Champions Now: Ep. 1 Welcome to Waterford

-
Macy and I had our first Champions Now session, featuring her supervillain/heroine Dark Matter.

The story was that Jackie Lee, scion of an Asian supervillain crime cartel, has been forced by her parents to miss a summer vacation and instead spend the semester at Waterford College where she will take several classes including her "Guided Studies" program in villainy.  Waterford is a small, liberal arts college in New England, a long way from her home in California.

Jackie is introduced to many new people, including her dorm resident assistant Kirk and one of her roommates Indu.  Her villainy class is taught by the strict but helpful Professor Monique Richter.  Her fellow students are

  • Bedlam, a female telekinetic who appears unstable
  • Dark Elf, a feral supernatural creature and snobby girl who hates that she and Jackie have similar names
  • Bronze Behemoth, another student from her old university and obnoxious frat bro
  • Ronin, a handsome martial artist and gadgeteer, but also an unwelcome flirt
  • Face, a shy empath and frequent victim of bullying by Bronze Behemoth
The intro session had the students working their way through an obstacle course (to teach Macy how skills and attribute checks work), tearing through barriers (to teach the damage rules), and sparring against each other (to teach combat).

By the end of the first session, Dark Matter was feeling a long way from home.  It didn't help that she discovered that she'd be sharing a quad dorm room with Bedlam, as well as Indu.  Professor Richter had warned her that if Indu or any other student found out about the secret behind the "Guided Studies" program, they would be killed.  But Bedlam doesn't seem to share Jackie's concerns for her roommate's well being.  Add to that antagonistic rivals, irritating suitors, and mysterious acquaintances, and Dark Matter is in for a very long summer...


Jackie's roommate Indu, illustration by Phil Cho on Deviantart

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I moved ages ago, but forgot to tell anyone

-
 I decided to get my own domain name: strangevistas.org and have been posting there for over a year.  When Adam at Barking Alien mentioned that he wanted me to start blogging again, I realized that he might not know, and that likely others didn't as well. So, now you do.  See you soon!
Read more

RPG Review: Far Trek

-
Image
So, as I mentioned recently, I've got a lot of sentimentality for Star Trek RPG's, and Star Trek in general.  Three actual honest-to-God licensed ones exist in history: FASA's, Last Unicorn Games, and Decipher's.  I own the first two and have heard mixed things about the third. But there are also a lot of non-licensed Star Trek RPG's out there, and recently I saw that one of them, Far Trek , was offering a hard copy for a couple of bucks on Lulu.  Never one to let a deal go by I picked it up and thought I'd give you, gentle readers, my thoughts. Far Trek is a light-hearted, even breezy take on the Star Trek universe, almost exclusively the original series.  There rules incorporate stats, skills, and talents.  There are four stats: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, with the stats ranging from about a -2 to a +2, reflecting their modifier on the die roll.  I actually like this mechanic, which I first encountered in True20.  It does...
Read more

Heroes Against Darkness review

-
Image
For my birthday I picked up a print copy of Heroes Against Darkness  by Justin Halliday .  Why, might you ask, would I spent hard currency on a book that is offered as a .pdf for free? First, I like real books.  I read them better, and can do so in places other than in front of a computer monitor. Second, it's worth it.  Beats me if Halliday makes any money off the sale or not, but I hope he did, because offering this game for free was a very generous gift to the gaming world. Heroes Against Darkness is worth owning. (At least if you are me.  Your mileage may vary.) Heroes Against Darkness  is, by its own admission, a "fantasy heartbreaker," which is the usually derogatory term used by someone's homegrown version of Dungeons & Dragons.  If I had to summarize HAD's genetic heritage, I'd call it an early edition of D&D done using Fourth Edition mechanics.  If that early edition had 11 character classes. HAD has the standard D...
Read more