Hey guys, I thought I'd share the play-testing of the Halt Evil Doer! game here. The players take control of one or more of the NPCs on the game board and proceed to play out a series of adventures that may or may not end up having elements incorporated.
The manuscript was only recently finished and the world completed for Superlink. We tested out the bugs with a '12 issue miniseries' which would take us across the setting.
Issue 1#
Against the Evil Invaders!
I decided to set up the players on something of a cake run as they begin the game seperately but knowing each other through reputation in the city of New Amsterdam. I immediately wanted to introduce the conspiracy angle that's a major part of the setting (the government is omnipresent and invasive in Heroic Earth stories). So I did a 'cutaway' to the villains where I essentially narrated the first part of the story by giving a few cryptic clues and mentioning Deathmask talking to NSA 'Special Affairs Chief' Peter Masterson.
GM's Notes: Deathmask is essentially the Heroic Earth version of the Red Skull in that he's a former WW2 German (he goes to great lengths to point out he was never a Nazi despite the fact he worked directly under Hitler) scientist. He came over to the United States after WW2 and is pretty much behind every conspiracy from UFOs to human testing of superpowers formulas on unwitting subjects. He honestly takes as much from the Cigarette Smoking Man as Red Skull.
The player characters get involved the old fashioned way by stopping a bank robbery. In this case, I wanted to preserve a Silver Age feel by presenting two rather silly villains in The Illusionist and the Teddy Bear. The Illusionist was a fairly typical stage magician with undefined powers like pulling Monty Python's rabbit from his hat or rainbow blasts from his stage gloves. The Teddy Bear on the other hand was just deranged and I gave him exploding bears plus a giant stuffed henchman.
The players successfully subdue the villains even as there's some amusing by-play as we get the idea the ridiculous 'theme villains' honestly believe their adopting such a harmless guise will help them in court if caught. I had more fun than I expected playing the two with the Illusionist playing at being a cultured gentleman despite being a common crook and Teddy Bear being genuinely deranged. I got the idea for their personalities from Sirrus and Achenar from Myst The players waited for the police in this game because crime-fighting is specifically not illegal in the world of Heroic Earth (so long as some guidelines are followed).
It was then the players were approached by police whom they immediately began to expect were 'unusual' in the fact that they were wielding Kirby-esque guns and weapons that they immediately turned on the players. Despite being tied up, the Illusionist and Teddy Bear snuck out during this time cartoon style because I couldn't bear (pun intended) to say that they were killed in the crossfire.
The players decided to exercise the better part of valor before eventually ambusing the police by dividing them up. After a few knocked rounds, they noticed the police 'fell apart' at the seems. They were corpses that had adopted an illusionary visage. As one of my player's stated to me "Our introduction to the world of Heroic Earth is They Live?" (a most underrated movie)
Black Wing, the team's resident Batman with Tony Stark level intellect, immediately brought the corpse back to headquarters for study where the others lived. I described it as an Avengers style mansion and put in probably more detail than was necessary. It was the home of their team in the Patriots though and they were Earth's greatest superheroes after all. Ironically, none of the players had chosen to play the heavy hitters of the team though. Instead playing the Iron Man meets Captain America-esque American Steel, Lady Midnight whom is a time lost French heroine, and Red Wing.
(As a note, the player of Red Wing chose to be the Robin-esque sidekick solely to complain about it and poke holes in the sidekick theory throughout the game. Many elements I'd later add to Red Wing's character)
With some handwavey science, its determined the corpses have all been embalmed except for a few that were recently dead and yet were animated by the possessing force of some psychic presence from another dimension. The process for inhabiting Earth's dead wasn't quite perfected yet though and Black Wing determines that the bodies are still not entirely linked to their inhabiting host.
The players then have the mansion attacked by a Dead Rising horde of the undead as they successfully manage to navigate the siege as they debate the ethics of slaughtering zombies vs. zombies created by aliens vs. aliens vs. regular humans. Determining it's alright to slaughter alien zombies, they maange to evacuate the mansion into the Black-Wing plane on the rooftop (thank you equipment). The players quickly discover the city is being overrun by the living dead even as they notice no one seems to be noticing.
The adventure is cut somewhat short as the players forego the clues I left to investigate the police stations of the city, funeral homes, water pumping stations, and cemetaries of the city to attack directly the city's television station. They made the leap of logic that the city's population must be brainwashed through television, probably because they got the They Live inspiration, and shutting it down is the key to stopping the Invaders. A good quip that I gave a power point for was here...
American Steel: Why aren't we brainwashed?
Black Wing: Well the unusual frequencies of our mind are naturally abhorent to the...
American Steel: Speak English Doc.
Black Wing: Madmen are immune. We put on costumes to fight crime.
The players successfully navigate the zombie-infested corridors in what is probably one of the most bizarre combinations of genres in time with Dawn of the Dead, The Matrix Lobby scene (except the players use superhero equipment instead of guns), and Office Space when American Steel stops battling to employ the worker to rise up against his oppressors. I had to laugh for about a minute when it became increasingly obviously the American icon was quoting communist rhetoric...with the addition of use your stapplers and TPS reports to slay the undead. Remember, you have nothing to lose but your chains!
Ultimately, the heroes ended up at the top floor where they confront the Alien Gateway and we find that it leads to the Annihilation Zone. The psychics are Djinn Weaponsmasters whom wish to escape their hellish imprisonment in this dimension and claim they have a deal with the United States to seal off the city and effectively consign it to the enemy. My players continued to undermine the iconic nature of their characters all throughout this fight...
Black Wing: The United States would never give up its greatest city to the hosts of the undead!
American Steel: It voted Blue last election.
Black Wing: Aren't you supposed to be some kind of jingoistic national icon?
American Steel: I'm the embodiment of America's spirit, cynicism comes with the territory.
Sensing the night was in no way going to be serious, I decided to end the game on a Ghostbusters homage with the Djinn Weaponmasters on the other side of the dimensional portal using their 'combined psychic might' to summon a "Beast from the Primordial Depths of your past that shall wear the body of your god incarnate." All the money in New Amsterdam then began to flow together as it formed into a gigantic cash monster that started stomping towards them.
American Steel: Is it too early to begin worrying about how the entire city is going to go to Hell if that thing collapses in the middle of downtown?
Lady Midnight: Surely the people will be honest enough to respect that the money is not thiers.
American Steel: ....uh huh. Black Wing, how long til you can rig a nuclear particle accelerator from this TV equipment here?
Black Wing: What? That's not even...
American Steel: We need to cross the streams ray.
Black Wing: Five minutes.
Needless to say they successfully managed to destroy the Djinn gateway to their dimension with only seconds before the Bank'One Cash Man arrived to crush them all. That of course caused all the zombies to dissolve with some hand-wavey logic and the player characters epilogue spent the rest of the week trying to fix the city's economy. The government also had to do a lot of explaining about why the city was cut off from the outside world by the military BEFORE the infestation of zombies appeared but no one knew.
At the end, I revealed via cutaway that it was Deathmask's plan that the Djinn find the first city they invade to be well guarded. He nevertheless traded it for a device that will become more important in the future.
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Saving the world, one d20 roll at a time
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