Last Saturday our StarCluster 3 campaign ended a bit early - Exploring an uninhabited system in a string of connected systems resulting from a newly formed/discovered jump line, the group came across mounting evidence that someone had been there recently. A boot print frozen in the mud on the top of a mountain on one world, a locator dropped in a jumble of boulders on another, and finally human remains in the charred ruin of a campsite on yet another. Yet there were no claim bouys, no markers, nothing intentionally left as evidence of a visit.
As they were surveying the jump point for the next jump Saturday, one of them found them. They were heading out to the next system in the chain - in relativistic flight. Either their culture didn't have FTL, or they had a different kind of FTL which required them to accelerate to at least .25C before going FTL. The crew beamed a message laser at their ship and got a heavily dopplered, very time-lagged message back hours later. In a series of such messages, they claimed the whole unoccupied system for their Empire of Worlds, accused the PCs of trespassing, and insisted the PCs' explorer vessel leave immediately.
In a fit of reasoned, intelligent, practical, and thus terribly un-PC-like behavior, the gang jumped back to their home system and warned the SaVaHuTa and DC military about this 'Empire of Worlds' and the arrogant, aggressive behavior of the other ship. Both the DC and SaVaHuTa have an abhorrence of Empire in their core beliefs, and one of the primary duties of both militaries is the suppression of Empire-building. The militaries set out immediately and sent out word for more units. This move caught me totally flat-footed, having expected anything but this! There would be no more exploring until the Military was done with this threat, so the campaign was over.
Since Volant isn't yet playable, we voted to run a playtest of Klax's Look! Up In The Sky! supers game. This is our third playtest, and having played low level and mid level supers, we decided this time we'd run a game at the highest level. We decided that, rather than create a city like we had the first two times, we'd go the Marvel route and use a real city to base in, in this case Boston. We used the city generation system in reverse, to express the real city in game terms, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Then we created our new Association - a US level metahuman police force. We assumed fairly lavish funding, and went to work defining our assets. First off, all the PCs would be sworn in as US Marshals, giving them jurisdictional and arrest powers. The unit is based on a former (and non-existent in RL) secret military base on one of the Harbor Islands. We opted for several platoons of elite military as guards, along with an elite security system. We put in a danger room and the best available databases on every subject. We incorporated a small hospital with a doctor, and healing vats. We picked up some trucks and a fleet of sedans, then got a spaceship, a ship, an airship, and tons of other vehicles. We spent a lot of points on trainees, several of each type, as replacement PCs in case someone goes down, or as sidekicks. It still has no name, but it's ready to run.
Most of us have created at least one PC. The power level is Superman or Batman-esque. I have never done a supers game at this level, and it will be difficult to keep things properly challenging without just throwing equivalent supers at them in endless beatdown battles.
-clash
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