Angel Tears

A couple links first: some kind of opossum with bolts in his neck or something has launched a kickstarter for a Troika! supplement called Spectacle. It's a pastiche of cosmic superhero fiction with art reminiscent of Jack Kirby. It's basically an alternate setting for Longshot City, though I don't think it was written with that as an explicit goal. So if you're here it might be relevant to your interests.

Bolt-Neck Opossum is also launching a game jam on itch.io to get people writing material for Spectacle and Longshot City. I hope it gets weird fast.

Angel Tears
Skill: 9
Stamina: 28
Initiative: 7
Armor: 2
Damage as Dream Weapon (see special).

Larissa Malone was one of hundreds to be addicted to fantomin at Dr. Sarah Tonin’s juvenile hall, and one of dozens to suffer a fatal overdose after escaping the system and becoming homeless. She is, however, the only known victim to return to the land of the living. Her ghost appears as an almost luminescently pale figure wearing an inmate uniform from SanDyne Juvenile Hall, with bloody tears streaming down her face (the hallmark of a fantomin overdose).

Special:
Angel Tears returned from the other side with innate magical abilities. She can physically step through shadows like doorways and into the minds of others (as Power—Puppeteer). If she tries and fails to possess a target, her physical form re-manifests as she is thrown from their head. She can retrieve objects from nightmares that function normally in real life, but turn to dust when she stops focusing on them.

Motives:
1. To make someone pay.
2. To share a beautiful nightmare.
3. To resurrect her friend.
4. To satisfy curiosity.
5. To protect someone she cares about.
6. To convince the PCs to help her.

Dream Weapons:
1. Axe.
2. Crossbow.
3. Flamethrower (as Energy Blast—Heat).
4. Dynamite (as Explosive).
5. Shotgun.
6. Bear (as Large Beast).

Enterprise Justice Solutions #12

click me

(this is my current Longshot City campaign—that’s what the players named their team so don’t blame me)

This session’s crew:

The Greasy Devil—host to a superstrong shapeshifting symbiote

The Letter of the Law—wealthy masked vigilante who everyone hates

Deathgun—supersoldier from a dystopian future

Mr. Fox—superspy from a more distant future where humans are extinct

The session opened with the team entering a warehouse party near the docks, looking for dealers of a dangerous new street drug called fantomin. There was a large cage onstage next to the DJ, containing one of the superpowered chimpanzees they’d freed way back in session 2. The cage must have been grounded because this one had the ability to manipulate lightning, making for a pretty impressive light show. Everyone assumes Mr. Fox is simply a furry in a very expensive costume.

Letter immediately started roughing people up in the bathrooom (none of whom knew anything), while Fox and Devil sweet-talked their way backstage. They were close to getting a dealer’s number in the green room before they started radiating cop vibes and the other two DJs starting roasting them and high fiving each other.

Meanwhile Deathgun and Letter were having a dance-off, in which Letter of the Law embarrassed himself so thoroughly that someone got a photo and he became a meme. They didn’t notice the chimpanzee busting out of its cage until it was too late. One dead bystander and one dead ape later, they decided it was time to split and head back to their headquarters beneath the Militronics building (Letter of the Law’s drone A.I. research company). When they jumped in the van, the head of security’s voice came over the radio informing Letter that the entire building was locked down and no one could access the system.

When they got back they discovered that Singularity, the first true general A.I., had invaded and taken control of the building, activating all security doors and a variety of combat drones. After a brief standoff and negotiation, they allowed one of the corrupted drones to enter their lab to analyze the impossibly complex array of dozens of hard drives they’d found in one of Dr. Sarah Tonin’s labs (she maintains several, each run by one of her clones, apparently all doing Bad Things). 

Turns out she needed all that storage space to save a copy of her consciousness, or at least the version of her that ran the lab where EJS found it. It was in a sub-basement beneath a juvenile hall where Dr. Tonin was developing fantomin and studying its effects on the kids in her care. 

Now they have to plan a prison break. While negotiating with Singularity, they agreed to free his mother, the brilliant hacker Tara Byte, who is currently locked up on PenalCorp Island. The Letter of the Law is not at all pleased about this, but with his building locked down and all his employees held hostage he doesn’t have much choice but to go along with it.

Pepe Silvia

click to embiggen

It was starting to take half a session just for people to fill each other in on what they'd missed, so I suggested to my Longshot City players they start keeping a conspiracy board to keep track of the campaign via shared whiteboard. I love it. That's logos for all the PC characters on the left (it's a drop-in drop-out style campaign, so it's usually more like 3-5 characters at a time than all 9 at once. just whoever makes it that week). EJS stands for Enterprise Justice Solutions, which is their team name. They want to make a name for themselves, so Professor Fangs had business cards and tshirts all printed out and ready to go before their first mission.

This is 10 sessions in.

Longshot City NPC + Shameless Marketing

This past weekend I introduced a new npc to my ongoing campaign. She ambushed the pcs as they left their hideout and almost killed them all. They captured her in the end but she melted a hole in the floor and got away when they wrecked the van. They wrecked the van because the driver saw a ghost.

P.H.
Skill: 11
Stamina: 18
Initiative: 4
Armor: 2
Damage as Energy Blast (Chemical).

Priscilla Hamilton won 8 Olympic medals in gymnastics before retiring from competition and coaching the sport at Franklin College. She is a well-loved local celebrity who makes frequent public appearances.

Her younger brother was an innocent bystander who became collateral damage in a superpowered fight involving the PCs. When she went public with her hatred of the team, 
Dr. Sarah Tonin noticed and approached her with an offer she couldn't refuse.

Special
P.H. is outfitted with tech from Dr. Sarah Tonin including wrist-mounted acid jets (as Energy Blast—Chemical), acidic gas bombs (area, as Massive Blast—Chemical), a compact grapple gun with a lightweight nearly unbreakable line, polycarbon jacket and pants, gas mask/helmet with enhanced vision (infrared and telescopic) and hearing. She rides a bitchin’ motorcycle.

Motives
1. To get revenge.
2. To protect a loved one.
3. To work for hire.
4. To make a name for herself.
5. To pull off a string of heists.
6. To protect her employer.

In Other News
Space Penguin Ink is now selling this t-shirt I designed:

They also have a 13% off sale on all their zines and books going on. I worked on The Garden of Corda and the first three issues of Red Solstice.

Silent Titans is also on sale, so be sure to check that out if the regular price was too daunting.

Happy SPInk Day everybody!

Doug Kovacs (illo) and Stella Condrey (typography)

Today is the official launch of Space Penguin Ink LLC, a new publishing company headed by my friend Jarrett Crader a.k.a. jert. The first wave of products includes a hardcover book and four zines written to support five different games (two are for Mothership but one has stats for both Troika! and B/X), so there’s a fairly wide variety right out of the gate.

If you don’t know who Jarrett Crader is, he’s been working in RPGs as an editor for about a decade and a project manager for at least five or six years. He worked with me at Melsonia for years before moving on to Exalted Funeral, not to mention the dozens (hundreds?) of freelance projects. He handled project management on Dissident Whispers which pulled together 90+ people in less than two weeks (and has raised upwards of $70k for the National Bail Fund). 

With SPInk he’s also introduced the most creator friendly business model I’ve personally worked under or seen in the industry, offering royalty shares to the artists, graphic designers, and editors, not just the authors. And of course complete creative ownership and control. This kind of approach tends to encourage everyone to go the extra mile and end up producing a more inspired, polished, and just all around better product, so the audience wins too. 

I have development credit on one of the new releases, The Garden of Corda, written and illustrated by reluctantly rising star Cade Crites. They previously did layout on The Ruinous Palace of the Metegorgos. The Garden of Corda is a Troika adventure that takes place on the planet-sized heart of a long dead space giant, host to a dying biome. This is the one written for Troika! with B/X stats included in the back.

So yeah, this is a pretty exciting development all around. Check it out, and while you’re at it take a look at the Kickstarter for my superhero game Longshot City.

Longshot City is Live (and i am not dead)

I’m finally at the end of the last project I posted about back in 2019—Longshot City, a stand-alone superhero RPG built on the chassis of games like Troika! and Fighting Fantasy.

The Kickstarter is currently underway (funded in 20 minutes!). The box set contains everything I wanted for my own home game—paper minis, GM screen, custom dice, a sick patch for my vest, and plenty more with a box to put it all in.

That’s been the theme of this whole process. This isn’t the game I thought people would want (though I hope they do), it’s the game I wanted. I ran an open table playtest campaign for close to three years, trying out the different archetypes and NPCs, seeing what works best for me and rewriting powers as I went. At this point Jarrett Crader of Space Penguin Ink was still editing at Melsonia, and helped with early development. This game is fine-tuned to keep me grinning like an idiot at the table.

As anyone who’s tried to turn a binder full of houserules into a cohesive game knows, the hardest part is translating your work into something anyone can use. To that end I’ve gone back and forth on the wording with Jared Sinclair until my eyes bled. I also included advice on running the game including how to set up and run three different campaign structures, all of which can be used with any open-ended RPG. 

I also filled the role of art director for this book. In this case that mostly means two things; supervising Meredith Silver’s layout work and providing her with a style guide and any needed guidance, and hiring and assigning illustrations to artists.

This game is designed not to emulate any particular tone, but to embrace the variety and weirdness of the superhero genre, and it was important to me that the art reflect that. I hired three artists with wildly different styles: JeCorey Holder who I worked with on Academies of the Arcane, Evelyn Moreau who I’ve been wanting to work with for like a decade, and Boson Au who I’ve never worked with before and definitely will again. There were times when I was worried about tying it all together, but I honestly couldn’t be happier with the end result.

I recently did an interview about the game for Logar the Barbarian’s (of Wizards and Wobblies) new podcast, the Hobos Collective, that just got posted today.

I’m also set to do a Q&A on the RandomWorlds Discord server that will be posted in a bunch of places in a couple days. Links to appear when it happens. EDIT: yeah this happened like a week ago now here it is.

If you want to talk about Longshot City or Troika! or whatever really, the easiest place to find me online is Melsonia’s Discord server.

SuperTroika: Archetypes Delta

Just got back from GenCon. Had fun. Didn't get arrested.

INVENTOR-EXPLORER (doc savage, tom strong, forge, the doctor)

Possessions

-multitool

-signature weapon (+2)

Powers & Specialties

-4 science

-4 engineering

-1 athletics

-1 signature weapon fighting

ENERGY VAMPIRE (rogue, sauron)

Powers & Specialties

-4 absorb stamina

-4 absorb ability (4)

-1 hand to hand fighting

-1 athletics

BLAST CAPACITOR (havok)

Powers & Specialties

-4 absorb energy 

-4 energy blast (3)

-2 massive blast (6)

Special

-can store absorbed energy damage for up to an hour and add it to the damage produced by their next energy attack.

BRUTE CANNON (etrigan, darkseid)

Powers & Specialties

-4 energy blast (3)

-3 feats of strength

-3 absorb damage

ELEMENTAL (storm, human torch, swamp thing, post-transformation klaw, iceman)

Powers & Specialties

(pick one elementish theme and stick to it: weather or plants or fire or ice or magnetism or gravity etc.)

-3 energy shield (3) or elemental form (3)

-3 energy/elemental blast/strike (3)

-2 command element (5)

-2 flight (or suitable style of movement) (1)

MYSTIC WARRIOR (iron fist, archer ((valiant)), shang chi)

Possessions

-signature weapon (+2, no modern weapons) or magic tattoo (+2 to unarmed)

Powers & Specialties

-4 hand to hand fighting

-3 energy strike (3)

-3 athletics