I so try to keep up with this thread. I really do. Between playing one week, and GM'ing the next; running my local Union chapter; keeping up on my gang task force duties; and my regular job and my family....Well I had a great game yesterday!

In our Saturday Look! Up In The Sky! game, one of our players was sick, so we had a smaller than normal group. We started out by finishing up Chargen with creating our trainees. The Trainees were kids who have not yet reached their potential, so we created them on the 200 point Cosmic scale rather than the 400 point Unlimited scale. Cosmic level is about the level of Spiderman or Fantastic Four. Still, that's a bunch of teenagers with tremendous power!

There were three trainee PCs - Doctor Danger, a teenage Weird Science geek, whose powers came from Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde like potions; Mister Awesome, a Strange Path fellow who had super Charisma, spoke with and controlled mammals, fast flight, and other odds and ends; and Black Bolt, a super archer with a hero complex. They were on a run with The Visitor, who was a full member/teacher. The Visitor is invulnerable, and immune to most things. He was also, by choice, silent, and preferred to communicate with gestures.

On their training run, they came across a burning apartment building and The Visitor decided this would be a good training subject. The building was burning from the bottom up, so many folk were gathered on the roof. Doctor Danger drank a potion and flew off with Mr. Awesome to haul people off to safety. Black Bolt ran into the burning building up a fire ladder to the second floor. The Visitor, being invulnerable to fire, ran in through the hottest flames, burning its clothes off in the process, and revealing a smooth androgynous body.

The Visitor, Doctor Danger, and Mister Awesome rescued several people each. After rescuing one pretty young lady from her window, Doctor Danger learned she had left a roommate still inside, so he flew up to her window. hooked his feet into the balcony grate, and stretched into the smoke-filled room, walking on his hands through the apartment. He finally found her by touch in the bathroom, fresh out of the shower, unconscious on the floor.

Now Doc's vulnerability is women. He gets tongue-tied, awkward, and stupid around them. He pulled back violently when he touched her skin, then nerved himself up to wrap her in a towel and carry her out, blushing and trembling all the way. Since he had stretched into the apartment, he could not get lost in the black smoke, as he merely had to shrink to get out. Smart lad!

Mr. Awesome was being interviewed by the local TV station. He spoke at length of his heroic forays into the burning building to rescue people - he had chosen the best looking ladies first - And mentioned his companions in passing. He was a born ratings star.

The Visitor had just rescued an old man in a wheelchair, and had returned into the building - the TV cameras catching it with its back to the outside. Clearing out the second floor, he found Black Bolt collapsed on the floor, hunched over something. Picking the kid up, he found a baby underneath. Both were still alive, but overcome by the smoke. He found the mother dead in a nearby apartment, and took all three out to the waiting firemen and paramedics.

They returned to the HQ afterward, where The Visitor got a reaming out by Captain Steel, the head of the unit. The Visitor had lost control of the trainees, allowing them to do whatever they wished, with one of the trainees almost killed. "You know he has a hero complex, and you knew he was all offense and no defense! Yet you let him go into that burning building by himself!" The Visitor shrugged.

Afterwards he went into the team's locker room, where he met up with the other members: Enchantrix, a powerful witch; Sarge, a super soldier; and Blue Demon, a beautiful escapee from Hell. Banter ensued, and Blue Demon infuriated Enchantrix with her vamping, especially when she teased poor Doc Danger into sputtering immobility.

Captain Steel called them in to give them their mission. An alliance between a Metahuman splinter group in Allston-Brighton and a terrorist cell was developing. A traffic camera had caught a strange occurance linked to this - a man was walking down Washington Street when he staggered, a briefcase appearing in his hand. He continued walking. Slowed down immensely, the camera showed a blurred figure streaking by the man and popping the briefcase into his hand. They could not see the speedster's face, but they got a good look at the walker. They sent his face in for facial recognition scanning.

Sarge growled "Why did it have to be speedsters! I hate speedsters!"

The game was a lot of fun - the bickering of the various characters, the posturings of Mr. Awesome, Doc Danger meeting his nemesis, the female... We laughed a lot, though it wasn't silly. Hard to explain the difference...

-clash

I play basically once every two weeks, and run a game on the alternating weeks. (So game one week, run game the next.)

Currently we're five games into our Gateway City Campaign, set in St. Louis in the Shadowrun game. The players have managed to incur the ire of a Megacorporation by completing several jobs that damaged their bottom line. As such their latest job was a set up, and they're currently trapped in a underground escape tunnel with a corporate strike team hunting them. Our next game is going to play out their possible escape, or capture and perhaps death or serious injury.

In the game I'm playing in we've retired our first group of characters-a team of artifact hunters-in favor of starting a Special operations game, loosely based on the TV show the Unit. We've only played one game so far, in which we snagged a war lord to turn over for interrogation.

Finally getting back to this after being distracted for a while. Anyway, my Slavic mini-campaign played out to considerable success. A fuller update will follow when I've more time.

In my Monday Coyote Trail campaign, two weeks ago, the deputy got blasted with a shotgun trying to stop a night wagon coming from the Chinese teahouse. Doc saw one of the bags they were loading move, and the two went to intercept. Last week, the Deputy Jackson recovered while Doc, Gambler English Ed, and Cowgirl Portman went out to investigate a vulture's feast in the desert north of town. Turned out to be the bodies of two Chinese men. They had been flayed, the meat flensed and separated from the bones, then carved into thin sliced, and the viscera removed from the meat. Each was stacked neatly in separate piles, though the vultures had made a mess of it. They noted that a buckboard had come out drawn by two horses. Two men had descended from the buckboard, another had come in by horseback. The one who had come in by horseback left on the buckboard, trailing the horse. The two men had knelt in the dust, and were butchered where they knelt.

This week, they decide they had had enough of this, Portman climbed to the roof, dropping bundles of burning brush down the two chimneys, and covering them with wet blankets. Doc covered the people running out of the door with a rifle, making them lie on the street and put their hands behind their heads. Jackson covered Portman and Doc from the roof of the Dry Goods store, also with a rifle.

The giant Chinese man who had dealt with them several times before came out on the roof as Portman was dropping down the line to the lower roof of the Western Union office. He grabbed the line, and with his immense strength began hauling Portman up like a fish on a drop line. Portman leaped off the line and landed well on the lower roof, then shot the giant in the shoulder with her pistol. This enraged the giant, and he lifted a big stone fallen from the chimney over his head to crush Portman. Jackson shot him in the back, and he fell off the roof, directly at Portman, the stone still in his hands. Meanwhile a rifle poked out of a third floor window of the teahouse, and a man doc had walked past, trying to see how Portman was doing, jumped to his feet behind Doc and held a huge, wide bladed knife to his throat. Doc dropped the rifle.

Cliffhanger ending. Next week English Ed will be back from wherever he had gone, and we'll see how it all turns out this Monday.

In my Saturday LUITS! game, last week the main group met up with a local metahuman gang. They were in Harper's Ferry, a pub in Allston, when they heard a big explosion and rushed out without a plan. The two teleporters, Blue Demon and Bamf, got there first. They saw a bank blown up, dozens dead or wounded, and the streak of a speedster dashing around in the exposed vault. They tried to stop the Speedster, but Bamf was pummeled into unconsciousness, and Blue Demon was knocked way back. This was the most dangerous type of speedster - the kind that also had super strength and was highly trained in martial arts. Enchantrix was just then flying in on her broom, and Negated his speed. He then ran towards a point where he vanished. On checking his tracks, as the others arrived, they found he had met with an accomplice who was evidently an invisible teleporter.

They traced the two shoe prints - being cops - the woman teleporter was wearing designer soles bought from a single shop. The speedster was wearing custom soles. They were able to trace them to the buyer, a man by the name of Michael Moriarty, who lived in Cleveland Circle. The woman was a bit more difficult, as those model boots had been sold to seven women, and one man - veidently for his SO, as they wouldn't have fitted him. They left that for later and began planning their visit to Mr. Moriarty.

This week, Blue Demon was the teacher for the trainees. She teased them unmercifully, in her succubus way. She also told them they were going to do something important, not just wander around and hope for a fire, and that they were going to show up the full member team. They decided to go after the woman. They found that in addition to the eight sales, one pair of these designer boots had been stolen. They watched video of the date, and saw a woman take the shoes behind a stack of shelves and vanish. They did a facial recognition run on her, and got a name and address from the DMV - Hera Harvey, living in an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Brighton. Blue Demon sent Doctor Danger, Man-Spider, and Nike to her door in plain clothes, while Grease covered the courtyard and she and Volt covered the roof.

At Doctor Danger's knock, she looked through the spyhole and asked who he was. he answered "Richie Long". She asked "Do I know you from the University?" and he nodded "Yup!" It helps sometimes to have a fresh, innocent face! She opened the door and stared at the three people. She said "Who are you?" and Nike answered. "Deputy US Marshals, Ma'am". They got initiative. Doctor Danger hit her with a Disrupt, which randomly mixed her volitional powers. Man-Spider Negated her Invisibility, and Nike leaped on her, bearing her to the floor, and pummeling her with her super-speed, but light, punches. She, of course attempted to teleport out, but the dice said she actually activated her invisibility, which was already Negated.

When they heard over the radio what was happening from Doctor Danger, Blue Demon teleported into the courtyard with Volt in her arms, and Grease slipped in with his super speed, nailing her three times where Nike wasn't covering her. Again she tried to teleport, panicking now, but she rolled the exact same number and again activated her defunct Invisibility power. Doctor Danger, vulnerable as always to women, was too flustered by the sight of two women - Nike on top of Hera - writhing on the floor, and did nothing but stutter. He gained aHero Point for playing his Vulnerability against himself. Man-Spider jumped on top of Nike, and extruding his extra four arms, reached around her and slammed punches into Hera. Hera went unconscious, and they took her back to the HQ, along with her computer and anything else they could find in the search.

True to Blue Demon's word, they had executed a textbook operation, gotten a valuable prisoner, and opened a wedge into the terrorist/criminal alliance they were investigating. This was a lot of fun because of the interplay between the trainees and Blue Demon, the procedural way they found Hera, and the way they set the arrest up. Teleporters are extremely hard to capture, and they did it perfectly.

Next week, the big guys, stung by the success of the trainees - and exploiting it - go after Moriarty.

-clash

We played The One Ring last week. It was our first session, so half of it was taken up making characters (a relatively quick process) and for the rest we got about half-way through the introductory scenario that's included in the book. I was the GM. So far I think people like it. We haven't dipped into the rulebook much yet (no combats so far) - our next session should be more revealing.

Lawrence Whitaker of RuneQuest/Stormbringer/HeroQuest fame is in the group and geez, that guy can roleplay! He's playing a dwarf and he immediately jumped into the role. Once he's in a role, he seems to want to inhabit it for the night. He had everybody in stitches as the cantankerous dwarf. I was able to hold my own for the first night as the GM, which is to say I rose to his challenge and, I think, met it with most NPCs. It's going to be tough keeping up with him in future sessions - but it's a challenge I'm really going to like. I love the idea of being part of a group that role-plays that hard.

This one-off session might turn into a small campaign. I'm going to have to come up with some scenario ideas for future sessions.

Played a pick up game of SR4 on Saturday. Solid fun, even if one of the players-a guy from online-surprised the group by decided to get medieval on the NPC's. Heh. But still turned into solid fun.

I'm trying really hard to get my next campaign organized.

In my Monday Coyote trail game, we had left things in a cliffhanger. Doc's player was not there, but was part of the scene, so I had to NPC him for the session. OTOH, English Ed's player *was* there, so he was brought in, running from the saloon where he had just rode in and tied his horse. Ed saw the Sniper in the window, and fired his six-gun at him. The shot missed, but close enough to draw the sniper's fire from Portman.

Unfortunately Portman could not get out from under the falling giant Chinaman, and was crushed under his enormous body, taking lots of bruising damage. Jackson saw the guy with the knife at Doc's throat and nailed him with a rifle shot from the roof of the Dry Goods store. Simultaneously, Doc shot him with his derringer in the thigh, while pushing back against him. The knife wielding dude was dead before he hit the ground. The Chinese giant heaved himself off of Portman, and she scooted back, scrabbling on the roof for her gun, but failed to find it. The Sniper hit Ed, but Ed was in cover, and it was partially deflected.

Doc grabbed up his dropped rifle and fired at the sniper, missing terribly. Ed hit the Sniper with his next shot, even with the wound penalty, but a pistol shot wasn't going to drop him. Jackson nailed a second sniper on the other side of the building, killing him, but the giant grabbed Portman, despite her desperate defense, and lifted her over his bleeding head, and walked to the edge of the roof, yelling "Stop, or she die!"

Portman struggled, but the man was incredibly strong, and he had one hand around her throat, and another around her upper thigh. She kicked at him with her free leg, but missed. Jackson had a shot at him from the far corner of the store roof, as it was at a slight angle to the Dry Goods store, but he had to take a wound penalty when he walked, because his shotgun wound of two days ago was not yet healed, and his shot went wide. English Ed did a very heroic thing, shooting at the giant with his six gun, even though it laid him open to the Sniper. He hit, and the giant fell dead off the roof. Portman tried to grab the edge of the roof but missed, and was knocked cold when she landed on the giant's body.

The Sniper shot English Ed dead.

Doc had rolled behind the dead knifeman, using him as a shield, and fired again at the sniper, futilely.

The second cliffhanger ending in a week!

English Ed's player is creating a new character, and Doc should be back as a PC next week!

Our LUITS! playtest ended. The last scene was awesome. Sarge, Blue Demon, Enchantrix, Hazard, and Bamf tracked down a nuke inside the diesel tank of a generator at the Harvard Club. The detonator was a radio device on a timer. It could send 3 different signals - signal 1 was a constant chirp every second. If that signal stopped, and it was set to stop at midnight, the bomb would blow; signal 2 was emitted if someone tampered with the detonator's case, causing the bomb to blow; and signal 3 was emitted on command, causing the bomb to blow.

It was rigged to go at midnight, the time when the Bilderburg's meeting commenced in the Harvard Club. They had an hour to go, so they lifted it out to Outer Brewster Island in Boston Harbor, and Sarge had to defuse it. He told everyone else to go away, but they wouldn't leave him. This wasn't a matter of cutting wires - the trigger mechanism was fiendish. Sarge finally used his Preparation power - think Batman's "I figured you might do that, and came prepared" - and pulled out a device which could emit the same frequency blip as the exploder, and synced it up. Midnight came, and passed. Now they had time bring in some experts to really defuse it!

End came when Sarge used his preparation power one last time, and pulled a six pack from a cooler hidden under a rock. "I figured I might have to come here in an emergency, so I prepared for it." They sat on the rocky beach and listened to the surf crash and hiss in the early early morning. End!

-clash

ADDED: What was really cool for me was two things - One, we didn't go over the edge into Action Comedy, no matter how tempting it was for us. A lot of funny shit went down, but it remained a drama with some very amusing comedy - like Castle, or Northern Exposure. Two - these supers were *cops*! Not vigilantes, not a black ops team, not military or para-military or Mercs. Cops. When they forgot to read one guy his Miranda rights, they had to let him go. When a prisoner wanted a lawyer, they got one. When they couldn't find a charge that would stick after 24 hours, the guy was let go. There was no torturing, no beatings, no mindfucking. It *STILL WORKED GREAT AS A SUPERS GAME*!