RinCon: Adventures into Darkness

October 21, 2009 11 comments

At Rincon I ran Ken Hite’s Adventures Into Darkness, the “What If H.P. Lovecraft wrote Golden Age superhero comics for Nedor” mashup setting. A single adventure wasn’t enough, and it really made me want to run this as an ongoing campaign.

The version I used was for Mutants & Masterminds, because that’s my superhero system of choice. There are other versions available, for other the HERO System and Truth & Justice. Because it was a one-shot, I wanted to cram as much Mythos goodness as possible in, but I also wanted to have plenty of slam-bang action. To that end, there wasn’t a lot of investigation, and one fight scene essentially led directly into the next fight scene.

All of the player characters were pulled right from Hite’s writeups in the book, in spite of disparate power levels. i have characters ranging from level 9 to level 14. No one seemed to notice or mind, as I played to my philosophy that game balance is in the hands of the gamemaster, and threw appropriate foes at each of the characters based not only on their level but their powers. For NPCs, I used characters from Lovecraft stories as well as supporting characters mentioned in the PC’s backgrounds. Nearly everyone has a girlfriend, a mentor, asidekick, or a scientist. It gave me plenty to work with.

The Plot
I want to note that I embellished a lot on what Hite wrote, tweaked things, and filled in blanks. If you haven’t read AID, don’t expect this to be in the book. If you have, then you’ll see what I did.

It’s 1953. The heroes are summoned to the Henry Armitage Memorial Library at Miskatonic University, in the bustling metropolis that is Arkham City. Someone has broken in and stolen the notes of the mad scientist Dr. Slade. He was killed when his own invention, the Vita-Ray, exploded on its first use. The invention did bring a mummy back to life, who turned out to be one of the player characters, ancient Egyptian sorcerer Mystico the Wonder Man. They figure out that it was stolen by a strange crime family from Innsmouth that controls the docks. They track the mobsters to a warehouse, where they’re making a trade with Dr. Ghoul and his gang. A large fight ensues in the warehouse, with ghouls and deep ones and superheroes mixing it up.

The heroes question the Deep One mobsters and learn that Dr. Ghoul wanted to modify the Vita-Ray to make a Ghoul Ray that would turn people into ghouls. They were trading the plans for something the ghouls had, a bunch of wooden crates with Nazi markings! The Deep Ones were going to trade the crates to someone else, they didn’t know who, for something their boss, the crime lord known as Devilfish, wanted. But they didn’t know what else. The heroes told the Deep Ones that they’d have to trade with them, and to have their boss meet them back at the warehouse the following not.

Back at the library, the heroes check out the crates and discover they contain strange cylinders. Mi-go brain cylinders, marked with the names of Nazi leaders. Yes, the Mi-go saved Hitler’s brain! Returning to the warehouse the next night, they’re attacked by Mi-go, because the cylinders were stolen from them and they wanted them back! Superheroes pounding on fungus was… interesting. Mi-go basically just explode when punched by supers. I made the descriptions as icky as I could.

Of course, sitting off Devil Reed was a U-boat, and the villain who wanted the Nazi brains was none other than the Black Scholar, Baron von Juntz! A fight ensued, of course, but the heroes couldn’t stand up to his sorcery. He never lifted a finger, he just mind-controlled player characters and had them beat up on other player characters. It was Captain Future who saved the day, appearing to fly off, then flying in at supersonic speed, grabbing von Juntz, and throwing him into space.

In Play
The horror was toned down because one of my players was a 3rd grader. The kid played Night Terror (the Black Terror’s brother, a character of Hite’s invention). He couldn’t roll successfully to use any of his powers, so he just started punching people… and doing it very well. The running joke became “and who does Night Terror punch this round?”. He was the first one to get hypnotized by von Juntz, and since the kid’s dad was playing Mystico I had him wail on his dad. We all had fun. We all agreed the kid was the best player and the MVP of the game, and he got the prize (RinCoin, aka convention bucks to spend with vendors).

I was blessed to have Ken St. Andre of Tunnels & Trolls fame in my game, playing Randolph “The Dream Master” Carter. He came up with weird uses for Cater’s powers, and talked me into letting him enthrall one of the ghouls. Since Carter really isn’t a combat character, it worked out and the ghoul did his fighting for him.

Ongoing
As I said at the beginning, I would really like to run this as an ongoing game. There’s a lot of history with the Nedor heroes to be explored, especially when you start crossing them over and making connections between their supporting characters. That’s before you add in the Lovecraft elements. Making Arkham into Arkham City, a large enough city to support a superhero population, with Mickatonic U. right there as a source of weird science, has so much potential. Tying the superscience and magical origins of the heroes back into the Mythos is great. I want to slowly make the heroes go mad as they realize the true origins of their powers. I want to introduce some moral and ethical dilemmas regarding the way their powers work. I want to pull in some of the tone of Watchmen, some of the feel of Marvelman/ Miracleman, and a bunch of background material from Delta Green. Oh, yes, I can have sooo much fun with this.