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.

Longshot Low-Down #1

from this page where you can learn all about molecular geometry

I've started running a Longshot City megacampaign over on discord. That is, I'm running a big complicated sandbox with lots of evil schemes progressing at the same time, with three separate superteams all trying to sort through the mess in parallel. So I'm running three games per week for groups who aren't in direct contact with each other. We're 5 sessions in.

I'm also running a solo play-by-post game for my fried Cade Crites (you can and should check out their itch page here, they do good work and you may have seen some of it) who is playing as a local investigative journalist for the community radio station 109.5 The Caltrop. They're only in direct contact with one of the teams so far, but I fully expect that to change sooner rather than later. 

The part that's cool for you the reader is they're planning on writing news updates in character semi-regularly, and they agreed to let me post them here! Realistically, this is the only way you were going to get any kind of play reports out of this—between the game schedule I've set up for myself, and the fact that I'm turning this adventure into a book at the same time, means there's no way on this wet rock in space that I was going to make time to keep up with play reports too. 

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

Now, things are always a little unpredictable here in Longshot City, but one of the topics I'm covering today is certainly in a league of its own. Experiments turning people into human-sized bugs, murders in the harbor district causing panic, and a daring heist in the middle of our art museum— today's episode will shed some light on these recent events.

A missing persons case led to the shocking discovery of known scientist, Dr. Trisha Nano at Krieger U, allegedly having conducted experiments on citizens. These experiments were disguised as a sleep study, and the one known and confirmed victim so far had gone through a type of metamorphosis to become a man-sized mantis posing as a human. 

After some exploration upon this discovery, cocoons were found in the sewers containing four people that had gone missing over the last few weeks. Upon opening these cocoons, the missing persons were found having various stages of chemical burns from the fluid inside. Two of the victims are currently receiving treatment under quarantine at Breckenridge General Hospital.

I would advise caution around sewer entrances for safety. A team of new heroes, the Legion of the Inhabited, is currently working to find and stop Nano's efforts.

In a separate incident, machine gun fire was heard at the Harborview Café in the harbor district, causing panic among the patrons. Investigations into the cause are underway, though two bodies were found at Pier 13-B. Possibly related to this, an unknown mid-sized barge had docked at the pier earlier that day. I will keep you updated as events develop.

Some of you may have seen social media posts recently about a heist at the art museum. A mask was stolen from the traveling Mesoamerican exhibit, and the presumed suspect is Jack Towers, a.k.a. Rocketman. There were four superpowered primates causing chaos as a distraction for the theft, mauling one of the museum's security guards to death before all four primates were killed by two new metahumans that promptly left the scene. The reason for the theft is still unknown, though investigations are taking place.

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@protonmail.com. 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.

Cosmic Trash Island

pdf available now

In 2021 I started running a homebrew setting for Troika! called the Junksphere with no intention of ever trying to publish it. It's a small planetoid formed of space junk with a core made up of wrecked golden barges (spaceships to those unfamiliar with Troika!). Everything and everyone that ends up there is broken, unwanted and discarded.

In 2022 I realized I needed to get it out there but I had misplaced my campaign notebook in a move and couldn't find it.

In 2024 I gave up on waiting for it to turn up and rewrote it from memory. My friend Robin, who played in most of the sessions I ran at that point, showed me a zine he'd written and illustrated (this one) and I realized he'd be great at drawing piles of random garbage, so I hit him up for the art.

In 2025 I finally got around to setting up an itch storefront so I can sell the damn thing. I'm working on getting it printed too, but I wanted to get the pdf out there right away.

beelzebub is a good boy