Breakout

 Continuing the NSC mini-campaign.

EPISODE 2: BREAKOUT

CAST

Busy, a 13 year old child and the only friend of Mongo the megaraptor.

Paragon the Laser Swordfighter from another planet, who is renting a room from Busy's oblivious parents.

After the team's other members stopped a handful of super-apes from hurting too many innocent bystanders at the art museum, they tracked a baboon with laser eyes back to its origin point: a hidden lab complex deep in the wetland preserve.

Busy and Paragon rode to the lab on Mongo’s back and scouted out the complex from the safety of the treeline. The whole area was surrounded by a 12” fence capped with razorwire. The tallest structure was a guard tower crewed by two security guards equipped with AR-15 rifles and a radio. The next tallest looked similar to a factory or warehouse from the outside, followed by a motorpool building with four wide bay doors, and finally an L-shaped one-story building like the ones in strip malls.

They both agreed that they should try to sneak in rather than going in hot, but with no clear plan on how to do that, Paragon boldly approached the guard tower trying to knock it down with a telekinetic blast, but was immediately spotted and shot. Shrugging off the injury for now, he attempted a telekinetically assisted leap to the guard platform, but was shot again in midair and ended up clinging to structural beams halfway up the tower.

Meanwhile, Busy and Mongo were circling the complex to smash through both the fence and the west wall of the factory building to find themselves in some sort of testing lab with gym equipment and target dummies. A thick glass wall separated them from a hallway running the width of the building. A door swung open across the way and more armed guards started streaming out, so Mongo smashed his way through the glass wall and bit one of the guards in half at the waist as he fired ineffectually into the ceiling. Mongo then tail-whipped another guard that was moving to flank him.

Outside, Paragon got shot again. Climbing out of the guards’ arc of fire, he took a second to get his second wind, then swung up onto the platform and cut one of the guards down with his laser sword, then telekinetically threw the other off the tower to his death. Alone at the top of the tower, Paragon watched the farthest bay door open and a giant robot walk out with thunderous pneumatic steps—Artillery MK I.

Artillery Illustration by Boson Au

Thinking quickly, Paragon leapt down while half-dragging and half-swinging his laser sword behind him to cut down the tower while also slowing his descent to avoid injury. With a final slice to a load-bearing steel beam, he brought the tower down on Artillery’s processing unit. The broken robot collapsed, smoking and sparking, unfired crew-served weapons sticking up at awkward angles.

In the testing lab hallway, Mongo killed another armed guard and ran back out the hole he’d created in the wall when he entered, employing a stick and move strategy. The guards followed. He ran across the complex under fire and Paragon joined Busy on his back before they turned to charge past the guards and smash through the east wall of the warehouse to find rows upon rows of stacked cages, each containing a super-powered primate and equipped with a device to suppress the animal’s power.

The heroes immediately set to work freeing the primates, slicing through cages and ripping off doors. The newly freed test subjects were smashing their way out of the warehouse and into the swamp as the guards caught up with the team, but Paragon telekinetically threw a mandrill with ice-breath at them, turning one of them into an ice sculpture. The two remaining guards decided they’d had enough and got the fuck out of there.

Having dealt with all immediate threats, Busy and Mongo went to investigate the L shaped building while Paragon checked out the unexplored office in the warehouse. There was a nameplate on the office door: Dr. Sarah Tonin. And on the second line: Director of Operations. The desk was locked, but not laser-sword proof, so Paragon had no trouble finding her research notes. Apparently an experimental drug called FantoMax III had been injected into the subjects as embryos. Every subject that survived gained a seemingly random superpower, which was then carefully measured over time.

Busy and Mongo found themselves in an embryonic lab, where they grabbed a gorilla embryo and a tray full of FantoMax samples, one of which Busy slipped into his own pocket for later experimentation. An interior door was labelled “Growth Acceleration,” and Busy went in. A dizzying mess of cables fed into a 10’ wide pod at the center of the room, shaped something like an upside down pinecone or beehive. With no hesitation whatsoever, he stepped into the pod and had Paragon activate it from a terminal at the other side of the room. A few seconds later, a 23 year old Busy stepped out, still wearing clothes that he'd suddenly outgrown. With no idea how they’d explain this (or the caged gorilla they were bringing home with them) to Busy’s parents, they grabbed Sarah Tonin’s computer and left.

THE END FOR NOW. 

Barrel Of Monkeys

The Longshot City campaign I'd been posting about until I fell off a couple months ago is still going, but I had to step back and cut it down to one session per week instead of the three I'd been running. The accumulated campaign lore that I haven't posted anything about here has gotten to be way too much to give anything proper context.

HOWEVER. I have recently started running a separate mini-campaign every other week on the New Save Collective server, and I've been writing session reports for it. Here's the first one:

EPISODE 1: BARREL OF MONKEYS

CAST:

Jebediah the Powersuit. Jeb built himself a suit of armor that flies and shoots rockets in his basement workshop. 

Gideon the 45th the Brute Cannon. Gideon tampered with his own DNA to give him increased strength, durability, and the ability to produce kinetic blasts. This also happened in Jebediah's basement.

(They haven't named their team yet but a theme is clearly emerging)

The Longshot City Art Museum. Opening day of a traveling exhibition called "Occult Americana." Our heroes are there simply because that sort of thing is cool. Little did they know they wouldn't have time to check out the installation.

Shortly after they arrived, a group of six workers in matching overalls pushed through the crowd to deliver a comically oversized wooden barrel in front of the reception desk and left. Gideon immediately walked up to the barrel and examined it. When he realized no one else seemed to have noticed the barrel, he tried knocking on it. Something inside knocked back.

The barrel exploded in gideon's face as a speedster gorilla, a baboon with heat vision, and stretchy capuchin leapt out.

First the capuchin reached up and pulled himself onto the top of a massive glass tornado sculpture made up of thousands of tiny shards of mirrored glass. It looked like it was going to fall onto a crowd of civilians, but Jebediah flew over in time and used the strength granted by his suit to right it.

Meanwhile a brawl was breaking out between Gideon and the gorilla, and Gideon was not doing well.

At this point the baboon was charging up for a blast of heat vision aimed at a pair of little girls. A man jumped in front of them to shield them from the blast. He surely would have been doomed if Jebediah hadn't intercepted the heat vision blast with a rocket-propelled grenade, throwing the monkey tumbling over the reception desk.

Having pummeled Gideon nearly to death, the gorilla caught sight of an extensive display of medieval weaponry up on the second floor interior balcony, particularly a 17th century halberd, and went running up the stairs for it. Jebediah managed to hit him with a well-timed energy blast, knocking the ape off the stairs. Then the gorilla tried to escape, but jebediah knocked him out with a an armored flying punch to the jaw.

All this happened within one in-game minute of the barrel exploding. The crowd was finally starting to thin out at this point, but the man and two girls were unmoving, frozen in place by the unfolding trauma.

The unmistakeable sound of shattering glass rang out from the direction of the traveling exhibit accompanied by what sounded like a miniature jet engine.

Jebediah and the baboon got into an energy blast duel, with both attacks meeting in the middle like a reverse tug of war. Jebediah gained the upper hand and tackled the monkey, beating on him while mounted on his chest like an MMA fighter, but the beast caught Jebediah by surprise with an energy blast that sent our hero flying.

The baboon got away while Gideon was getting his second wind, preparing to rejoin the fray. Meanwhile the capuchin had climbed up into the orrery hanging well above the reception hall, and was causing havok up there. A blue-green stone sphere, larger than a man and depicting Uranus, fell. It was positioned directly above the man and what the players were by now assuming must be his daughters. Gideon shot it out of the air with a massive blast of kinetic force before it could hurt them.

Another minute passed. Our heroes could now hear the sound of gunfire, at least two different calibers, from the direction of the Occult Americana exhibition, accompanied by the same jet engine sound as before.

Curious, our heroes poked their heads into the traveling exhibit hall. They saw one security guard bleeding but alive on the ground and another crouched down and shooting upward at Rocketman, a notorious art thief and prominent socialite. He was wielding a gold-plated L
uger in one hand and carrying his prize, a hand mirror with a very particular history, in the other.

Rocketman Illustration by JeCorey Holder

Gideon and Jebediah gave each other a look, instantly agreeing without words that this guy looks fucking cool and probably deserves the mirror. They simply let him get away.

They did manage to kill the stretchy capuchin, but not before it pulled down a massive bronze relief directly onto the head of the man who'd been protecting his daughters.

As the police sirens started to get closer, our heroes made their escape in jebediah's geo metro. When they got to their hideout, the girls popped out of their hiding place in the back seat and yelled "surprise!" so it looks like the team has a pair of adopted daughters now.

THE END FOR NOW

Return to Leviathan Island

In which the Bloody Monkeys continue to fuck around and some of them find out.

Gonna be lots of flashbacks today. This campaign’s been going since August and I only just started writing play reports for it.

Cast:
Leo Highwind—a FantoMax-powered paragon with a signature spear.

Vardené Pavardené—a biohacked dracula with a science background.

Daisy Leper—a super-strong zombie cheerleader who vomits death and chaos.

Beaver Babe—born with a mutation that makes her more at home in the water than on dry land.

The gang started the session aboard Leo’s hidden sanctum, an armored zeppelin above the clouds, debating their next move.

Vardené had spent the past week synthesizing a few doses of FantoMax for Leo. This is the superserum Dr. Sarah Tonin has been refining. It was a particularly violent encounter with her super-powered primates that originally inspired the Bloody Monkeys’ team name. Judging from Leo, who escaped Tonin’s new lab (the old one was torched by the Legion of the Inhabited many Mondays ago) she’s made a lot of progress since then.

The vampire also had time to analyze the two blood samples that had been delivered to him by the Legion of the Inhabited and the Murder Patrol. The Legion’s sample, labelled plague, was infected with Dr. Hanna Risto’s Mayfly Virus. The Murder Patrol’s sample came from their own Zero Fighter, an irradiated Japanese supersoldier with enhanced healing abilities. When the Patrol heard there was a frat house infected with the Mayfly Virus (because the Legion brought it there), Zero Fighter decided to infiltrate the house and lick everyone he could find. Vardené’s analysis revealed that Zero’s plan to contract the disease so that his immune system would defeat it succeeded, but he hasn’t been able to isolate and synthesize a cure from it yet.

Given that the Bloody Monkeys now had a new lead on a cure for the Mayfly Virus, and that Hanna Risto was now protected by magic shadow armor (see last play report), they chose to leave bad enough alone at PenalCorp Island for now. I can’t say I blame them.

Instead, they decided to follow a different lead. The relevant entry on hero.net (a secure forum set up and maintained by Singularity and Tara Byte) reads:

Leviathan Island—Dr. Rona Shanti
This is the project the murder patrol first encountered. They were kidnapping homeless people and releasing them on an island full of monsters while billionaires gambled on their survival.
Goal: Genetically engineer monstrous species and elevate individual specimen to kaiju status. Primary Laboratory: Leviathan Island (-23°, 8°)

So, partly because PenalCorp Island had become too dangerous, they chose to fly across the Atlantic Ocean to investigate an island full of monsters.

Normally this would have taken weeks, but Leo Highwind is very strong and can fly very fast so he got out and pushed. 

They were in visual range of Leviathan Island by sunset the next day, when the airship was attacked by six large humanoid bat creatures, which fled after the heroes killed two of them. After a quick aerial survey of the island from above the clouds, they decided to launch an all-out assault on the what appeared to be some kind of control tower. 

Vardené transformed into his alternate form, a foot-long centipede with paralytic venom, and crawled into one of Leo’s coat pockets. Then Leo slung his spear across his back and picked up Beaver Babe and Daisy Leper, one in each arm, and flew down to the roof. He smashed through the roof into a control room packed with terminals and terrified operators dressed in identical lab coats. Beaver Babe grabbed the technician who failed to run away quickly enough and asked her where to find Rona Shanti. The tech said Shanti’s office was on the first floor, and B.B. let her go. 

Leo decided to skip the stairs and start smashing through floors until reaching ground level. Beaver and Daisy started out following him, but stopped at the armory, where they got into a fight with three heavily armed and armored guards. On the ground floor, Leo was confronted by a group of five more of the goons, so he flung Vardené at one. Vardené tried to shift back to his humanoid form in midair, hoping to drain one of the thugs of blood, but took several bullets instead and scampered off having reverted to millipede form.

Beaver took one of the guards out with a fire axe she’d found on the airship, and Daisy killed another with her projectile vomit. The better organized squad on the ground floor managed to give Leo significantly more trouble. He managed to skewer one of them and badly injure another before passing out.

Having donned a set of body armor, Beaver Babe jumped down the hole, got shot, got shot again, tried to run away, and got shot in the back. When she went down her body broke apart; she’d been a robot planted for unknown reasons. Meanwhile the real Beaver Babe woke up hungover on the airship under a pile of empty beer cans, wondering where the fuck everyone was.

Daisy Leper found a grenade bandolier, pulled the pin on one of the grenades, and dropped it from the armory on the fourth floor all the way down to the first floor, where it predictably killed all the guards but through a very lucky dice roll did not also kill Leo. Daisy then used what she had available in the armory vault to set up a machine gun nest and hunker down until next session.

Risto's Ascension

 IF YOU ARE PLAYING IN EITHER MY MONDAY OR TUESDAY GROUP THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS PLEASE GO AWAY THANK YOU

Cast:

Strange Angel (powersuit made of nightmares and shadows)

John Tempest (badass supersoldier with a big sword and a gravelly voice)

Megalodon (has Animal Man or Vixen style powers but kinda decided to just be Killer Croc instead)

Replacement Cast:

Beaver Babe (real fuckin good at swimming basically, has a big tail like Squirrel Girl)

Leo Highwind (basically like superman without the laser eyes but with a big fuckin spear)

Sooooooo it’s been awhile since I posted anything about the Longshot City campaign I’ve been running. It's still going strong, I’ve just been stupid busy.

This campaign has three weekly groups. There was a three week gap where everyone had holiday stuff happening, but other than that it’s mostly been real time, as in one week passes in the game when one week passes in meatspace.

This week, my Wednesday group (the Bloody Monkeys—don’t blame me, I’m not naming my players’ teams for them) decided to go back to PenalCorp Island and acquire some experimental cultures in Hanna Risto’s safe.

I should explain Hanna Risto. There are several mad science plots (as in schemes not as in storyarcs, the story is whatever the players do) unfolding at the same time. The PCs worked out awhile ago that these experiments were all being conducted by clones of Dr. Sarah Tonin, whose names are all anagrams of hers. Hanna Risto was, as the warden of PenalCorp, using prisoners as test subjects in researching a bioweapon called the Mayfly Virus.

Last time the Bloody Monkeys met, they raided PenalCorp Island and kidnapped Hanna Risto. They interrogated her this session, and learned that she was working on a cure for the Mayfly Virus, called the Dragonfly Bacterium. So they decided to go back and retrieve the cultures she’d been working on from the refrigerated safe in her office. Crucially, they also decided to take Risto with them, carried by Strange Angel in a sort of womb formed by Angel’s shapeshifting armor.

When they got to the island, the death robot Artillery MK 5 (every time it dies it rebuilds itself and comes back stronger) was waiting for them on the roof of the prison itself. Megalodon managed to get into the prison and eventually the warden’s office. Artillery managed to kill both Strange Angel and John Tempest.

When Strange Angel died, her armor dissipated, releasing Hanna Risto. Risto immediately put on the necklace that had previously given Strange Angel her powers, and became a sort of nightmare Iron Man, who then attacked and K.O.’d Megalodon (whose result on the K.O. table was “resolve a familial conflict” so that should be weird).

Beaver Babe and Leo Highwind just sort of randomly showed up because that’s how replacement characters work sometimes, managed to kill Artillery MK 5, and retrieved a comatose Megalodon while the newly empowered Hanna Risto escaped into the clouds.

So next week I need to run some sort of familial conflict coma dream, and also Hanna Risto has Strange Angel’s powers now. 

Bombs Bursting In Air (Mothership Month 2025)

Mothership Month 2025 is almost over and I’m just posting about it now because I am very smart and good at this.

MM25 is a group crowdfunding event set up by Sean McCoy of Tuesday Knight Games largely to help share some of their success with third party publishers which is pretty fuckin cool of him.

I’m mostly done with the second draft of Bombs Bursting in Air, with editing by Jarrett Crader of Space Penguin Ink and illustrations by Boson Au.

Like all MM25 projects, BBiA takes place on the critically damaged but inhabited space station Prospero’s Dream. In this case it was written to take place before any of the events described in A Pound of Flesh.

The player crew has been hired to deliver a surgical bed to an oxygen shelter in a deoxygenated neighborhood in the damaged region of the station known as the Choke. By the end of the first session they’re accused of the crime of the century, and are left to prove their own innocence by finding the culprits themselves.

Back it! Or don’t, I’m not your boss. One thing the Backerkit page doesn’t mention is that at the end of the campaign when all the backers are tallied and being confirmed, you’ll have the option to upgrade your pledge with an add-on. Specifically, the Survivors of the Core Wars character cards I wrote for MM24. I used almost half of these characters in the adventure, so you’ll have a way to use them right away.

I've also been playing as the president of the Teamsters Local 32819L in the game Over/Under, which you may have heard of if you're on Bluesky. It's a massive wargame with political elements from the faction bosses' perspective and a sort of freeform larp from the perspective of more than a thousand denizens. Well I was playing until I got assassinated at the measurable peak of my political popularity. I'm planning on digging into the experience from my character's perspective here but I can't do that until it ends tomorrow because everything I know is actionable intelligence.

Masquerade

sam sorenson tagged me into stella condrey's mask game. i'm gonna cheat a little. this is a supervillain for longshot city or troika!, but the masks would all translate pretty effortlessly to a d20 based system.

aaron i choose you.

Masquerade

Skill:9 Stamina:18 Initiative:6 Armor:4

Bartleby Fontaine has enjoyed a successful 20-year career as a high society art dealer, but he wants something more. His personal collection consists mainly of masks, several of which have unique occult histories and abilities attached.

Fontaine occasionally makes an appearance in the celebrity gossip pages for rekindling his on-again off-again relationship with the notorious Jack Towers, a.k.a. Rocketman.


Special: Bartleby wears a cloak woven from the unformed nightmares of infants, where he keeps a selection of magical masks stashed. Changing masks on his turn still leaves him enough time to act as normal.

Funeral Mask of the Broken King 

The Mayan King Tlacatla of Pétocten who was buried in this jade mask held onto his kingdom through much of the Spanish holocaust by allying himself with a nearby settlement of English privateers. Eventually the English abandoned the colony and its nearby allies to the genocidal whims of the Spanish.

The wearer can cause everyone in earshot to obey a direct command or adopt a simple belief at the permanent cost of one skill point. Luck test to avoid.

Void Mask

Forged, stained and cursed by aristocratic french magician named Jacqueline Du Monde who was executed during the Great Terror.

Absorbs all ranged attacks. Sucks melee combatants into a pocket dimension that drops them back into reality 1d3 miles away.

Bronze Helm of the Gladiator

Infused with the spirit of its wearer, Brutalis, a captive enemy of Rome forced to fight against overwhelming odds who somehow never lost. He lived to retire and die an old man, and he insisted on being buried in his helm.

Imbues the wearer with 2 ranks in Superstrength and 3 ranks in Fast Healing.

Broken Mirror Veil

Infused with the spirit of a bride-to-be named Lily Tenbaugh (to be Lily Pond) who was murdered in her dressing room by the best man, one Richard Haupstein in a fit of jealous rage.

Allows the wearer to become invisible at the expense of one Luck Point per round (or Stamina for NPCs). 

Steamboat Willy Gas Mask

Thousands of these were made in Hawaii during World War Two and distributed to families with small children in the hope that the kids would practice putting them on while playing. A little boy named Bobby Stipend was wearing this one while playing on the beach when a piece of unexploded ordinance from the battle of Pearl Harbor detonated underfoot.

Causes its wearer to physically transform into a child until the mask is removed.

Motives

1. Add to mask collection
2. Petty revenge
3. Appease an impatient entity
4. The excitement of a good heist
5. Unrequited lust
6. Enjoy the company of bad friends

Longshot Low-Down #2

What follows is the second installment of the Longshot Low-Down, a local news radio show trying to keep track of events in Longshot City. (It's actually written by Cade Crites who is playing as an Ace Reporter):

Welcome to the Longshot Low-Down here at 109.5 FM the Caltrop and wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Arden Merle.

Today's broadcast features more chaos taking place in the harbor district, a series of unsettling discoveries regarding Trisha Nano, and a deadly fight between man and monster in the waters off the Atlantic South African coast.

With further investigation into Trisha Nano after the last broadcast, there are no records of Nano's existence, from birth to education to scientific pursuits. Nano has allegedly employed Cleaners, a company with no qualms against burning civilians alive, to aid in her apparent escape from the public eye. Her last known location was the city zoo, giving her a possible tie-in to the primates used as a distraction in the museum heist. Investigation into the superpowered primates is still ongoing.

The follow-up to the museum theft itself has yielded little in regards to finding and capturing the culprits. Jack Towers, a.k.a. Rocketman, has been lying low since the sightings of him fleeing the art museum, presumably at the nightclub he owns downtown. I will continue to provide reports as accurate information comes in.

 

Moving on to the harbor district, chaos has struck once again. An NQA truck was found bombed in a building in the harbor district. Witnesses claim a number of our city's unhoused citizens were within the building, which now bears a hole in the roof and the following ominous message graffitied on one of the walls: "ECHO IS COMING FOR YOU"

NQA Trucking is known to have been making large deliveries of lab equipment to a location deep in the wetland preserve. Investigations into this are underway.

Finally, in news from outside the city: a group going by "Murder Patrol" discovered a deadly human-versus-chimeric monsters spectacle at a wealthy resort on an island far off the Atlantic South African coast. Witnesses report the resort's clientele engaged in orgiastic debauchery while watching the people dying in these fights.

Murder Patrol sent in images regarding this, attached beneath this episode's transcript.

If anyone knows more about these events and is able to share anything—or if you have questions or topics you'd like covered on the next broadcast, contact me at lsclowdowntips@proton.mail. Thoughts and comments are welcome under the episode.

As always, transcripts for today's show can be found under "episode transcripts," wherever you get your podcasts, updated after each Saturday show. Till then, this has been Longshot Low-down and I hope to greet you all again soon.

Stay safe out there.