Worlds in Peril: Issue #1

Recently I ran a short game of Worlds in Peril for my local group. It was pretty fun, even if we were limited to 2 hour sessions. Here is an abbreviated example of the gameplay for the four sessions of the first issue.

Session 1: Character Creation

First we decided on the rough nature of the world the characters lived in. In an earlier vote on what to play, The Sprawl lost out to Worlds in Peril, so to make it up to the player who voted for it, we set the game in a cyberpunk near-future world.

The time: 2025. The place: the City.

The players quickly outlined their characters and then I got down to helping them through character creation.

Grace decided to make a pure telekinetic, no telepathy or anything else. Calling her Red Tempest, she decided that the heroine was the child and "successor" to a super villainess called the Tempest. The Tempest experimented on her as child granting her super powers through blood transfusions. Now she is hunted by a secret government agency (L.O.T.U.S.) who wants her secret. Her mother was banished from the city 4 years ago.

David created the Gravedigger, a hero back from dead. This ghoulish figure enacts vengeance on criminals so they can't escape justice in the afterlife. We also worked out that before he died (20 years ago), he and the Tempest were lovers. Red Tempest is his daughter, though only he knows that.

Karen took a bit longer to finished her character. Chameleon, a freak of nature from another city, can shapeshift into almost anything. With a vice of falling into and out of love, she has left a menagerie of ex's behind her. We also establish she has one true friend, Josh, who she hasn't slept with.

As the players finish their characters, I whip up some villains. I jot down a small gang (size 2) of minions: six burly men with picks, shovels and pistols. They are being led by an undead super villainess named Banshee. I put down some powers: turn intangible and chilling touch.

Eager to get started and with only a half hour to play, I drop the heroes in the subway system. Tina (a subway mechanic and roommate of Red Tempest) had put them on the trail of some mysterious noises and people in a section of the tunnels.

They hear someone pulling aside stone up ahead. After a quick reconnaissance by Chameleon, Gravedigger charges forward. He rolls Take down and easily bests the minions while Red Tempest yanks their weapons from their hands. Then the rotten superhero pushes Banshee through the gap her men uncovered.

As they battle in an abandoned lab, the fight begins to drag on. Banshee escapes a telekinetic grapple by turning into a mist. Gravedigger gets his eyes frozen shut while Chameleon messes with the lab equipment. Red Tempest seals Banshee in a tube but after several failed rolls, Banshee blasts her way out with a sonic scream. In the end Chameleon frees the lone test subject in one of the tubes and threatens to kill him unless the villain surrenders. Banshee flees instead.

Session 2: World Creation, Investigation and Downtime

With a week to prepare, I set to work on a set of questions about the world the heroes live in. Where did they work? Who were their friends? What are their surroundings like? I also worked on rough outlines for several villains including agents of L.O.T.U.S. and a dangerous ex-lover of Chameleon.

My crude rendering of the City.

We picked up right after they defeated Banshee. Gravedigger recognizes the man they pulled from the tube in the lab as the Herald, a henchman of the Eater. The Eater was a living singularity that plagued the city decades ago. The Herald himself hasn't been seen for 14 years.

Unfortunately the Herald, cowed by the presence of so many heroes, doesn't have many answers to give. He was captured and experimented on by scientists. They never told him anything. He still thinks it is 2011.

Red Tempest pushes her powers and by vibrating her surroundings finds a secret compartment. She also gets a migraine. Inside they find transmission equipment stamped with the L.O.T.U.S. logo. Red Tempest seems worried but refuses to talk about it. When they turn the transmitter on, Chameleon is surprised to find her ex-boyfriend (and would be crime lord) Donny on the line. Donny invites her to the docks but she refuses knowing of his criminal activities. He claims to be organizing fellow freaks.

The heroes split up. Gravedigger takes the Herald to his secret cemetery lair in the middle of Steelside (the neighborhood they defend). He throws him in a cell and then looks for his friend and sole human contact Jack.

Red Tempest meanwhile get some rest and goes to her job (Fit in) as an internet blogger employed by the Tattler. She gets an email from her editor Sasha Sivinski to cover a protest by the freaks at the park. She does so hoping that her headache subsides. When she arrives, she notices some fires in the distance. She decides to investigate.

While Gravedigger tries to fit in by talking with the child there is a crash from the prison. Gravedigger finds a smoldering hole where Herald,who can now turn into a blazing inferno, has escaped.

Chameleon spends the day Investigating L.O.T.U.S. After striking out on her own, she talks to her friend Josh and gets him to check a possible connection between Prospera Industries and L.O.T.U.S.. He gets back to her later in the day. Nervously he relays that they've been sending mysterious deliveries of high-tech equipment starting 6 months ago. Someone on the board of directors authorized the shipments.

Chameleon hears a nearby commotion on her way to work that afternoon. As she arrives she finds the rest of the team in combat with a burning man.

Chameleon envelopes the Herald as a fire proof sheet (Take down) and puts him out (negating his advantage of a flame barrier). Meanwhile Gravedigger seals everyone in a life ward so the Herald can't escape. Red Tempest helps contain the fire and then helps with subduing the burning man.

As Gravedigger drags the Herald (who has no idea how he did that) back to his private prison, Chameleon flies after Red Tempest to ask about L.O.T.U.S. Red Tempest flies away leaving Chameleon in the dust.

Session 3: Investigating

Compiling the notes from the previous two sessions took some time. By this point we had a fairly complicated relationship map and I still wasn't sure who the bad guy was. I came up with several options and decided to let the specifics come out in play.

We pick up the day after the Herald's defeat. Red Tempest gets an assignment to cover her friend the Mayor's speech at City Hall. The Mayor hopes to rebuild "the Scar", wreckage left over from the Tempest's battles. It will mean relocating the freaks squatting there. I had a concept for an attack on the mayor if she missed her Fit in roll. But that was one of the few dice rolls that worked out for her.

Chameleon meanwhile does some work at the tattoo parlor with plans to meet Red Tempest after her meeting with the Mayor. She still hopes to learn about L.O.T.U.S. While at work, she talks to a freak named Rainbow Jack. The color changing mutant is worried about a friend of his who is missing. After he leaves she sees him get tranquilized and thrown into a van by a group of men in silver sunglasses and dark suits.

They try to grab her too but she escapes. But before she disappears into an alley they wing her with an electrical blast from one of their guns. Chameleon collapses in alley, safe, at least from them.

Gravedigger meanwhile maps what he knows of the underground tunnels and discovers a couple likely locations for more L.O.T.U.S. bases. He also becomes obsessed with Banshee. When his research into her comes up empty, he tries another tactic. Working off of Chameleon's findings, he stakes out Prospera Industries. After hours he grabs Dr. Vulmar, their chief supers researcher. From him, he learns that the scientist is investigating the source of supers powers. In fact he had a sample from Banshee. It was worthless, as she gets her powers from a non-genetic source, much like the Gravedigger. Vulmar does cough up contact info on the person they hired to get the sample: Agent 00111.

Red Tempest begins to worry when Chameleon misses her meeting. She does some research and learns of the attack by L.O.T.U.S. A cyborg journalist captured the incident on video. She visits him and gets a first person account. Chameleon comes to and finds Red Tempest. They discuss the incident.

The two women arrive at the cemetery lair as Gravedigger calls Agent 00111, hoping to hire him to catch Banshee for him. Red Tempest helps out by supplying the million dollar down payment (she has a trust fund).

That dealt with the team heads to docks where Donny is lurking and another L.O.T.U.S. base might be found. They find Donny and a mysterious individual putting freaks in shipping containers in a warehouse. Then L.O.T.U.S. agents arrive with another freak.

Red Tempest acts impulsively and drops a warehouse on them, crushing the agents. As Donny's goons fill the Gravedigger full of bullets, Red Tempest begins to whirl debris around and around, slicing everything to ribbons.

Gravedigger nearly decapitates Donny with his shovel while Chameleon tries to impersonate the stranger. The stranger, a freak known as Iteration X, emerges behind her (after she blew her Influence roll to get the goons to flee) and replicates her powers.

Gravedigger drags off Donny to finish him off. Chameleon slices Iteration X mostly in half by turning into a giant saw blade. It barely slows him down. It seems he also possess's Donny's regenerative powers. He then tries to grab Red Tempest. She chooses to flee straight up, leaving Chameleon alone.

As Gravedigger beats up Donny and his men, he hears Chameleon call for help. He grumbles and lets the thug escape. By the time he arrives however the others have fled. Gravedigger melts X's face off and the regenerating shapeshifter lops off his arm in retaliation. As Gravedigger arms himself with his own arm, Chameleon turns her arm into a heat seeking missile and blasts X.

X, bloody, burnt and angry, gets back up. Elsewhere Red Tempest spots the fleeing Donny and traps him in a dumpster. She drags him back to the others to finish X.

Then we have to stop for two weeks.

Session 4: Conclusion

Our final session was short. I already knew how things would end, other than the specifics of the battle. I wanted to leave the final session on a bit of cliffhanger but still resolve the current arc.

We join our heroes as they regroup to defeat Iteration X. Gravedigger smacks X around with his detached arm, causing a befuddled X to wildly claw into an exposed power cable. As the freak gets shocked, power goes down for this side of the city (resolving a burnt bond).

Chameleon spends her actions freeing the captured freaks from shipping containers. She blows some rolls to rally them to her cause and gets spun around and exhausted for her efforts.

Red Tempest arrives and telekinetically lifts Donny's goons guns from the rubble. They form a circle around X and fire. Following some more missed rolls, X uses a freak-based magnetic ability to crush the guns and extract the bullets from his battered body.

Gravedigger decides to rot the floor from under X, causing both of them to spill into the level below. Gravedigger finds his leg impaled on a sharp bit of wood while X takes some rebar to the chest.

Then Red Tempest drops the L.O.T.U.S. truck on top of him. With six conditions, he is defeated.

After interrogating him, they learn he was hired by Prospera Industries via Dr. Vulmar. L.O.T.U.S. was allied with them. The plan was to feed X powers so he could take on the Tempest. She is coming back.

Red Tempest suffers a flashback of the experiment where she gained her powers. We see her as a young girl getting a blood transfusion from her mother. This allows her to use the move Painful Catharsis.

We then have another cut scene, jumping to the Board of Directors at Prospera. Dr. Vulmar gives them the bad news about Iteration X. A new plan is formed: bring in AEGIS, the government's team for dealing with supers. This will mean a hunt for all super-powered beings though.

As a final note, Agent 00111 drops off Banshee to Gravedigger in exchange for his payment.

And that's it. Thanks for reading!