getting patched up Yev decides to stage an Intervention for Zebraspider that all attending player characters are happy to jump in on.

Seems there of the opinion Zebraspider is wound way to tight, letting his guilty conscious rule him, way to paranoid about what could happen if he doesn’t constantly take every possible precaution other than murder every half dangerous bad guy he fights, that’s he’s way overly paranoid about Cat Grant in particular since he’s never allowed her a face to mask crack at him to explain why she seems to hate his guts at a visceral level, and, that he’s running himself way to ragged, working himself way to hard, and has gotten WAY to prone too and comfortable with allowing himself to take hits that if he were still a vanilla human wouldn’t have even left a body to bury in all likelihood.

Nanosecond in particular came out of left field and suggested that maybe Zebraspider should loosen up his no kill rule based on Nanoseconds reading of Objectivist philosophy. Backing Buccaneer on the same idea. Something that floored Zebraspider. Particularly after they argued the Anarchy Incident.

That was an incident in the first campaign. Anarchy murdered a church full of people in Gothem and thoroughly desecrated there body’s in order to desecrated the church to provoke us to come to the court house so he and his goons, and his new friends the Cultists that created Lizard Woman and wanted her to show up so that they could finish unleashing there Chaos Goddess, could ambush us.

We obliged them.

Zebraspider was so livid he was only seeing the color red and drug anarchy an one of the camera’s he’d had set up up too the roof, intent on telling him to get up and then beating him to within an inch of his life, and at the absolute closest the character has ever been to deciding to say “You know what? Go to hell and tell them I sent you to shitstain.” and literally ripping a mans head off his body.

This had the benefit of taking 1 of the 2 things in that room that could of overcome Coshka’s defenses out of play, the sorceress I mentioned in a few prior sessions being the other one. And she got locked into a wizard duel with the player who, for scheduling reasons, could not make the sequel game and his character, W.R. Abbot. She lost and got incapacitated.

This however didn’t work. GM made a bad miscalculation on Anarchy and had set his defenses by M&M standards to make him nearly unhitable, and his attacks to be nearly auto hit. Which, had the problem that it meant he was mopping the floor with me and with my party members as they got up there to help. I ended up doing a somewhat Meta thing with M&M rules to take him out. On the grounds that while the character might not of ultimately killed him, I the player realllllllllly wanted him dead. So the end result was that his grapple line that he was swinging around on had a 1 in a billion defect, snapped, and he fell through the skylight onto the statue of Justice in the Gothem court House.

On the point of Justices’s sword, which points straight up.

And now Zebraspider blames himself that it went that way because as far as he is concerned, if he’d been sensible and just knocked anarchy out when he had a good grip on him instead of dragging him up too the roof and trying to take his time slowly beating the piss out of him to try and make a point and make himself feel better, Anarchy would still be alive. He’s also of the opinion that letting his temper get the better of him is why Anarchy was able to put up such a fight. It’s because, he, the one with super powers, let himself be unacceptably sloppy.

No, he doesn’t realize he probably saved Coshka’s life with his little maneuver. And the lives of everyone that would of died if that ritual had been permitted to complete.

He also doesn’t know that the GM’s are agreed that The Specter was watching that fight and decided to take the opportunity to remove Anarchy from the mortal coil in a poetic manner, in order to justify how it played out.

That detail took an already pretty hard no kill character and made him a titanium clad no kill hero.

The fact that Cat Grant actively held vigil for Anarchy afterwords and made him out to be a young saint taken far to soon form the world by a vicious out of control self serving ego maniac within hours of it did not help.

Anyway, that bit of character motives now cleared up.

The group wanted him to take a day or two off, though, when he pointed out that that was a bad plan unless they really though they could deal with saving the Mayor and stopping all the things Doyal had on call, it was a agreed that it really, really did have to wait till at least that was done and we were certain things were not immediately worse.

So while he’s not bending on not killing people, He is now firmly committed too the group that once things are at least for the time being under control, he is going to have a chat with Cat Grant face to mask. And among other things are going to be the topics of why does she hate Zebraspider this much, and what does he have to do to get her to start backing off and stop doing stuff like put out bounty’s to the whole world for anyone that can prove who he is under the mask too her so she can publish that too the world.

He’s also agreed to take a day or two off once he’s sure that things are not spiraling completely out of control, and another one or two days once his sister is out of the hospital.

So we will get to find out if there right or not about this whole “One or two days off won’t hurt anything.” idea of if this is just going to reinforce his bad habits by something biting them while he’s too far away to do much about it.

That is about were we ended it, next time were going to go in 1 to 1.5 hours form the end of this session too the club we’ve picked out to pick a fight with some metahuman drug dealers doubling as muscle for the IRA member who’s going to blow up the mayor at the order of Ra’s Al Ghoul and Captain Nazi.

So, Archon asked for some elaboration after this log related to the Anarchy fight.

The fight happened in Mutants and Masterminds which is what we used for 1st campaign. Anarchy didn’t have stats so to save time the GM used stats for Roy Harper, AKA Red Arrow AKA Arsenal, Green Arrows former sidekick. What we didn’t know was that due to favoritism at M&M’s publishers, all the Arrow related characters were published as broken powerful. As a result, Instead of being about our street level party’s level, Arsenals stats left him basically untouchable. We could only land a hit on a nat 20 in a D20 system. And also left it so any roll better than like a 1 or 2 on a d20 roll from him to attack was 100% locked in to hit us. This is double bad as we were stated mostly to be high evasion characters who weren’t the best at taking a beating, but were the best at not getting hit ot start with.

Thus, the whole thing with Anarchy actually winning after the initial attack.

I’m confident if Anarchy had been properly stated out in Ascendant and fought Zebraspider with no funny business power enhancing artifacts or tech or the like at the time of the original log posts, that Zebraspider would of mopped the floor with Anarchy.

Around this time we also had a few sessions of a server member listening into the game sessions. :slight_smile: So, just noting that.

Alright, it’s been a few weeks but we are back! And we had a very eventful session last night! Note: this was a longer than normal delay between sessions due to several players having IRL stuff interfere.

So, we started off heading into the club The High Water Mark. We had some antics with Buccaneer and Nanosecond going in, and with Zebraspider telling a line of none powered people at the club door that all hell was about to break loose and they did not want to be in the building when it did. The 2 rich girls at the front of the line did not care for that.

We also had some antics of the party largely rolling poorly to cope with the stupidly loud music and being a bit disoriented by it. Except for Nanosecond. He rolled fine.

So, within minutes we have a fight and I try making the surrender offer, and the bad guys don’t take it. 3 women, 1 7ft+ muscle bound dude. Zebraspider takes a swing at him, and then one of the women moves, just slightly, and instead of connecting very cleanly with the table I was going to use to hit the big dude since he was the one we were warned last session could flash freeze people on contact, the table is at a weird angle being swung with the force I swung it with, and I walloped myself and had to dump hero points to roll with it to not take major damage.

This set the tone for the fight. We kept trying to do things, the rolls said we should, but then reality kept realigning itself to not let that happen. Mercifully the Civilians had a brain and got the hell out on there own. We found out one of them had some weird doppelganger and explosion power, one of them was we eventually figured out stopping time though the nosebleed she developed suggested the amount of times she was having to do it was a monster strain, one dude can flash freeze on contact and is tougher and stronger than human, and the last one was making them heal up and there stuff repair itself on contact which was mitigating the little damage we were dealing.We eventually figured out, to the general annoyance of the Party:

We were fighting 3 Stand Powers from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures, and the 4th guy was using Dio Brando’s Vampire Power’s from Part 1 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures.

The. Whole. Fight. Is. A. Jojo Referance.

Just in case anyone is wondering the GM assured us they didn’t just full on have Stands. One of them could stop time and had some Short Range Telekinesis. AKA The World/Star Platinum from Jojo’s parts 3, 4 and 6. One of them could do repair and that included repairing people. AKA Crazy Diamond from Jojo’s part 4. And one of them was linked up to the Multiverse and could have different versions of herself pop in to help her out, but had to come form under something that was against or over something else. A big cloth garment left on the ground, under a table, behind a curtain, ext. Further, if things from the 2 universes came into contact there was a massively powerful and damaging Kaboom. AKA Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap From Jojo’s Part 7.

I will be honest, we had a time manipulator, a Space manipulator with a bit of time manipulation tacked on, a brick with flash freeze potential instadeath touch, and a universe space manipulator. I was not liking our chances at this stage. And we were getting slowly chipped away at, but steadily.

Things finally swung our way when the one with The World/Star Platinum Powers Finally bungled a roll. And because of some draw back with her powers, she has to roll to use it more than once per combat round, and if she fails to roll below I think the GM said a 60, it doesn’t work, and she then risks going into potentially lethal shock as she’s over strained her system to spam her ability, and the system finally gives out.

Which is what happened because she was trying to use her power to get out of Nanosecond getting a very clean hit in on her that was a 1 hit KO by itself. Her heart stopped.

We managed to then, before her turn came out, drop the one with the Crazy Diamond Powers, and finally figured out her healing/support ability’s were all she had, she had no combat offense of her own. So she dropped.

Meanwhile the big guy get’s a hit on Inquiry that would have killed her, forcing Zebraspider to jump in and take it and roll Might to see if he was tough enough to not succumb too the instead death part of his powers. Zebraspider made the roll just barely, so he was still alive and able to fight but took about a third of his total heal out with 1 hit, and that’s not counting the damage from earlier rounds. At that point Zebraspider just grabbed Inqury, threw a web-line on a table, and jumped up onto the ceiling before taking a good swing with the table like it was a ball and chain weapon at Not-Dio-Brando. And got a Red success which dropped him completely.

From there we were able to focus down the Dirty-Deeds-Done-Dirt-Cheap and find a defibrillator and restart the heart of the one who had flat-lined a few seconds ago. Ambulance was called and they started taking her but warned us she might not make it. Power Restraint collars and webbing were used to bind up everyone else.

And from there, we start investigating. We find more of the Bang Baby Chemical, we find out that Sugarman isn’t here and that the ring leader, the big Not-Dio-Brando guy that wanted to kill Inquiry because Inquiry’s dad killed his dad back in the day, calls himself Hyperborian, really actually hates Sugarman and Doyle’s guts, and is only working with them to get stuff so he can empower people. He’s actually not dissimilar too The Church Of The Ascendant in this setting. He’s honorable and he just wants to see humanity eventually hit a point were everyone has powers to give everyone a better crack at life. It’s his methods of going about that at are questionable. And the girls working for him are working for him because he saved all there lives at different points.

So with this information in hand we wake up Hyperborian and have a chat. He is able to be persuaded too tell us were Sugarman is likely to be holed up, though, he admits he doesn’t have all the Info. Sugarman deliberately held out on him as part of a strategy to keep Hyperborian form taking his business elsewhere.

We also, after some discussion, wake up the one with the Crazy Diamond powers, and turn her power restraint collar off with me standing over her ready to clock her if there’s any funny business. She puts herself back together and we explain that we are going to remove the webbing restraining her, I am going go loan her a re-breather, and Nanosecond is going to take her to her friend that flat-lined, so that she can do her repair thing to ensure her friend doesn’t die on an operating table.

And we caution her no funny business with it. A warning she heeds. Thusly we managed to save her friend with The World/Star Platinum powers, and we allowed her, as long as they stayed restrained, to patch up her other friends as well. She also ended up patching Zebraspider up and the conversation was again had that we will be talking too them later about there methods but that right now, they are only our enemy’s if they choose that path.

We also learn that because of the nature of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’s Powers, she’s got a likely-hood of one of her counter parts from another universe being able to let her free later on. So, we expect to see this group again. Facepalm…

So, we are getting ready to go for Sugarman, Buccanneer, feeling a bit out classed in this with the lack of henchmen to go after, is sulking abit. And then, Dr. Sivana Sr. Calls in with a projected hologram. He and his family are ready for us to use the tech they were putting together to go after Sneky Doyle.

Buccanner leaves while we handle handing the group over too the Cops. On the way there he’s listening to some news stuff about some rising tensions between China and Japan and Atlantis, with Japan Convinced China’s doing shady stuff in there waters, China Blaming Atlantis, and Atlantis scratching it’s heads going “We don’t even HAVE a settlement in that region.”.

And then locally there was news about us raiding the night club. In which, Cat Grants News Company blames Zebraspider for roughing up the bouncer to get in. Which Zebraspider actually did not due. Zebraspider tried to tell the bouncer to let them pass but got about 1 syllable of 1 word out before Buccaneer cold cocked him. And then the 2 rich girls that were Pissy at Zebraspider got on to talk about how bad Zebraspider is. To Buccaneer’s annoyance that he’s not even getting credit for being the edgy crazy one.

So, I webswing and bring Inquiry along. So Nano second get’s there first, I get there second with Inquiry, and Buccaneer left first in traffic and get’s there last.

I should mention that Wraith is MIA for the foreseeable future, and we don’t know when he’ll eventually be back. So we are down 1 Ghost at least for now. (Note: That player ultimately had IRL stuff that made it so he could’t rejoin. I just didn’t know that when posting to discord at the time.)

Anyway, we get there, and get greeted by Dr. Georgia Sivana. Who, looks a whole lot like her twin brother and father, just, with some boobs and more feminine haircut. This is a running gag in the Marvel Family comics since forever. She’s also a super scientist in her own right. And She takes an immediate shine to Zebraspider because it’s well established she likes Boyscout types. This is temporarily defused by me pointing out that we have a time limit and her father has a vested interest in us succeeding, and then Inquiry makes it a problem for later when it could of been dropped by telling her to try again later. Zebraspider will be remembering that himself down the line.

So, we meet Dr. Sivana Sr and get a strong suggestion that Dr. Sivana is in fact just playing the long game and is in fact not turning over a new leaf. Evidently the bet he made was that if we stop the Mayor getting bumped off, Dr. Sivana get’s a piece of frozen lighting from The Rock Of Eternity which he very ominously says he will do “great things” with. And if he lost he had to give him some bit of magic The Cult Of Keku, the Egyptian chaos cult we’ve had run ins against before, uses to look through any mirrored surface. Which means one way or another, we will be dealing with the Sivana’s alot because now there relevant to the Coshka Plotline.

Anyway, he’s got the tech tech working, and we are able to be teleported to were the Enth Metal is. and it’s a big Walmart Parking Lot on the outskirts of Miami. And sure enough, there’s Painkiller, sitting in a lounge chair in a Winnebago. He see’s us and has enough time to say “Shit.” before I throw weblines on the Van and yank it over hard in a way that forced the 3 people in it to just bail out and prevents it from going anywhere.

So, It’s a fight, Painkiller, a member of Zebraspiders Roges Gallery who’s a roided up brick called Slab, Lightweaver, whom, you might recall, was our first fight in the first session. The guy who makes hard light contstructs and Buccaneer cut his arm off and we later got it reattached and then he tried to use the news against us and Wraith Stopped him? That guy.

And of course, Snaky Doyle. I win Initiative and go for Doyal and Slab jumps in front of him and takes a red hit on a lighter but faster/more accurate version of my melee attack. He doesn’t go down but he’s hurt. Nanosecond then goes and Light weaver jumps in front of him and is still standing, but pretty beat down. And then finally Nanosecond knocks out Doyle which means now we don’t need to worry about him teleporting away.

We keep fighting, Painkiller and Slab get some hits in on me but I manage to avoid the contact high from Painkiller, and Lightweaver goes for Buccaneer. Big Mistake.

Buccaneer ends up cutting both of Light weavers arms off in 1 stroke. To which Painkiller gripes at us that he is never going to stop complaining about that now.

So, we fight some more and then Buccaneer, as we are whittling down Slabs HP, offers to talk too them like adults, Villain to Villain. Which, they are actually persuaded too do. So, Coms are open, we are listening, but, the 3 of them go into Subway and Buccaneer use’s the Leagues expense account to buy the 2 of them lunch, and get what information he can.

Meanwhile I partially reattach Lightweavers arms and stop his bleeding while Inquiry calls him an Ambulance, and we thoroughly search Doyle to make sure he has nothing we could even theoretically need to be worried about on him, no gadgets, tools, weapons, anything, and I web the crap out of him so he is going nowhere.

Also of note is all 3 of us being dumb founded that of all the people to not only offer surrender and an olive branch, it’s Buccaneer, and it worked. After all the times Zebraspider tried it and go nowhere.

Turns out someone named R is running this as far as the 2 big guys know. And we ended up letting them go. Seems Doyle either thoroughly believes, or has at least completely sold the two of them, that they are saving the universe form The Cult Of Keku who are an imminent existential threat to all life. And, to be fair, they sort of are. The rest of the Justice League and Society dealing with them has been a big part of why we’ve had so little support from them in story despite all the stuff that should of had them swarming Miami if that was not the case. With that done, Inquiry starts with the investigation stuff.

Sivana had made us promise him the new gods tech which we had very reluctantly agreed too.

There are a tone of notes in Galic, a tone of treaties and guides for the alien tech tech, some neat alien tech tech for boom tubes and gravity manipulation and alien weapons, but sadly nothing that can in that moment tell us precisely how Doyle was going to kill the Mayor in 3 days. So, out of options, she does the Pyscomitry thing on Doyle and while we do not find out all the details, we do find out he’s got assassin’s who are going to Impersonate out team and kill the mayor at the start of his reelection bid, and do it in a hyper blood-soaked manner. Wolfspider, whomever that is at current, will be getting a duplicate of my new costume and impersonating me, some actress type we could not pin will be doing likewise for Inquiry, and unknowns doing the same for Nanosecond and Buccaneer.

And the idea is this will get a chain reaction to go off that will get people to not trust or depend on The Justice League and collapse it form play.

We also got more information that supports that Doyle sincerely thinks he’s saving all life in the universe except the people he get’s killed in the process of doing this form The Cult Of Keku. We also found out that part of Doyle and his group’s plan is to use a specific McGuffin to murder Coshka as part of stopping the Cult and the threat of the chaos goddess they serve forever.

We ended up leaving off there, and will figure out precisely how we are to proceed next time. We have 3 days left to save the mayor and our reputations.

Archon and Teleros chatted, and there was a bit of discussion of the build outs.

One of the things observed at this time, and this would become a problem, was the party got busy and didn’t bother sitting down to try to do the math to update there sheets between sessions. Which meant I’d often find myself at this stage and for a good chunk of the game well ahead of most of them. So, future GM’s. Take this as a lesson. Ride your players to make sure they upgrade immediately when they get points, or if they are going to save points, make sure they have something in mind to save up for. (Even if it’s just “Topping up my too-hit/damage/defense levels at next PL.”. ) It will prevent a lot of avoidable mishaps and attention, as we learned the hard way during this campaign. And remember, we learned it the hard way during a narrative driven game, a simulationist game would of been worse.

Alright, so, had another session last night.

Wraiths player is still out till further notice, and Nanoseconds player had college homework to handle so couldn’t make the session. Though he did before getting called away to some emergency in Hub City run all the books we found last session too our home base first.

So we picked up right were we left off last time. In the Walmart parking lot with an incapacitated Lightweaver and Doyle, Slab and Painkiller having headed for the hills as the saying goes.

We tried talking to Doyle who was not keep to share information with us at all. Tried advising him that we would hand him over too the British Government to be executed in a triumphant victory over the IRA for Jolly Old England, but he called that as a bluff (we are not bluffing, we just need the info out of him first. We will be doing this too him once we are sure we don’t need information from him later.).

So, in general frustration, Zebraspider decides “The heck with it. That crazy and loathsome mage can drag the information out of him for a fee and then I can finally be done with this particular problem and start working on the mounting list of things that are not getting helped because this jerk put me on a time limit to clean up his mess.”. And literally took him too the office of one W.R.Abbott. Only for us to find out he was in fact not in at the moment, he was busying doing not on physical earth stuff, with no ETA for his return. So, left him a message. And his construct/assistant/illusion/whatever it was thingy, also tried to give Zebraspider a gift that he did not accept after the Wizard insisted my character was gay, again. Evidently the gift will show up at my home later. So, I am sure Zebraspider will be re-gifting that to someone at some point with a warning that it’s likely a very poor taste prank form Abbott and to dispose of it accordingly.

So, with that plan foiled I met back up with Inquiry and Buccanneer.

Buccaneer really, really, really wanted to go the “torture him with copious bodily harm till he starts talking.” route. Zebraspider didn’t. While Zebraspider wanted the information, he doesn’t trust just vanilla torture as a tactic, and he’s kinda morally opposed too it.

So instead Zebraspider sleeper holds him and let’s Inquiry try to go Psycomitry on him. This time she get’s more information, and finds out he’s hired The Council Of Spiders to impersonate us. There “new” Wolfspider they think is physically close enough to a match for me as too pull it off, one of there female members is close enough to Inquiry to pull her off (I think it was Funnel Web Spider but I could be wrong.), and Widower, a crazy sword wielding serial killer assassin, will be impersonating Buccaneer. We are about 90% sure the only ways they could feesably be impersonating Nanosecond are to use Hunter Zom I think his name is, who’s a Flash villain that slows time around him which makes him look like he’s a speedster. Or using a left over Even-Steven’s Robot set to Nanosecond. There is a 3rd guy that we ruled out because he appeared to be doing stuff in India named Savatar. He was also dismissed because the league knows for a fact his powers are science based, but he is insane and thinks he’s an actual Hindu god and thus can do whatever he wishes. He’s notoriously not a team player. And his powers can be tracked were as the other 2 cannot, so, we are reasonably sure in character he is not the speedster we are looking for.

One more trip inside the winnebago and Buccanneer decides to help himself too the antigravity fridge and the booze, and then doesn’t roll so good so only get’s the booze. Inquiry finds a news paper scrap book of stuff about the annual Miami/Atlantis Friendship Parade that Aquaman has had going on for decades (Altantians age slower and better than humans, but they do still age.)

Inquiry does a reading on it and we find out that Doyle and his group had plans for that over a month from now in universe. And they implied doing something bad to Aquaman since they will know were he is. So that’s a wrinkle. We also confirm Doyle and Intergang are working for Ra’s Al Ghoul and his League of Assassins like, 100% confirmed.

Dr. Sivana checks in, and we don’t give him the books or the laser weapons or the booze (the last one only due to Buccaneer.), but we do give him all the rest of the tech which he teleport’s off too his lab. We try getting him onside to help us by mentioning that they have declared his adult daughter to be acceptable loss if it gives them the edge to kill the mayor and make us look bad, but he’s still not moved to help us. He’s convinced we should be able to deal with them and that stopping the mayor from making political hay out of it is not his problem. Just stopping the mayor from dieing.

I should touch on the copious amounts of insults that have been thrown around by this point between Sivana, Doyle and the attempt to get Abbott to help at Zebraspider and Buccaneer. Anyway.

Paramedics show up and take Lightweaver off. They mention the cut wounds are so clean it will be trivial to reattach his arms in surgery and he’ll have precious little if any nerve damage. Which is great. Though, the blond in the ambulance does muse when talking about Doyle and it coming up in passing he’s Irish that “That’s weird, he doesn’t look Asian.”. No real relevance too the story it was just a funny dumb blond moment I wanted to mention.

So, Inquiry puts a call in to Lt. Frog and finds a safe house we can stick Doyle in and we come up with a plan.

Buccaneer is going to start earning that parole by going out and trying to find this super villain bar they hang out at all the time that’s evidently a local secret. He is also going to try and from there, start trying to put the word out too the council of spiders that he, in a fake ID, has a contract for them, in an effort to lure them into an ambush so we can try to take them out before the 3 days are up. Or at least learn were they are hanging out form the people we do ambush. Or from playing undercover detective at the villain Bar.

While he does that, Inquiry guides me to the safe house to stick Doyle in. From there, she will go talk to Lt. Frog about what Lt. Frog might know/be able to do about helping us find our doppelgangers too be.

And I will be on guard duty with Doyle till Inquiry can get some cops there to relive me and hold him. Cops that Frog can trust and thus we can trust.

At about this point Inquiry’s player is kind of falling asleep in his chair, having had a very rough week. So, he signed out abit early while the 2 remaining players tried to cover some ground work. Zebraspider put a call in to our tech guy, and checked on the Titans to find they are busy but not too crazy busy. (We also established Bart Allen is canonically the current Kid Flash.) so he had a message left with the Titans for Raven to see if we could get some wards/charms or something so that Selkie cannot effectively mind-control the party next time we run into her. This was done because he had time to kill, and he does fully intend on making Selkie and trying to fix his Fiance’s boyfriend a priority as soon as Doyle’s ticking clock is off his plate.

He also discusses the idea of creating an alibi, changing costumes, and then rescuing the mayor as a bunch of super villains just having a grudge match and outing the impostors. Get’s told that won’t work with out more media support than we have just now, and his trick to make an Alibi would not work either.

Evidently the magic involved would make it so that we don’t get to be on camera so, it would just make our allies look like there talking to people that are not there.

So, with that, there’s a good bit of banter between buccaneer and Zebraspider, and Buccanneer, goes too the prison we keep going to by himself this time. And Zebraspider finds out the reason Blockbuster and Harley Quinn are loose currently is because of Buccaneer. Which might be significant later but for right now he doesn’t have time to be mad at Buccaneer about letting Blockbuster loose.

The Puzzler is evidently out of there cell at this time, so, that’s not encouraging but could be a red herring. He goes and get’s an original bad guy we fought awhile back when the city nearly got nuked named Cicada and has a chat with him. Offers him a deal to do a similar parole thing to what Buccaneer’s doing in exchange for information. On a different local branch team of course. And since it’s implied he might not live if left there, buccaneer tried to get authorization form the watchtower to pull him out early.

And get’s to talk too the Wonder Woman robot, with out being able to risk letting on that he know’s it’s a robot. He succeeds and get’s Cicada and his stuff out and starts heading back to home base to drop of Cicada and go through the armor more thoroughly to make sure it’s not somehow a trap. We couldn’t find one but that was too easy so we are on edge about it.

We wrapped the session up about there, though we did ruminate on a great planes Justice League regional group because that’s were Buccaneer’s player want’s to stick Cicada for his Probation period.

Next actual play session we will follow up on the plan for Buccaneer and Inquiry, and Zebraspider will find a safe window to talk too Dr. Fates wife again and relay the information they have about the cult of keku side of things. With luck, we will be able to find and catch the 4 would be assassins, and then the mayor can just have a boring speech were nothing happens and we can start working on other things in character.

Oh, almost forgot, We touched on Doyle’s fixation with them but he wouldn’t cough up details on that either. Insisted too many people would die so we’d try too stop them. Though he claims the Coshka NPC wouldn’t be a target. Zebraspider does not trust him on that point though.

Lastly, We officially hit PL 25 at the end of this session. So, next session of sorts will be a week from now to make sure everyone is pointed up to PL 25.

Of note Archons continued support is appreciated, and the discussion of session length times is had. I mention usually between 3 - 6 hours, GM estimates 4 - 5, but I’m allowing for some outliers.

Also around now is when they let us quote our on posts on discord, or at least when I learned of it.

Ok! We had another session last night! This deviates form the 2 weeks scheduled but this is in anticipation of having to delay for the at time of writing this upcoming Thanksgiving Holiday. Will be resuming early December, and probably have another delay due too Christmas and New Years in Late December and early January.

Anyway, so, we picked up with Buccaneer trying to get Cicada back to base. This get’s interrupted by Grasshopper sized Velociraptors swarming Buccaneer’s ride.

Nanosecond, having been called up to Hub City to deal with the none Super-powered version of the Puzzler, arrives on the scene, and we find out he stumbled into an instruction manual the aliens that gave him his augmentations left for him. So, now he’s got some new tricks, and he breaks out some pressurized air blasts (Gust power.), and get’s the dino’s off the car. Buccaneer comes out and he and Nanosecond end up facing down a chick wearing burn victim bandages and a hat and coat in Miami, with a bunch of really small Dinosaurs hanging about her.

She threatens them and tells them her master wants us not to interfere in what he’s doing, fighting chase breaks out. Buccaneer discovers in character that his sword can do more than cut because it calls down a lighting strike on her Dinosaurs. Surprises the hell out of everyone. She get’s away and we figure out at the end her Master is Hyperborian. The guy form the Jojo Reference fight. So, looks like he got loose already with his group. So we will be seeing them again.

They get Cicada back to base, Buccaneer starts practicing with his sword’s new trick. Meanwhile, Inquiry has a chat with Lt. Frog, and unfortunately the only way she could post guards on Doyle is if she includes some people she does not trust. Further she has no real information on The Counsel Of Spiders or Hunter Zolomon.

Zebraspider has a thought that maybe Dr. Fates wife can drag the rest of the info we need out of Doyle so we can have done with him as a burden. He tries knocking Doyle out again and then taking a picture of the two of them, and sending that too Coshka. Which, just goes through normally. Alarms the hell out of him. Come to find out Dr. Fates wife is off guard duty because all hell is breaking loose in the Alps right now so it’s all hands on deck over there.

Which frustrates him because that is preventing information they need form getting relayed too them.

Eventually Wraith, as an NPC, show’s up to take over guarding Doyle. This is the GM’s way of making sure the party is not perma-split during the last part of this leg of the campaign. We regroup at the homebase. Cicada starts working on repairing his suit and turns down Zebraspider’s offer to help him to try and speed it along. Zebraspider goes through some of Doyle’s paperwork, recent sheet updates allowing him to now read Irish Gaelic, finds a little bit of stuff but not too much and nothing we can immediately jump on.

Inquiry takes a read on Buccaneers sword and get’s an image of an Atlantian king from thousands of years ago killing a frogman wizard with it. Who worshiped a god called Kek. We call Aquaman to see if we can get a chat with him about buccaneer’s sword and find out it can control weather if it finds the wielder worthy, and maybe other stuff, but, we didn’t get too far into other stuff. Mera called Aquaman away, and in the back ground we saw two Mera’s. One of them tied up.

We have 2 theory’s on this. Either we just watched Mera get replaced in real time. Or. Aquaman knows his wife on such a deep level that he sniffed out her being replaced, rescued her on his own, and now there trying to make sense of the evil robot doppleganger. We are realllllllllly hoping it’s the latter, and to be fair, it’s not far fetched for Aquaman.

Dude is basically Underwater Thor and routinely makes chumps out of the Lovecraft mythos. Underestimate him at your own peril.

So, Buccaneer takes a bit more time working with his sword but that get’s cut short by a call that The First National Bank, A Division of Lexcorp (as in Lex Luthor, yes, that Lex Luthor.), is being robbed by what appears to be The Cult Of Kekue. The one’s that want to kill the universe by completing there ritual with Coshka. So, were on that real fast. We get there and there working a bunch of magic, They have re-created Stone Hinge out of Car’s, the Bank looks like something out of ancient Egypt. So does the weather and the general lay of the land around it. There is a 300lb fat dude with a staff chanting atop Car-Hinge, In a mix of Egyptian, and modern Meme’s. As previously established, the cult are 4Channers and GM leaned hard into it here. We start fighting, at first he’s doing a good job of no-selling attacks. Turns out he’s got some weird probability manipulating chaos magic that’s keeping him from taking dead on hits that should flatten him.

And then Inquiry’s turn comes up. And with her newly upgraded gunfighting skills and Psycomitry, She drops him like a sack of potato’s. We hand him over too the cops on scene and go into the bank and find 3 more 4channers who are party too the cult. I’m going to summarize this now. There are a LOT of meme’s and 4chan flavor insults form smack talk rolls thrown around during this segment of the session, too the amusement of the players, but for sake of not getting the server in trouble, I’m gonna just gloss over them.

So, Zebraspider rolls a natural 2 on a Persuade check with 12 ranks of Persuade and Sex Appeal perk if that mattered on any of them. They, are unmoved by this. Cultists are fixed on there cult goal. The Civilians that overhear this are however very moved and now all have a very positive opinion of Zebraspider.

We fight them, and again, Inquiry tears through them like never before, dropping 2 out of 3 of them. Nanosecond does get bit in the butt by an Awakened Attack Office Chair with angry eyes that one of the cultists whips up on the spot. We find out there trying to rob the safety deposit boxes, and find a specific number. On a hunch Zebraspider calls into our tech guy and tells him to ask Dr. Sorrow if she has a safe deposit box matching the number. Humorous exchange aside, she does, so he tells Yev to tell her an Omnicidal Chaos Cult want’s whatever’s in it, and she just asks we please not let Inquiry see the contents.

We try to head down, elevator has a skeleton operator, the stairs have water and time displaced crocodiles. We opt for the elevator, which plays Muzack Walk Like An Egyptian.

Inquiry does some Psycomitry, Buccaneer and I lay on the smack talk while Inquiry learns the lead Cultest has magically fused people with the wall. Said lead Cultist also has 4 more skeleton minions carrying her on a litter, and a tube with a lot of hyroglypics on it.

We fight, she’s throwing Minions out to keep us from hitting her. I end up jumping in front of a blast. And find out 2 things. 1: Zebraspider now has armor he didn’t know he had before now. 2: The blast is literally some kind of power straight from the Chaos Goddess because she’s bypassing my magic immunity and that’s the only real way they should be able to do that.

We end up wasting the skeletons and Inquiry get’s the finishing shot on her. Though Zebraspider clocks her one good time while she’s down to make sure she will stay there for awhile, not wanting her to wake up and kill more people. The Civilians fall out of the wall, and Zebraspider remarks to Inquiry “are you sure your last name isn’t Wick?”.

She get’s a thousand yard stair off into space and says “Babayaga.”.

We spend a bit taking pictures of the scene, and then get into and claim for protective purpose’s the contents of Dr. Sorrows safe deposit box. Pains taken the whole way to not let Inquiry see what’s in there. Which is a small box, 2 journals, and it seems the tube-thing the cultist had. We get outside with her and the hostages and are greeted by Minor DC character The Enchantress. A member of Justice League Dark. Who looks like hell right now. As Dark are getting run ragged dealing with this cult. We talk to her and 1 of the journals has a bunch of rituals and information related too the cult. Including, importantly, a ritual that might help Coshka’s situation. Copy’s are made and relayed and made into hard copy’s of this, and the original journal is handed to Enchantress. We take the tube thing through because Dark is stretched too thin to guard it.

We find out it’s one of 4 McGuffin’s the cult are trying for all at once. They got 1 but Dark stopped the other two and we stopped the last one. Enchantress teleport’s off with the cultists to drop them somewhere actually equipped to hold them. And Enchantress also explains how one of the things the Cult had a couple of, the Order Daggers, would work if, hypothetically, they got to use one on Coshka. That it would of made it trivial for them to kidnap her and finish there ritual if she’d been hit by one of them.

And then describes the weird Egyptian weapon Anarchy was wielding back when Zebraspider and crew fought him back in Gothem. Which, hits Zebraspider like a freight train and he’s gonna have to process this once he’s not under the gun for time. But once he does yes, this does set the stage for him to have figured out that Anarchy was about to help Omnicide the Universe and that screw up he’s convinced he made by moving the fight, probably saved the universe.

So, we head back to base, Zebrapsider still trying to make sense of the new armor as well as the other revelations. He has Yev take him too the most secure location we have for locking something down on site. So we go into an elevator, and, start going down. Way down. More so than should be logistically possible in Miami. Zebraspider asks if this was like some cold war bombshell thing, but Yev says there’s Kryptian space folding tech in play.

And thus Zebraspider found out we have access to the top security vault of Superman’s Fortress Of Solitude to store high priority items. A Vult Superman has had help from Shazam, Martian Manhunter, Dr. Fate, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Mr. Terrific and Zatana to re-enforce. No way is anyone getting anything we put in it now.

This is big for Zebraspider because, he’s a big Superman Fan.

So, we head back upstairs, and then the group has a chat with just Dr. Sorrow. We find out she was researching the Coshka situation and found the artifact and decided the safe-deposit box would be a well camouflaged place to keep it. And the ritual stuff, she was planning to surprise Inquiry with later. There is general appreciation, group hug happens, and we assured her none of the group went through the rest of it once Enchantress established it wasn’t magic.

Warm Fuzzies aside though, we still have to deal with our assassin problem. Buccaneers plan is for Cicada to take us too the local Villain Bar, with us dressed up under cover as The Royal Flush Gang. He’ll be King because sword, Nanasecond Jack because leaner hand to hand combatant, Zebraspider Ace because that way I won’t be talking and possibly giving us away with how I normally talk, Inquiry as Queen because obvious, and in need of a fifth member and after some discussion on the merits of it, Dr. Sorrow will be joining us as 10 to help keep the illusion up.

Plan is to try and link up with the Counsel of Spiders, or at least find out were they are, somewhere were we would prefer to fight them, and try to get the drop on them.

That will be were we pick up next session.

As back ups we are still hoping to re-establish contact with some of our out of communication allies in time for them to help yank info out of Doyle before 3 days are up.

Failing that, were looking real hard at using a body double of the mayor that’s combat capable, and Cicada to help us spot out the Doppelgangers, and having Buccaneer try using the sword to call up a bad enough weather alert to force cancellation. Or at minimum, such ridiculous fog that nothing of the super fight is scene by the crowd.

And our tech guy and Enchantress have promised to get the information to Dr. Fate ASAP regarding the ritual stuff for Coshka.

Lady’s and Gentlemen, after a holiday pause, we are back!

So, this session ended up being 0 combat, all Story and Role Play. We also were down an extra player and his character was largely just relegated to the background unfortunately.

So, we ended up getting a nights sleep before going in for the mission. Found out that when Inquiry dreams she dreams part of what her partner is dreaming. Zebraspider considered having a chat with Kat Grant but opted not too, and had a moment going into his place, with the thin cover of dust on everything, and wiping that off a family picture to reveal his grandfather again. Good moment of sort of remembering why he does this stuff.

We meet up next day, Yev has to hack Buccaneer’s systems and blast the Dutch version of Barbie Girl through it at concert volume since he decided to try and sleep through his communicator. General banter was had as we suited up in disguises. Cicada is on point and we found out the place was basically in a swamp outside of town. An old Legion Of Doom headquarters that was decommissioned.

Since I’m Ace and playing at being a mute android, Buccaneer as king takes numerous opportunity’s to call me donkey and monkey while we make our entrance which involves everyone on one of the Royal Flush Gangs flying cards, and me carrying them into the main room proper. There are multiple Amazo unit’s that we find out run the place, and we quickly meet The Cosak who pulls Jack, which was Nanosecond, our absent player, into a card game. Everyone else is in full southern accent mod as the group we are posing as frequent New Orleans. And evidently are planning to try knocking over Fort Knox soon. We pass it off as being in town for a few days looking for The Council of Spiders because we had wanted to hire them to be a diversion so we didn’t have to deal with the new local Justice League Outreach group nearest Fort Knox.

For my part I spend the majority of my time during this part having the odd reaction under the costumes built in poker face, looking and listing around, and not doing much.

The rest take 2 tracks. Dr. Sorrow, Ten, and Inquiry, Queen, take the track of being very into one another in very good looking costumes while being very good looking to distract, get people off there normal balance, and sweet talk info out of people.

King, Buccaneer, takes the more business like track. Though I do have to pass him a bit of paper that explains that “Libations” are booze at one point. There are a bunch of super villains hanging around in here including Giganta, who’s 2 stories tall to talk to someone on the second floor the whole time, Amazo, Deathstroke The Terminator, Wavelength, Count Vertigo, Sportsmaster, Chesire, Gun Hawk, Gun Bunny and a few others who’s names either escape me as a player currently, or whom I did not recognize in character at the time and thus didn’t get name’s for. We also learn over course of conversation that Morgan La Fey and her son are in another room, as is Clarion The Witch Boy, lord of chaos.

So we spend hours doing chit chat, and had a number of good and very fun or funny exchanges, but I’m going to try to summarize some of the important bullet points because there’s just no way for me to keep it all straight unless I started audio recording the sessions which I have no interest in doing. We learned that Chesire is into Zebraspider (For those keeping score at home, that is 7 women very into him at least 4 of whom have super powers, 5 of whom are smoking hot, and 2 of whom are super heroine’s and 2 super villainesses. ). We learned that as mentioned above, the Royal Flush Gang, or one of them, will be making a go at Fort Knox so we gotta warn that Justice League outreach group. Running out of characters, more in the nest post.

We learn that a substantial percentage of the officials the sitting mayor has appointed or gotten into there positions are league of assassins members working directly for Ra’s Al Ghoul. We learned that no one in there knows where The Council of Spiders is, but, they know a major bomb shell. That Whisper’A’Dare, is now running Intergang, and she nearly certainly knows. This is a bombshell because we find out she’s been cozying up to Dr. Sorrow so that she can get Magpie in play, that that was her idea, and she also had the bright idea to engineer the Mad Hatter kidnapping we saw awhile back. (Note, that was one of the last things we found out. Just for context.)

Additionally we found out that the new Wolf Spider is in fact, the original Wolf Spider. Seems after Deathstroke killed him, Ra’s paid off Deathstroke to not have a cow about the following, then, put him in the Lazarus pit to bring him back. And used him as a plant within the The Council of Spiders. Seems he plan to use them for this last job and then wipe them out. He’s “helping” him somehow which is probably why he now has comparable powers too me. And we confirmed that Kat Grants Boss, Morgan Edge, is in on it with Whisper’A’Dare. And they have Wavelength working for them to make sure we don’t talk too Kat Grant before the mayor incident with out something going horribly wrong, and to ensure that the broadcasts of the event when the mayor get’s attacked go out no matter what. A minor note was Deathstroke bought Buccaneer a drink during this.

Count Vertigo, didn’t know anything, but we did find out he’s gonna try again with his plans. Last time his plans nearly nuked Miami, and he’s gonna try again. And he bitched endlessly about Florida weather. Zebraspider has resolved to knock a copious number of the mans teeth out first time he get’s a crack at him. So that’s a thing will need to handle at some point.

And we found out, why Kat Grant has a vendetta against Zebraspider. It turns out, at one point when I was trying to tail a villain unique to Zebraspider’s Rogue’s Gallery, Gelding, a shape shifting serial killer tumbler-feminazi-type, Grant had an Intern tailing me to get the scoop. And the Serial Killer crossed paths with the Intern, killed him horribly before I got there.

I didn’t know it was her intern. And she blames me for him getting killed.

Now, an aside for Context.

When we did the first campaign I picked Kat Grant because she is canonically just about the only unethical person in Journalism in the DC universe. She’s there to be the bad girl do anything to get ahead bitch to counter balance Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Iris West-Allen, Linda Park-West and all the other incredibly ethical and decent reporters in the DC universe. In a universe like that, she’s the one realistic (read, completely morally bankrupt and generally shitty human being.) one.

I had wanted a dynamic like Ditko’s dynamic between Spiderman and J J Jameson. Were in Jameson was going after Spiderman because he was jealous of what Spiderman could do and couldn’t handle it, so, he was going to use all his institutional power to tear Spiderman down whatever it took. And Canonically Grant is perfect fit for that.

However, because the GM is a hugh fan of the later iterations that wanted to make it so that Jameson was Validated and completely legitimate in his positions and Peter was just kind of shitty, what I now have is that my Journalist Antagonist is now Blond Lois Lane, and completely in the right.

So suffice it to say I have strong feelings and I have had fairly passionate discourse with the GM about before this reveal, and after, but that is context that even if you don’t need now, you will likely need at some point going forward. And as an addendum: you will absolutely need this context before the campaign log is over.

So anyway, during the course of all of this Inquiry and Dr. Sorrow have been playing up being very hot and very into one another and have a considerable percentage of the room staring at them.

This, turned out to include Morgan La Fey’s Son. Whom, she’s used Magic to Keep 13 years old for over 1500 years, so that when she does finally get the throne of her perfect Camelot for him, he can be in a position to have a full life as King including his physical prime. Which caused him to spend 30 minutes staring at Dr. Sorrow and Inquiry, and not doing what his mother told him, which was to bring drinks in for her and Clarion The Witch Boy.

So she comes out to find out what’s taking her son so long, sees the scene, and decides to go have a chat with us about why we should not be distracting and way laying her son. And make her displeasure known. Keeping in character we try to apologize and as Ace I end up paying her Bar Tab for her to try and smooth it over, and then she let’s us know that she knows precisely who we are and the only reason we are walking out of here is that it serves her purpose that we are giving The Cult Of Keku a black eye every single time we cross paths with them.

And by precisely who we are, I mean she calls Zebraspider by his Civilian last name.

We also find out that Agrogora is in town and planning to do a Heist on Dr. Sorrows Museum for Morgana La Fey. Because Excalibur’s Sheath is on display there on lone currently.

We end up cutting losses and leave after that, rather than Risk Clarion discovering were there and deciding to make a scene because he has axes to grind with Zebraspider and Buccaneer.

There is some conversation, Zebraspider is overly blunt in trying to get Dr. Sorrow to wrap her head around the fact that Whisper’A’Dare metaphorically stabbed her in the back. And Dr. Sorrow starts having a metal spiral that we try really hard to keep her form going too far into. Mostly because the GM insisted on doing this with the party 400ft in the air with nothing to use to try to affect a rescue if she lost her balance and we really, really didn’t want her to die that way, because the GM was determined to not give us Zetatube access.

Once back at base we have Dr. Sorrow’s sister and Inquiry working on trying to keep Dr. Sorrow form going completely to piece’s, and Inquiry get’s more visions and a more complete picture of Dr. Sorrow’s past.

Buccaneer puts in a call to the Great Plains justice league out reach group, and has Cicada sent over there. After there head has a massive prank on him to put the fear of the Native America Spirits and curses into him if he double crosses them. And then he get’s called away to fight a Corn Demon. A Multi Story Tall Corn Demon. Just to prove to him that actually, stuff does happen not on the costs.

Meanwhile I take a trip to Collect Doyal, sedate him, and take him back to the base intent on reaching back out to Raven to have her try and help us check a few problems off the list. We do get in touch with her and have a humors scene of The Teen Titans having just party’d really hard, because they had a full day of nothing worth noticing happening in San Francisco. We are speculating that someone dropped all the chaos magic and energy form there onto Miami and we speculate this is because Raven teleport’s over too our base to try and give us a hand with several loose ends, and immediately get’s hit by a magic truck from the sheer amount of chaos and corruption magics that are vastly overly concentrated in Miami just now. She’s able to stand it long enough to Ward the party against Selkie so next time we meet them we should be able to not succumb to her Libido focused mind control and actually fight her and her group. So we might actually get to handle that situation next time.

Unfortunately she’s not able to stand it any longer and teleport back immediately and puts Star Fire on the com’s with us. It messed her up bad enough that she’s going to need a week to pull herself back together, meaning she can’t help with much else. I do send Star Fire the ritual stuff for Coshka before we check out.

Zebraspider tries to remember whom all the members of Justice League Albion are and if any of them happen to have the magic or telepathy needed to just drag the information we need out of Doyal, when a somewhat battered looking Dr. Fate shows up. Seems Captain Nazi and his crew tried to launch an assault on Justice League Western Europe HQ specifically to go after Coshka.

Because they were forewarned, by our party specifically, about several details of who was in league with Captain Nazi and how there teleportation crap worked they were able to repel them. It was a fight to be sure but the league were decisive winners and captain Nazi did not succeed in getting at Coshka. Everyone on our side also actually survived, some injury’s to be sure, but alive and will make 100% recovery’s. Which, would not have happened that way if not for the warning. Hold onto that you’ll need it for a minor fun bit later.

Zebraspider gives him a copy of the ritual information Dr. Sorrow put togeather and Dr. Fate said she’s to be commended for it. We mention she’s had a major betrayal in the last two hours, and Dr. Fate takes some time to give her a pep talk and helps pull her out of it. He also take Snakey Doyal and all the information we have about what he’s been up too and assure’s us he will get the information out of him first.

Doyal is woken up by Dr. Fate collecting him and our last sight of him is of him screaming as a golden Ank of magic energy takes him away, with Zebraspider looking him dead in the eye and telling him that he should have told us what we wanted to know, and him spitting on Zebrapsider. Given all the shit we are still dealing with thanks to Doyal, this is fairly cathartic.

Now, there is no assurance that Dr. Fate will be able to get the info in time. On his advise while Inquiry helps Dr. Sorrow figure out how there going to protect the Museum from Agrogora, Buccaneer and Zebraspider do some patroling and stop a Jewelry Heist. And the shop owner, a Latina MILF or so the GM said, makes a pass at Zebraspider. That’s 8 now for the record.

Were going to go after Whisper’A’Dare next session, and Zebraspider is going to go have a chat with his sister so that if things go horribly side-wise, she’ll know what happened and why. Since she wants in on this part of his life that badly.

Dr. Fate, before leaving, did at least assure Zebraspider of his biggest concern. That it was phonemically unlikely that Morgana La Fay, even if she had an ax to grind with us, would go after his family. It’s evidently not how she does things.

And We are also seriously starting to prep for in case we cannot deal with the counsel of spiders before the appointed time. Laying ground work to try and either shut down the event before it happens, or, failing that, to be ready to have a body double go out there and take the mayor’s place, and to have enough shenanigans in play to make sure no one see’s the mayor and we can keep this from being the big spectacle we are sure he wants it to be.

So that is were the session ended. Next session is 2 weeks form yesterday.

Were going to go after Whisper’A’Dare next session, and Zebraspider is going to go have a chat with his sister so that if things go horribly side-wise, she’ll know what happened and why. Since she wants in on this part of his life that badly.

Dr. Fate, before leaving, did at least assure Zebraspider of his biggest concern. That it was phonemically unlikely that Morgana La Fay, even if she had an ax to grind with us, would go after his family. It’s evidently not how she does things.

And We are also seriously starting to prep for in case we cannot deal with the counsel of spiders before the appointed time. Laying ground work to try and either shut down the event before it happens, or, failing that, to be ready to have a body double go out there and take the mayor’s place, and to have enough shenanigans in play to make sure no one see’s the mayor and we can keep this from being the big spectacle we are sure he wants it to be.

So that is were the session ended. Next session is 2 weeks form yesterday.

(Note: Got a bit click happy, posted too soon, and for whatever reason, forum won’t let me update.)

And we are back!

So, our speedster has been having some IRL stuff going on, and once again was unable to join us. GM ruled he had gone up to Hub city to handle something.

So we picked up with everyone regrouping back at home base. (I had us skip Zebraspider going to see his sister at the time in order to try and not make everyone sit through it. Took care of it later with the GM right before we hopped off but since chronologically it happened first, i’ll cover that here. I left her a written message of how the situation stood and what we were about to try to do so that if things go horribly wrong she would know what actually took place. Along with directions to destroy the letter. This was to keep her room mate form getting wind of things. So, she’s informed.)

Anyway, we did something we don’t like doing and the GM wasn’t expecting us to do. We split the party.

Inquiry went to pay a visit to the mayor to try and size up if the question was correct and he really is in on the whole thing.

Buccanner took Dr. Sorrow and her sister to the Museum to check around and try to figure out if there was a way to reinforce security there to stop Agrippina from taking what she wants at Morgan La Fey’s behest.

Zebraspider went to pick up The Pretender from prison on the logic of using him as a body double, and make a phone call.

So, Inquiry goes in, and meets one of her buddy’s form Swat. Get’s a reading off her with Psycomotry that confirms she’s actively working for League of Assassins. In the right now. Meaning she’s been playing Inquiry for awhile. Inquiry then goes in and finds the mayor is having a 3 way with 2 of Dr. Sorrow’s interns. We get further conformation that they are either League of Assassins or that they are Intergang. Inquiry ends up also confirming that the 3 interns appear to have some sort of power to be able to speak to one another with out anyone knowing what they are saying. And that the Mayor is Morgan Edge’s adopted brother.

And we also pretty firmly establish he and his step brother are certainly in on the various goings on we’ve been dealing with.

Inquiry also has a talk with the Campaign manager whom we determine is the mayors brains. We devise that she seems mostly aware of what is going on, but do warn her that she’s been deemed 100% acceptable looses by the bad guys if it helps them. She has some tricks of her own to keep herself from dying so, hopefully that will be enough. We also got a pretty good hint out of character, though none of us had the in character knowledge to pick it up, that this is a version of that character that is actually a good guy. (So, she is frequently the white sheep in a family of black sheep. She’s loyal to her family but she’s also fully aware of an entire group of Super Hero secret ID’s that she keeps tightly secret, because she understands what her father in particular often get’s up too is horrible and needs to be stopped. She’s just also fighting a battle of inches to try and drag more of her relatives onto the side of the angles so to speak. She might be about to have a breakthrough with her younger brother actually in this canon.)

So, meanwhile, Buccaneer and the Sorrow sisters start checking around the museum. They figure out some stuff has been swapped with fakes, but, cannot figure out who caused that to happen. It’s also alarming because it was cult of Keku related stuff, that back in session 1 light-weaver tried to swipe.

Inquiry eventually get’s there and determines that Doyal used the Magpie personality to get into the museum with Slab, Painkiller, and to our surprise, Bane, to do the swap. However, a palm pilot style computer was left behind because Magpie swiped it off Slab and stuck it in a little hidey hole Dr. Sorrow has for some other things. Along with a few other humorous random items like a sandwich in a ziplock bag.

The group reminisces for abit about past antics, including the story of how Dr. Sorrow’s sister actually blew up the Batmobile one time and how Buccaneer once nearly hit Batman with a truck. You know, like the episode Almost Got Em from Batman The Animated Series. This let into them talking about several things of various levels of seriousness.

Meanwhile, Zebrapsider has borrowed Buccaneer’s armored vehicle that use to belong to Iceburg, and taken a trip up state to the prison again. On the way he makes a phone call to Live Wire and Live Wire, being Live Wire, opts to make an in person appearance. They banter for a bit and Zebraspider get’s her to agree too help us with trying to ensure the broadcast doesn’t get out if we have to just deal with the counsel of spiders on there terms.

I get too the prison and get a chat with The Pretender and offer him some options to try to help us stop his former college’s if we try to get his family out of line of fire. On the logic that the only reason he helped the bad guys to begin with was they had guns metaphorically and literally trained on there heads. He’s persuaded, and I get to have a chat with the Ted Kord iteration of The Blue Beetle who’s on Watchtower duty to sign him out for 2 days. This is great because Steve Ditko, creator of Spiderman, also created the Ted Kord version of the Blue Beetle.

I bring him back over too the museum, then we head back to base. Pretender is filled in and the Sorrow sisters and Yev are gonna keep eyes on him till we get back. We’ve got the ball rolling on having one of the Justice League Europe teams getting Pretenders family out of harms way. And we know were Whisper A’dare is hunkered down courtesy of Dr. Sorrow.

So next session we are going to go after Whisper A’dare and see if maybe we can get lucky and The Counsel Of Spiders and Hunter Zolomon will be laying low with her so we can deal with the lot of them.

Next session will also likely be sooner than 2 weeks due to holidays making peoples schedules odd.

Also, for anyone interested. That is 2 sessions back to back that were basically all RP and social stuff and no combat. Though, we are quite confident we are gonna end up having a fight with Whisper A’dare at least next session.

GM advises: “Point of correction. Edouard Laslo is the Poser not the Pretender. The Buddy from SWAT is Anya Volkova. The Campaign Manager is Beautia Sivana of the Sivana family.”

Alright, Lady’s and Gentlemen, this fine Christmas eve while I get breakfast ready, I am here to start typing up the last after action report of the year!

So:

We went into the layer of Whisper A’dare, now identified as the leader of intergang. She, was very not subtle about illegal stuff going on on her property. Her goods greeted us with full automagic sub machine guns and an an Anti Material Rifle at the door.

Buccaneer decided to sneak in, triggering but then evading security, this allowing him to overhear about how evidently they were in the habit of feeding intruders to Whisper A’dare’s pet. While that happened, the chick with the Anti Material Rifle took us down stairs. Inquiry and Zebraspider got, fairly heated and A’dare didn’t bother to make a serious effort to hide what she was all about. Her property had an underground facility that was ancient antediluvian ruins complete with a stone sacrificial alter that drains blood into a special pattern on the floor, and had an enormous mural of Cain murdering Able. Woman wears it on her sleeve’s. She’s got 2 of her Hench women hanging out in there, one of them bristles at a remark made by Zebraspider to Whisper in a way that tips off Zebraspider that it’s his own Shapeshifting antagonist Gelding. The serial killer.

Meanwhile Inquiry get’s a vision and we find out Whisper A’dare’s pet is named Dave, and he is a snake big enough to give showa-era Godzilla a fight and he eats people for her on the regular.

So, of course, a fight breaks out. Though with the admittedly unexpected start of Whisper having the balls to insult Dr. Sorrow to inquiry’s face after betraying and nearly destroying the woman in a very through manner. To which Inquiry shot A’dare right between the eyes with the comic-book-logic specialized none lethal ammo our gun users are favoring so there not piling bodies up all over the place. A’Dare drops and while she’s got a magic trinket to heal, she needs a turn or two to get back up.

Fight breaks out. Gelding has a go at Zebraspider and nicks his new armor while screaming at him. Buccaneer drops down onto the snake and stabs it and hits it with lighting which doesn’t actually drop it. Zebraspider goes in and lays a serious hit on it and we find out while it’s not immune to blunt force trauma it is more resistant too it than the last snake we fought. Nano-second goes in and takes Gelding completely out of the fight in one go. Turns out shapeshifters are not so hot against speedsters once revealed. The hench-woman with the anti-material rifle wings Nanosecond but she barely grazes him (green hit.) so doesn’t do too much. Inquiry drops the chick on her turn.

A’dare get’s back up and makes a go for Inquiry. Zebraspider jumps in, tanks the hit on his armor from this occult looking dagger she’s wielding, and then breaks a whole bunch of her bones in one very solid hit, and takes her magic healing item off her to ensure she stays down. Then starts throwing webs on the Snake. I am then informed by the GM that it’s too big to be Glued up in such a tight space, and thus I can’t make it easier for everyone else to beat on it, even if I spend a hero point.

We manage to subdue Dave the snake, and start going through the place. Gelding, in her creepy serial killer fashion, has a wallet made of very, very, very obviously human flesh from multiple dudes. And when I check inside, sure enough, part of her old MO of having pictures of planned victims is still in play. And, she’s got pictures of a co-worker of Zebraspiders at his actual job. Family man, multiple kids. In a bit of shock and not sure how he’s gonna proceed with this, particularly with the reveal that Cat Grant is validated in her hate of him because evidently he failed to stop her murdering Grants intern at some point, Zebraspider decides to go make sure that no Reinforcements were in bound.

(This was a bit of an OOC player to player concession as well to Buccaneer’s player that wants to kill the baddies more. But not in character.) (edited)

So, Inquiry is getting all of A’dare’s papers and files, and buccaneer seizes his opportunity and lops Geldings head off to make sure she won’t horribly and sadistically torture and murder anyone else for being born in a way she doesn’t personally like. And manages to wake up Dave The Snake and befriend it. By Feeding it Gelding’s Corpse.

Meanwhile, a few rooms over, Danger sense starts tingling. And who happens to show up planning an Ambush that that spoiled but, Dr. Sorrow’s Interns. We banter a bit but Smack Talk isn’t really demoralizing them. Alright, fair enough. We find out there power, for they all have the same power, is they have full control of sound. With this they prevent me yelling down the hall to warn the others, and start trying to do substantial damage. I’ve got a lot of sound dampinging in my suit now, so, that hampers them somewhat, but, there still doing damage to the armor. I’m having to spend hero points to lessen it. And there are 3 of them. And as I found out, they have a Sonic Shield so you have to get not 1 but 2 distinct solid hits a turn to actually do any damage too them at all, and there a good deal tougher than normal humans once you do.

I manage to get on the comes and get the group thinking something is going on and Nanosecond comes to back me up. Unfortunately, Dice are against him trying to hit them for basically the entire fight until his last turn. He does try to create a vacuum by spinning really fast but the GM kept saying that even spending hero points on power stunting it off Gust to move the air to not be were the bad guys were on rolls in the 40’s and 50’s he couldn’t suck the air out of that area because he wasn’t rolling well enough. Even though this was was something speeders do regularly to shut down people with sonic or verbal based options.

We did eventually work through them with punching, but the last one tried to bring the whole building down on us and damaged it. This lead too a favorite of the GM’s. A ticking clock to get what we need and not be able to come back to get full benefit out of our victory!

I tried to patch it to buy us more time but again, not able to stop it fully. Meanwhile Buccaneer comes in with Dave, and we have everyone accounted for except Gelding. Zebraspider asks were she is, Buccaneer bombs his role to lie about it. And thus, Zebraspider comes to the only sound conclusion that won’t cause an actual serious inter-party problem. He concludes Buccaneer turned his back on the snake and Gelding for a moment at some point and after insisting it wasn’t a cold blooded near mindless killing machine, the snake killed and ate Gelding before they could stop it. This annoyed him greatly in character. He doesn’t think much of snakes in general. The rest of the party however have decided Dave is a vital member of our team and they will kill anyone who hurts him. Ladies and gentlemen, the party has a pet now, and it’s a Godzilla sized snake.

So, we look around, find a lot of stuff. A black crystal orb in a crate emblazoned with Nazi Imagery, that makes my danger sense go absolutely ballistic. 2 more crates, one full of documents in German, one full of specialized syringes of some odd substance in a generous supply, similarly emblazoned. One that’s empty and had the markings burned out, one that’s full of guns, including a really weird 40’s Sci-fi one with multiple Nazi Emblems on it. And another that’s got some other guns in it, luger’s and things like that. There’s also a submarine docking area that uses Atlantian tech to work. And then the weird stuff.

Inquiry opens a box to find a perfect, flawless replica of Dr. Sorrow’s head.

And she get’s a vision off it of Captain Nazi talking too that robotics specialist we captured back in the prison break. Only to realize we didn’t capture the real specialist. We got one of his damn robot doubles of himself. And this, is his Even Steven’s robot double of Dr. Sorrow, which they had planned to replace Dr. Sorrow with.

All the parts are there, just needs assembly. Similarly, there is a Robot Replica of Mercy Graves, Lex Luthor’s personal body guard. A vision read on that reveals he made it to cover for her if she ever needed to take some time off. But we do not know why it’s down here. We are however hopeful that maybe, just possibly, they stole from him and he knows nothing about what’s in play, and that him finding out will piss him off and get him going after Ra’s, Intergang and the rest. We also during course of all this, find out Whisper A’Dare has been in the habit of sacrificing people to Cain down in the chambers. Not just to the snake, but also cutting there hearts out with that dagger she tried to kill Inquiry with. Which, is setting off my danger sense on it’s own.

The henchwoman wakes up, I take her gun, and we pump her somewhat for information. She claims the Counsel of Spiders isn’t in the building. All I know is I the player and Zebraspider the character are gonna be pissed if that wasn’t true.

Some logistics are had, and we make our way upstairs. Bunch of rank and file goons try to stop us while the lead Henchwoman books it. I roll single digits to catch her with an AV 11 ranged snare to catch her. Somehow, this results in only getting her shirt and her getting away with most of Intergangs remaining people and who knows what else. Similarly the 5 goons we are fighting despite 2 smack talks rolls one in the 40’s with 10 SP’s, and another that was in the low teens, won’t stop fighting for anything except electricity or blunt for trauma or stun rounds. Too my general annoyance.

Once we get the goons, we send Nanosecond with buccaneer’s sub with the more dangerous items we need to remove, and take the rest, including Dave, out the front door. Buccaneer rides Dave and insists on going by the hospital Selkie’s victims are still in, so he can wave to the one he’s taken a shine too. I have to go along to help make sure there is crowd control and not a panic started up by a Kaiju scale critter going down the road.

We get back too base, Dr. Sorrow reveals she knows that Dave likes to be scratched under the chin. One of Supermans Robots that caretakers the fortress of solitude for him comes over and collects Dave, The Growth Syrum that the documents revealed was in the syringes, and the documents. Turned out Dave needed regular measured injections to not die at this point in his life because he’d been on the stuff so long. Dr. Sorrow get’s to be freaked out by the robot doubles, cops come and collect the lower level one’s, we slap Metahuman restraining collars on the 3 with sound powers. Dr. Sorrow looks at what we got for the chamber and wants to get back there but is ultimately unable to because we are pressed hard for time. Though we do figure we’ll talk to Aquaman about getting her access again later. And then she get’s to be weirded out similarly to Inquiry upon seeing the robot parts.

We ultimately work out we are, unfortunately, going to have to go ahead and give Lex Luthor the Mercy robot back. For the rest, we decide to have the dangerous glass orb, Whisper’s Dagger after Dr. Sorrow looked at it, and the head of the Dr. Sorrow Even Steven also get locked up in The Fortress of Solitude and I go to see too that. Meanwhile, Inquiry and Dr. Sorrow have a bit of a heart to heart with Whisper and the Interns. We get a bunch of information out of them, not were the counsel of spiders is yet though.

Most of it is fluffy and focused on either Whisper A’dare and how she got into this point in her life, how the triples did, and and how much contempt they all hold for Dr. Sorrow and Inquiry. We find out they call Inquiry “The Inquisitor.”. And we find out that The Triples are the one’s using a trick with there sonic powers to let Magpie loose form Dr. Sorrow’s mind. Oh, and how fanatically loyal Whisper A’dare is to her dead boss/boyfriend, and how fanatical she is to her cult.

Some of it ties into Inquiry and Dr. Sorrow being an item.

But, one of them is about how one Dr. Freak, an original Villain of Buccaneers, is working with Ra’s Al Ghoul. Ra’s has someone, as yet unknown, who is looking to create an army of super powered people to oppose him and this is playing right into Ra’s plans. And during this, Dr. Freak talks about my characters civilian ID and his sister. And how there Metagene’s are profoundly promising. And how there going to target the sister because Zebraspiders Civilian ID is “Boring.” This could mean what they think it will do is not what they actually want, or that his lifestyle is boring and they don’t think that makes his mental state a good candidate for what they want. But he’s targeting her very directly.

We also in all of this found out that it’s pretty likely Aquaman wasn’t fooled by the Mera robot, and why. So next session that will be one of the things will be doing. Or at least trying to do. Were also gonna have to try again to pump the location of the counsel of spiders out of our captives, get ready for the likely at this point outcome that we are going to have to have the event go on and stop the assassination there. Zebraspider will need to get word to his sister and Professor Bubbles about the metagene wrinkle, and to someone we can trust in the league as a just in case.

And of course, we need to try and get in touch with Dr. Fates wife to update her and through her, Dr. Fate. Which is what were gonna open on next time.

Note: It was around here that discussion was had that the players and GM did not like the moral and Smack Talk mechanics as a way to end conflict with out mercilessly pummeling every single individual mook into a hospital bed. So from this point that tapers off and I reworked Zebraspider to not waste as many ranks in Smack Talk as almost all it’s use was out the window after this. It’s a call I don’t happen to agree with the party or GM on but I abided by as I was outvoted.

So, after like, a month, we had a session last night!

We opened were we left off, message to Dr. Fate’s wife which let us drop off the Loud Sisters and Whisper A’Dare with her. She’s, unfortunately, not going to be able to pump them for any information we can use in time. While doing this we get a bit more information about the Dagger Whisper had, a bit more information about the Cisaphian Dagger and how it fits in, and Inquiry and Dr. Sorrow see an oddly Dr. Sorrow but not Dr. Sorrow like shape in the mists of the Mind Space we are in, that the rest of us cannot detect.

And since Dr. Fates wife isn’t able to tell us were The Council of Spiders is holed up, we examined our options. She didn’t have any inside track she could share with us about Beutia Sivana, and Inquiry’s last chat with her left us with a hang up on that front. We need to insert the mayors temp replacement, with out anyone knowing about it, and we need to tank his political career, but, we also would benefit from not nuking her’s in the process. Which, is gonna be a problem.

After a bit of discussion of options, we end up doing it the Buccaneer way. We put a plan together, to go in dressed as Super Villains, Kidnap the Mayor, insert Mr. Laszlo, AKA The Poser, in his place as a doppleganger, and let him revel himself as a body double during the attack. At which point he can make it look like the Mayor knew a little too much about the danger, which drives suspicion too the mayor. He can also look for evidence and with a bit of good fortune, have some concrete evidence of his dealings with Intergang in hand to pass too us after we extract him after The Council of Spiders has there go at him.

After some discussion we figure we need a bit more help as far as making sure we have the hard evidence to nail the mayor, so, Zebraspider puts in a call to an acquaintance from the first campaign. And get’s Lois Lane, yes, THAT Lois Lane, on the first flight she can get to Miami.

With that done, Buccaneer contacts a very, very gay dude he knows who does costume tailoring. Get’s a rush order on costumes that will allow us to pass ourselves as the same Council of Spiders members that we know will in fact be going after the Mayor the following night. We figure if things go south, they’ll get blamed and it might still spook the Mayor into what we want.

A whole lot of jokes are had at the expense of Buccaneer, Inquiry and Zebraspider during this in turn. Zebraspider thinks the plan makes sense, but, hates it anyway because he swore he was never wearing the Wolf Spider Costume again. Zebraspider also, of note, asks Dr. Fates wife to see if, in the event the next few days go worse case, she and Dr. Fate could make sure someone in the league who could be trusted could make sure his family’s protected. And got Yev to message Professor Bubbles about the recent meta information. We sneak into the Mayors place with Laszlo and find the Mayor, passed out like the Degenerate he is on a couch in next to nothing watching TV. And King Snake, Minor DC villain who’s a blind kung fu bullshit master. One of the higher level hand to hand combatants in setting though. He’s set up as a body guard.

He, Immediately, hears through our rolls to deceive him into thinking it really is the council of spiders. So a fight breaks out while Nanoseconds is on watch. Zebraspider does a fast and dirty hotwire job on the TV to make an unholy high pitched sound that really interferes with King Snakes ability to fight and Inquiry and Buccaneer do a whole lot of damage too him before Inquiry knocks him out. Zebraspider grabs the now awake mayor and chokes him out and quips as Wolfspider at him. We then web both up in a bag and cart both out, leaving Mr. Laszlo behind to pass as the mayor and execute that part of the plan.

We manage to make our get away, and leave just enough evidence to point people to it being Council Of Spiders in the hope that will make trouble for them.

While getting away, Inquiry does a reading on the Mayor and get’s a read of him talking to Sugarman and how all there plans are secure as long as he doesn’t get busted before things, and how, evidently, most of this mess as been kept form The Boss. We Sedate the Mayor, and cut King Snake Loose with a fat stack of $100 bills and an agreement that his version of this will be The Council of Spiders made a play, and it didn’t work out and they had to make a snap decision which is why he got grabbed. We also cautioned him that the mayor may not be the mayor but to not worry about it for a couple of days, and given he was given several hundred more than his asking price and cut loose not much worse for wear, he was highly amenable too that.

We also end up using Buccaneers submarine to stash The Mayor. He’s being kept restrained in a locked area inside of another locked area, in the sub, with the controls locked out via encryption key, and the sub a good ways under water in Whisper A’dares now flooded base that no one would have any reason to go to that would also have the ability to go too it. And Wraith, who’s player hasn’t returned, is still standing guard over him as added insurance he’ll be there when we want him.

With that done we head up to the Air Port and pick up Lois Lane and fill her in on most of the goings on. She’s gonna try to help us with pinning down hard evidence to actually get the Mayor held to task for his participation in all of this, and start by going through documents of all the people we busted and Talking to Lt. Frog.

During the drive back to base Buccaneer decides to make it a point to say in front of Lois Lane and Zebraspider that he executed Gelding previous session. This in spite of my efforts to keep that from becoming a plane fact Zebraspider was aware of.

There was some disagreement had about that as we wound the session down, and after the GM actively refused to allow Zebraspider to just bumrush Buccaneer in an environment that heavily favored Zebraspider to win with out even taking damage in the PVP since the GM insisted there was a no PVP rule, a compromise was reached.

GM agreed that I won’t suffer mechanical consequences from Buccaneer being a murder hobo such as not getting hero points back at start of new sessions.

GM also stated an understanding of the concern that there would be in universe blow back from people in universe who would not approve of Buccaneer being a murder hobo when I made it clear I didn’t want to have that coming back on me since we don’t want PVP and that’s the only other option I’ve got to stop a PC doing that stuff.

I agreed that I’d back off of being bothered about Buccaneer rampaging around as a Murder Hobo. And even though I’d already rolled and rolled a natural 8 to let Buccaneer have it, I agreed to a retcon that he was about to do so and then got a phone call and forced him away from it for a couple of minutes, during which time his initial reaction cooled a little.

And I agreed to ease off using Smack Talk and Persuasion to solve fights with out fights so that Buccaneer could have more room to play up being “Guy who’s Good at Sword.” as he puts it. This will hopefully reduce the tension between Buccaneer and Zebraspider. Now fully codifying the GM’s nerfs to the moral system and too the Smack Talk skill.

Next session we will have 1 last day to hopefully pin the Mayor on some hard evidence with the help of Lois Lane. And then that evening, we get to go have a fight with The Council of Spiders.

During the course of the run up we might end up having to go after Sugarman since we do know were his base is.

So! We had another session last night.

With 10 hours to go until the attempt to assassinate the mayor goes into play, we got a new party member. Dr. Entropy, a chaos sorcerer from an earth were WW2 never actually stopped right up too today, and The Lords Of Cosmic Order are actively backing the Nazi’s and thus going totally out of balance.

He’s here to help us at Dr. Fate’s request and in exchange once things calm the hell down, Dr. Fate is going to help him find some Artifacts that can help him save his world from the Nazi’s. Most if not all of which he explained after popping in.

So he pops in, we more or less verify he’s a PC. And we play 20 questions trying to figure out what it’s gonna take to actually find The Council of Spiders. Most of which he spends generally taking the piss out of Zebraspider at this stage. (Zebraspider was quickly the favorite take-the-piss-out-of-him target but he did give the others there share of grief .) We do however lock down that a trip back to Dr. Sivana’s lab is needed to have a second look at the boom tube tech to let our new Wizard Lord Of Chaos see if he can magically track The Counsel of Spiders.

We pick up a bunch of muffins, bagels and coffee and go off to see them. Except Inquiry whom hung back with Lois Lane looking over the evidence of Intergang’s dealings with the Mayor. A detail they do uncover via Inquiry’s powers is that Intergang planned to use Bloodsport, who’s sort of DC comics answer to Bullseye from Marvels Daredevil line, to kill Inquiry’s old coworker Lt. Frog during the hit on the mayor. So one more wrinkle.

Meanwhile we have a meet with the Sivana’s and figure out that Sugerman is running things for this leg in Intergang at current moment with A’Dare out of the picture. And that the only way we can get to the freaking New Gods Pocket Dimension the counsel of spiders is hanging in, is to hit Sugarman’s place and get the Fatherbox he’s holding.

So we reconvene too do that. During which time Dr. Entropy decides it would tbe funny to try and use Illusion magic to hook Zebraspider up with Georgia Sivana. Seen in the image on this post. This amused, well, everyone except Zebraspider.

And after making a plan that did make sure Sugarman couldn’t teleport out, find out Buccaneer forgot the bombs. And brought his Hotline Miami stuff, complete with baseball bats, instead, by accident. So, we improvise, and Instead Zebraspider just came bursting through the floor and dropped one of the two most dangerous guys in Sugarman’s Layer after Dr. Entroy teleported us in and set up to prevent us teleporting out.

Zebrapsider ended up dropping Black Spider, who, registered a lot closer to a Mirror Match, and on his first Initiative turn, dropped Sugarman fairly hard to make sure he couldn’t pull anything out of his ass to get away. And Dr. Entropy took a blast at the other most dangerous person in the room. Giganta.

Who, tanked it, stood up, grew bigger and stepped on Dr. Entropy and if not for a tiny fluke of luck and spending a lot of hero points, would of killed Dr. Entropy on the spot. The hit was so bad is also required a few rerolls from Inquiry’s powers to keep her form getting killed by it, and Buccaner only just barely lucked out on not getting caught up in it. Buccaneer proceeded to retaliate by pulling a whole lot of lighting into Giganta and the mook standing around, both of whom he dropped.

Inquiry recovered the good Dr. and we bailed out, me leaving a calling card of a sort since I didn’t get a chance to verbally use the quip I’d had in mind for Giganta due to Dr. Entropy and Buccaneer dropping her almost instantly before I had a turn in combat against her. And of course we brought Sugarman along. Dr. Entropy tried to use his powers on Sugarman to get something useful out of him, no dice. We searched and Disarmed Sugarman, and started figuring out options.

Note: Evidently, the picture I had originally posted was too big. Just do an image search for Georgia Sivana DC Comics, and you’ll see what I’m getting at though.

We spent most of the session discussing how we were gonna try to deal with the counsel of spiders. With a new gods fortress for home field advantage, them sticking tight together and under no circumstances deploying until they were ready to go for the Mayor, we worked out that we have 2 options. A boobytrap were the Fatherbox tells us the Boomtube will put them, which, risks possible civilian casualty’s.

Or,

Talk to the Sivana’s about working something out to have the Fatherbox send the Counsel of Spiders somewhere else and deal with them there. Which, will almost certainly require a Date with Georgia Sivana and a one Zebraspider. And given that Buccaneer and Dr. Entropy were jumping at the opportunity to not only have this date plan happen but to try and make it as much of a pain in the ass as humanly possible, this didn’t go over especially well with Zebraspider.

Next session were expecting to have to at long last deal with the Counsel of Spiders, one way or the other. And Zebraspider is now going to have to deal with some of the rest of the baggage.

Ladies and gentlemen we are back!

So we had a session last night. Real quick, we did not have our speedster player this time around again, player had some IRL stuff to handle that required him to not be up till 1AM give or take playing a game this particular Friday night. But we wish him well at the martial arts tournament he is attending even as I type these words.

That said, We opened up with a brief couple of phone calls happening in between Zebraspider and a couple of NPC’s. Livewire, to let her know there was an adjustment too the plans and what we needed was for her to ensure that the Media Mogul Morgan Edge couldn’t cut the feed during “the Mayor’s” speech and that there would be some flexibility in taking care of Zebraspider’s end of the Bargan, talked about earlier. After that bit of Banter he left a message for the Coshka NPC to make her aware he was being put under duress to take some other NPC’s out for an evening, and that the only reason he was complying with it was that he had a combination of lives on the line, and, when he had his moment to try and bargain to not have too do that particular thing, he had 2 Asshole Team Mates who thought it would be endlessly hilarious to force his hand and make sure that he had to do things he didn’t want to do since he didn’t like it when they murder hobo people.

That done, off too see the Sivana family. And sure enough, my efforts to get one of the others to tackle the tech issue we needed sorted out failed, and we got to talk to Geogia Sivana again. And sure enough, Asshole Team Mate number 2, Dr. Entropy, Chaos Sorcerer, Made Sure to interrupt me talking to her and offer the Date option 1st so that I didn’t have any room to make other arguments, and him and Buccaneer made sure to keep pressing trying to make Zebraspider take her too the Opera and make sure Zebraspider had no control over this. After complaining about Zebraspider wanting to reign in party members wantonly murdering indiscriminately earlier.

In so doing they prevented Zebraspider from even getting to make the argument he wanted to use as a back up, which was to be able to dictate day and time of the date, and so Georgia Sivana got to dictate those things too him instead. So he’s going to a Metal Concern 3 days later with her weather he likes it or not. And then Dr. Entropy informed me that in his universe, Zebraspider is Married to the Goblin, and got mad when I pointed out that in His Universe, Superman is a literal Nazi and WW2 Never actually ended, so I wasn’t keen to be importing things from his universe, and that his motives were frankly suspect give how hard he pushed for this exact outcome at all costs and with out heed to any other possibility. He seems to have decided that that would be coercion to bargain with her so. Nevermind that he Coerced Zebraspider through Metagaming and none Metagaming means to get this outcome. He also made it clear he plans to keep doing this shit for the forseeable future and won’t stop unless Zebraspider marries the mad scientist goblin woman.

This is in universe the 2nd time in 8 months Zebraspider has been saddled with an amoral psychopath who has magic and thus get’s to get away with endless bullshit even when he shouldn’t be able to. So there starting to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

Anyway, we got what we needed out of her, interparty drama aside.

She worked out a containment field that should keep The Council of Spiders from being able too get clear and take hostages or go for the Mayor or what not. And we spent some hours prepping in various ways. Inquiry did a little light sparring with her girl friend to center herself. Dr. Entropy Meditated. Buccaneer when to go be a creepy talker on his love interest. Zebraspider found a quite room alone to pull a little wooden cross he carries around out and desperately pray to god this went alright.

After that, some Antics getting disguises up and running and getting the party subtly inside the stadium, and then into costume and in the right spot at the right time with Civilians cleared. And then the council of Spider’s Showed up at last, dressed like us. Because the Speedster player didn’t make the session, Hunter Zolomon was able to get out before the field caught him, So Nanosecond was running around outside the field dueling the speedster. GM advised how that went would mirror how things inside the field went. Inside said containment field, which was inside the area that a football team would normally enter the field on, we have:

Zebraspider.

Wolfspider-Dressed-As-Zebraspider-and-using-tech-to-mirror-his-powers.

Inquiry.

Funnel-web-spider-dressed-as-inquiry.

Buccaneer.

Widower-dressed-as-buccaneer.

Dr. Entropy.

Arnak. Who’s evidently an Apocoliptian Minor New God who had there equivalent of a side arm.

Zebraspider Won Initiative and started hammering on Wolf Spider, which helped set the tone for a Mirror Match. Nearly took him out on the first round with a grapple and Judo Throw combo, but he had just enough ability to take it to keep going. His turn did get eaten up by being made to break out of my grapple and try to move away from me though.

Dr. Entropy went after After Arnak, and put a good bit of hurt on him with a really solid cosmic blast. And Arnak responded in kind and forced 3 hero points to be used to deal with a red hit he took out on Dr. Entropy.

Widower lunged for buccaneer and similarly rolled stupidly well and nearly took out Buccaneer. Forced hero point use to keep Buccaneer fighting. Buccaneer, in turn, retaliated by putting lighting behind punching with the Cutlass Guard and managed to Drop Widower.

And then Inquiry. Up to this point our side had been rolling well. Inquiry’s player rolled to take a shot at Widower and after 4 uses of probability control couldn’t get the Roll20 Roller to go below 79 for her, and couldn’t hit. Funnel, for her part, also couldn’t hit.

Next Round Zebraspider got 2 really good rolls and put Wolf Spider and Arnak out of the fight, and then Dr. Entropy got a red success to mind control Funnel and force her to surrender and tell us if there were any other surprises. And we got more information that Lt. Frog wasn’t here, she was at her home and the hit on her was going to be there.

With us having won handily, Nanosecond of course won his fight smoothly enough. And we rushed over to try and stop Lt. Frog from getting murdered. 2 thugs already shot outside her door, one dead one bleeding out. Zebraspider, 12 agility that he has, with out missing a step while walking by, webbed the wound on the bleeding out one up to make sure he’d live till Paramedics could get to him anyway, and they’d have a chance to keep him alive.

We get inside as gun fire keeps going, and find 2 Bloodsports and 4 mooks standing over Lt Frog with several bleeding gun shot wounds, about to have a few more bullets from Mid Caliber rifles put in her skull at point blank range.

So we go on the attack, Zebraspider hits one of the Bloodsports, and shatters it. Hard light construct from a gadget of his. This get’s most of the baddies focusing him.

Bloodsport shoots a grenade from the under mounted launcher on his rifle at Zebraspider, and Zebraspider dodges it, letting it go out the window behind him. Sadly, it blows up some dudes Ferrari randomly. (It’s evidently an up scale neighborhood, don’t know what to tell you.). This guy does get out a red hit swapping too his side arm that Zebraspider has to roll with, but roll he does, getting it down too a hit his Armor can safely absorb for him.

During the fight I’m having to be really sparing with protector advantage now because Lt. Frog is on the ground helpless so I need to make sure I have something in case someone tries to shoot her and finish her just to spite us if they loose.

Dr. Entropy does some magic to try and heal up Frog and keep her from bleeding out. And some more to make the ammo and explosives Bloodsport is packing inert. Inquiry and Buccaneer focus on the henchmen, with 1 Henchman grazing Inquiry with a green hit with his rifle and a couple of them going down.

Next Round Zebrapsider finishes off Bloodsport for the fight, leaves him knocked out and broken but alive on the floor. At this point I take a meta option and let Buccaneer mop up the remaining Mooks, and he does so. Zebraspider then picks up Lt. Frog and has Dr. Entropy teleport him too the home bases infirmary and starts using the advanced tech to put Frog back together. While I’m gone the rest start interrogating Bloodsport and his minions and confirm that part of the plan was to hopefully draw us away from the Mayor, figuring if either of them died then no matter what happened we’d loose. This, suggests, the bad guys actually did plan for the Mayor to die as an entirely acceptable outcome this whole damn time, and lead him on so he’d be all to chilled out about it. (We also got a scene of Bloodsport antagonizing Gelding before Gelding died, that’s always fun.)

So, With the information in hand, Dr. Entropy decides to casually Maim all the hench men that are still alive so they will have constant nerve damage pain for the rest of there lives, and to teleport Bloodspot several miles out to sea even though more of his bones are currently powder than not and he’s got a concussion, and just let him die horribly out there. Becuase Dr. Entropy thinks he’s the good guy you see. Zebraspider has no knowledge of this in character, just to be clear. Not that I’d really be able to do anything about it anyway for sake of keeping the peace if I did.

So, at this point, all the baddies are locked up or in hospital beds and good and restrained, and everyone’s alive and safe. Dr. Entropy, Buccaneer and Inquiry decide to get Chinese for dinner, and call in and a bunch of the NPC’s at the manor and Zebraspider relay orders. They then teleport into the restaurant and the older Chinese lady that owns it chews them out in Mandarin, and Buccaneer argues with her in Japanese because he’s Buccaneer. Meanwhile Lt. Frog tries to do her seduction Schick with Zebraspider and get’s shot down by him, so instead ends up comparing notes with Lois Lane for the investigation. Food comes, I keep on eye on the TV, and Cat Grant is on there not saying 1 word about Zebraspider, for a change, but railing against the Mayor getting a known Nazi Criminal out of Jail to be a body double even though the Justice League busted the mastermind for this so called assassination days ago, and all the things him doing such a thing anyway imply. I go after dinner and collect Mr. Laslow, get him back to the Manor. Find out he got a signet ring that unlocks a secret panel in the Mayors Office that has a safe attached too it. So, that will help that part of the investigation we hope.

We also had Lt. Frog report back in to confirm that she was alive, and collect her stuff form her office since the Chief of Police was letting detectives in another department box it all up to be thrown out. During this she got her stuff all back. And Buccaneer got a good look at The Chief Of Police. (Rolled a nat 7 on a criminal contacts check.). and He’s 99.9% sure that’s Ubu, Ra’s Al Ghoul’s right hand man. Ubu who hasn’t been seen since right around the time this guy appeared out of nowhere to be appointed by the Mayor as chief of police. She’s got all her files now, and Buccaneer pointed this out to her, so, she’s got that info. So her and Lois Lane are really raring on the case in light of all these recent developments. To Yev’s annoyance and dismay at the perfect replica of the winter palace having thumb tacks for note cards and connecting twine stuck all over it. Oh, and Frog made a pass at Buccaneer and he shot her down too. This is humerus because of prior characterization of the woman.

We ended up, after some discussion and Buccaneer really wanting to beat the Mayor till he blacked out form a Concussion and leave him in his manor with out medical attention, out voting him. Dr. Entropy put a spell on him to make him sleep and teleported him into his bed with no way to know if everything that’s happened to him wasn’t some screwed up nightmare or not.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot to mention. Someone finally told Zebraspider that The Specter exists and gave him the basic thrust of what The Specter is… That’s gonna be important too him later but not right now. Also, Inquiry got a vision that Kraken is still abducting people for metahuman activation while Interrogating Bloodsports group.

Unless I’ve forgotten something, we will be picking up next session with probably a quick visit to the Mayor’s secret safe, and then following up on a long dormant plot thread. What’s going on under the Santaland Amusement Park. (A horror show we are sure.).

Oh, and Zebraspider will probably have to make good on at least 1 date.

Anyway, till next time!

GM Comments: Technically it was Dr. Entropy that got the past vision of the Gangbangers that Bloodsport hired while finishing up the Kidnapping of a Woman, Shinia Brown.

Good morning all. Got another update for you from a new session.

So, we evidently started off the following day, though, I thought it was still the night of the incidents with the Mayor for basically the whole session. We had Nanoseconds player back and gave him a bit of a TLDR for the prior sessions. The first hour or so was spent figuring out what we were going to do with the ring the Mayor had that was the key to his secret safe. The Ring Said “Ra’s Al Ghoul” on it, so, we felt the need to get into it. Some various tactics were discussed before we settled on having Dr. Entropy throw a Time Dilation spell on Nanosecond and having him zip in at speeds even he’d find mind blowing to find the safe, open it and clear any evidence out. The thought being we’d give it to Lois Lane form an anonymous source and then she’d write a hit piece about it, and then turn it over to the cops, forcing the cops to actually do there jobs and preventing the likes to Ubu from sweeping it under the rug.

We get in there, and there’s an early 80’s punch card computer with punch cards, a book written in Latin, and several obvious historical and likely magical artifacts. Also Ubu as the police chief is coming to see the mayor who’s looking for the ring. So Nanosecond get’s the stuff back to base, and we take a look at it. We figure out the book is written in Latin and accounts a bunch of tale’s of Mortals Killing gods, and that the sword was once used in such a feat. The Amulet that’s there has an Ancient Pre-Real-World Civilization demon bound in it of some considerable power (name escapes me, lot happened last session.), and we found out one of the items was The Girdle of Hippolita. Which, has been tainted by the will of conquest of Hercules, but also works in a sort of Amazon Excalibur kind of way. If you are a woman who can wear the belt and the belt doesn’t control you it will give you strength/stamina/durability of a Greek god and right to sit on the throne of Themiscara.

When the Campaign wraps up I’ll consider moving it too the Forums or something.

Anyway.

But it also has a will to conquer first Themiscara and then the world.

We had to call Dr. Sorrow in to help figuring all this out, with her sister and Buccaneer standing guard so to speak at the Museum, and a brief mention that the last one was probably a stolen artifact that if not returned through careful diplomatic channels would start a war with Themiscara.

And that would be about the time that an explosion rocked the Museum and a bunch of dudes in Tacticool versions of roman armor with guns and grenades to go with the swords came bursting in, a Dozen in all. Agrophina shows up and orders them in Latin to kill Buccaneer and what they think is a strictly normal civilian and then heads too the Albion exhibit with all the stuff on loan from the British Government.

Buccaneer calls us in to deal with her so he can work through Minions. Dr. Entropy, Lord Of Chaos And Sorcerer Supreme, Wise In All Things, makes it a point to go out of his way to insist it was best if Zebraspider sit this one out and get the 8 artifacts that were recovered stuck in the Fortress of Solitude, because there too dangerous to be simply left alone and that if this was a 2 prong attack, it could be devastatingly bad if some of them fell into the wrong hands.

Which I grudgingly agreed too.

So the rest of the party shows up, Dr. Sorrow going along to help her sister and buccaneer with the Mooks. Unfortunately, they get there after Agrophina has broken the exhibit open and helped herself to a coin that dates back to King Arthur’s time on the throne. And who should teleport in but Morgana La Fey to back them up. One of the most powerful Sorcerer’s in setting and the Lord Of Chaos and Sorcerer Supreme, Wise in All Things, Dr. Entropy, had in fact not predicted that anyone more powerful than Agrophina might possibly show up to this matter. Thus hampering the party by splitting off a combat specialist that’s resilient to magic from it. (edited)

And no, no one attacked the base so I stat out a couple of hours play as a result except for the odd mention of the option to spend hero points or the like.

So, the fight’s on, Dr. Entropy barely shielding the group from La Fey turning them to stone and locking down the movement of Agrophina. He, doesn’t really actually do anything to the sorceress after getting me sidelined and insisting he’s the big deal were magics concerned though, and she get’s away scott free with what she staged the break in to get and curses Agrophina on the way out, giving the woman third degree burns and rapidly aging her decades in seconds. Fully intent on killing her. Turns out Agrophina is distantly descended from the same family as Julius Ceaser and is in fact the last of that line. And La Fey holds a grudge against Rome so decided to set the woman up to be killed in horrible agonizing fashion for things her ancestors did 1500+ years ago because she doesn’t actually have any restrain and all of Zebraspider’s concerns about her knowing his Secret Identity before were 100% rational and justified. Any argument to the contrary just contradicts the facts as they have played out on screen, so to speak, Sorry DRT when you read this.

This Dr. Entropy manages to stop and patch up, but in a way that will Force Agrophina to be his servant going forward.

Of note during the fight is that Nanosecond did impressively get to take Agrophina out of the fight the rest of the way before La Fey turned traitor on her, though, it also played off of Agrophina rolling a nat 100 on an attack roll at him.

Inquiry getting a shot off at Morgana La Fey and getting past her magic to wound her. Didn’t stop her but La Fey acknowledged her skill with an actual bit of respect there.

And as mentioned, La Fey making it clear she 100% holds grudges and blames people for what there relatives did and will murder them horribly in agonizing ways in cold blood over there relatives ever doing anything that displeased her.

On the mooks side, Buccaneer and the Sorrow Sisters do well and mop them up.

Until Dr. Sorrow has a break down and the Magpie persona takes over.

Then she attacks her sister and then goes for Inquiry right as La Fey’s escaped. Nanosecond and Buccaneer manage to knock them out. It’s about here that Nanoseconds player needed to tap out for the night as I recall, though, I’m trying to cover a whole lot of ground so, could be misremembering that. She ends up getting knocked out by Buccaneer and Nanosecond over powering her.

On the Buccaneer front, I will note a positive that while he maimed several of the mooks, it’s canon too the point that he did so in a way they can heal from given time and treatment that they will get per games canon, and didn’t kill anyone despite no one being there to be particularly bothered by it.

However he still made it a point to try and rob them after but rolled badly so they had no cash. He and Nanosecond and Dr. Entropy all decided to go out for Beer and German Food afterwards. I get told, after being told during the fight that Zebraspider needed to take things 1 at a time into the Fortress of Solitude which ensured it took too long to get that done to no miss the fight, that they can’t hear me and there’s too much static on the com’s and there gong through a tunnel, by Dr. Entropy and Buccaneer. So I head out and get told the fastest way I can get there will still take 15 minutes because there’s not enough sky-rise in Miami to pull a power stunt I wanted to do of slingshotting myself airborne with webs and then parasailing the rest of the way. It basically boiled down to the GM and Dr. Entropy wanted to sideline me for the whole session so the whole evening would be a colossal waste of my time and generally unpleasant, and they succeeded in making it so. So this keeps me separated while they have boys night and ponder all the stuff that’s happened, and figure out that The Concert that Dr. Entropy Roped Zebraspider into Taking Georgia Sivana too is part of a ritual that La Fey’s gonna use to go back to Camelot in the early days of King Arthur’s Court, so that she can get her son on the throne and rewrite all of history in the process so that he rules Camelot and Camelot rules the world with her as power behind the throne.

Oh.

Almost forgot.
Inquiry had a Psychometric vision of Agrophina meeting with La Fey and Clarion The Witch Boy as part of figuring this all out.

During which Clarion Tells Inquiry through the vision to tell Zebraspider Hello. When Zebraspider finally does get there Inquiry declines to have the sorrows taken back to base to use the infirmary and insists she’s got that under control. And explains this to Zebraspider about the vision, in an albeit not straight forward way that required some 20 questioning on my part. We also worked out that La Fey’s daughter is actually headlining the band that will be helping with this ritual. So, that’s great.

So this leaves us with a rapidly ticking clock to stop the end of the world as we know it, in which if we fail it is in universe a near certain total party wipe as Morgana La Fey will certainly make it a point, having rewritten history to suit her, to either kill off our ancestors so that we are never born, or, to kill us having worked the timeline around so that none of us are anything but vanilla humans.

I should mention now. The GM LOVES magic and evidently didn’t like it when Zebraspider picked up Immunity to Hostile Magic. Well, he’s getting his revenge now albeit I’m sure unwittingly because I DESPISE Time Travel Bullshit. 99.9% of the time I find it insufferable. So while he thinks that all that’s gonna happen if we can’t stop them here is were going to spend a session or two being half way between Lord Of The Rings And Conan The Barbarian in middle ages England and thus not in Miami for a bit, I am no as optimistic on that score.

And even putting that aside, we are now under yet another desperately short ticking clock to save the world, right after the one with the freaking mayor. One Dr. Entropy is determined to tick down too the last second by insisting there’s no way we are going to find her before the concert. An idea Buccaneer is happy to push for.

He wants us to go for the Santa Land thing and ignore the new even shorter ticking clock. And he and Dr. Entropy, of course, get there way and we agree that will be tomorrows thing in game. I am on record that I don’t like that we are not getting La Fey’s issue dealt with.

With that established, Zebraspider has an obligation to keep. A date with Livewire.

So having gone to all the trouble to have some space for this even, and having been side lined from a major combat earlier in the session by another PC’s actions, another PC who’s profited by those Actions none the less, you’d think I’d have been able to just have my character have his date and do what he was going to do and try to maybe talk Livewire into less supervilliany.

You would however be wrong.

See, Buccaneer and Dr. Entropy decided it would be no end funny to put illusion magic on themselves and have Buccaneer come in as a shirtless Fabio looking guy, waving his crotch 3 inches form Zebraspiders face while playing Careless Whisper, using Buccaneer’s Criminal Contacts to get Volcana to pose as a member of the wait staff at a small family run restaurant that Zebraspider due to a bad roll failed to recognize to tip them off when and were the date was.

Incidentally Buccaneer is getting a Portal from Dr. Entropy to Volcana’s base to visit whenever he feels like it out of this, and also got to ride by the hospital to charm his stalking victim with this, and oh yeah, literal Aphrodite popped up and took him to her place for the evening.

Meanwhile, with this little diversion mucking the ability to use the good persuasion roll I managed to get up so that all it did was keep her from moving the conversation into sex or personal details, Zebraspider took her to another place that specialized in desserts, and after a bad second persuasion roll in the mid 90’s naturally, she fried the radio in the shop, his com, and decided to bail and that next date would be her terms.

(Minor Aside he did of course pay for the radio and the trouble.)

Meaning this whole shit show with her is not only not over but it’s getting worse. Though on a minor positive Note, Buccaneer had to get an eye full of the fact that when my team mates aren’t tripping me up, I can be very capable in a social situation.

Also, I don’t know that it was them because they rolled supremely well for it and then Livewire lied to cover it and claim this was something she had arraigned to try and set the mood she wanted.

Oh, and, the concert, being the same one Georgia Sivana insisted I take her too in exchange for her help thanks to Dr. Entropy injecting himself into that negotiation with the express purpose of making sure that date happened even if we didn’t get the part we needed at the time, means I’m gonna have to have a chat with her and her family to try and talk her out of it since if she goes I can’t promise that Morgana La Fey won’t teleport her with just her street cloths into the Core Of The Sun or have Cuthulu eat her soul or some such, or that I’ll be able to stop it form happening if she does. He’s hoping that maybe she can be persuaded to take a stupid rain check and let him pick the venue next time and he can fulfill his obligation and have that done with. And that on a second date with Livewire he can hopefully have the chance to actually pull a good persuasion roll out and try to talk reformation with her which had been his plan this time before outside interference.

Oh, almost forgot a beat from earlier. Those items we got from The Mayor’s Safe? one of them was a Map but we didn’t get as far as having Dr. Entropy look at it before all hell broke loose.

Next session, we will pick back up, and decide if we are going to try to deal with Santa Land during the day when there open and access is easier, or at night, when there closed, and there’s fewer civilians around to risk getting caught in the cross fire.

GM comments: Technically Volacana was Livewire’s woman to bail her out if the date went pair shaped

I did ask him to address this in VC but he was enromously slow in responding too that so I ended up hashing it out in the following post.

Because if that’s the case, it really doesn’t make any sense that Buccaneer called her to find out were Zebraspider was during the date to go pull the Fabio stunt.

That only makes sense if Buccaneer knew she’d be there well in advance, and arraigned for her to be there.

Further, Since Livewire was deliberately not told by Zebraspider were he was planning to take her, just that it was a local place that he swore by the steaks at (There’d be at least a couple of hundred of those in Miami. Minimum.), Volacana being able to set up at the right place at Livewire’s direction as a server also makes no sense.

The whole thing only logically follows if Buccaneer knew and was planning to pull some bullshit ahead of time (and we know he’s planning to pull bullshit every time Zebraspider is trying to interact with women and Dr. Entropy is very keen to help him, they have firmly established this by now.) and wanted Volacana in position, and either warned Livewire ahead of time he’d be pulling some bullshit and that if she rolled with it she might get a rise out of Zebraspider, or, didn’t, and she just thought the situation was pleasant so she rolled with it since it is in character for her to be fairly good at thinking fast if not thinking deep necessarily.