Character and story help wanted

General GTG Off Topic
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Good news everyone! I am finally out of the hospital and now I am starting a new Mutants and Masterminds campaign with my friends, one of which is a nice girl I met in the hospital and got into sentinels, and cam try out the characters I made. So with some tooling about here is our parties superhero team! 

The campaign is called "The Last Days of Angel City" and is about the Cult of Gloom and some other nasty entities have left Angel City to suffer cut off from the outside world. Basically the Gloomweaver and Cult of Gloom arrive in Angel City to set up shop but Biomancer and his foster home of flesh children already have plans and in their conflict, The city will face its final days unless the heroes of the city can come together to halt these fiends.

 

So here is the party as it stands! I would love to thank everyone for input and ideas on my other thread on character creation, you guys know how to make new members feel welcome.

 

Lightning Rod: David Ivy, A former Citizen of the Sun but would make his escape after the darker sides of the Citizens were revealed to him. Born with the ability to attract electrical discharges and lightning strikes to his person and store that electricity to boost his speed and strength and project lightning blasts. An incredibly positive individual who knows his job in life is to use his gift to help the world! May or may not still have a crush on a certain seasonal citizen.

 

Captain Phoenix VI: Isabelle "Izzy" Cinderhill is the current Captain Phoenix, a Hero blessed with flight and the power to emit powerful flames. Originally from London this hero relocated to Angel City after her nemesis, Jacquelyn the Ripper, had appeared there several times over the last few months. A rather intense lady with a drive to carry on the great name of Captain Phoenix. 

 

The Mathemagician: Stephen Lasterburg was a computer programmer with a love of nerdy stuff. As a side project he studied every book on "magic" he could find until one day, he found one in a bookstore called Ballard's Books. This book taught him the ways of conjuring and with his knowledge of coding he combined the two to become The Mathemagician! Now he uses his magic to summon pixel constructs to defend others and adapt to any situation. Has a cat named Snarf.

 

Johnny Demonic: Johnny holds the powers of a lesser demon from the demonic blood running through his veins, he is super durable, super strong, and can breath demonic flames and uses these to stop the other demonically blooded children from destroying everything. A rough and tumble hero who just needs a t shirt, jeans, and his lucky baseball cap. He is a loner but deep down likes his new teammates. As the sole Guardian of his four younger sisters he has never once missed a pta meeting or dance recital.

 

Panda-monium: Little Baozhai was always a weak child, her upbringing in rural china was not easy until she found herself face to face with the Grand Panda! It taught her the ways of the panda, how to eat bamboo, how to look good in black and white, and most importantly how to destroy all she sees with her bear hands, get it? BEAR hands? Her years of tutelage inexplicably turned her from a 5"2 weakling to a 7"2 Muscular Amazon. Now with her Favorite Panda hoodie and her new friend Lightning Rods help she is ready to make her hero debut.

 

I would love to have lots of other hero and villains show up as NPCs so if you wanna join in on this story we are weaving I would love to make it a little community project. I would also welcome input on any ideas of how I should have the players interact in this war between gloom cultists and flesh children. Heck if you have any ideas at all I need all the help I can get! 

 

 A special thank you to Cult of Gloom because his great questions on the letters page and Chris and Adams reactions gave me this idea.

 

I will post the story as it goes to keep you all hopefully enthralled with our tales of heroism and shenanigans! 

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I would love to have lots of other hero and villains show up as NPCs so if you wanna join in on this story we are weaving I would love to make it a little community project. I would also welcome input on any ideas of how I should have the players interact in this war between gloom cultists and flesh children. Heck if you have any ideas at all I need all the help I can get! 

One pair of NPCs that I used in a couple of Buffy/Angel games are Gabriel Booke & Caitlyn Bell, the co-proprietors of a used and rare bookstore called Bell & Booke which specializes in things related to magic or the occult.

Caitlyn Bell is the 4th generation of Bells to co-own the store, and is a Wicce of not inconsiderable raw talent that she mostly keeps under wraps. She usually handles the human resources & front-of-store duties, and is pretty well-known in the community. Most evenings, she can be found at a bar not too far from the house she inherited from her grandmother (along with her share of the store), semi-moonlighting as a jazz piano player. When originally conceived about 20 years ago, she was "played by" Diana Krall; for a modern game I'd use either Evan Rachel Wood or Emily van Camp instead.

Gabriel Booke is the son of the original proprietor of the store, although he only appears to be in his early 40s. Bespectacled and owlish, he handles most of the decisions about acquisitions and is the proverbial guy who knows everybody and that everybody owes a favor to. He's got a capacious memory (eidetic/photographic, really), but is also haunted by unpleasant memories associated with his military service in both WWII and Vietnam. The secret to his longevity? He's half-Byblos, meaning that he also has a shadow form and an affinity for anything that is printed/written. Gabriel Booke is "played by" Kenneth Branagh.

The store is located in modest part of town, and is built into a house that was converted to commercial purposes in the early 1970s. (This is the 3rd location that the store has worked from.) Most visitors have the disorienting impression that it's much larger on the inside than it is on the outside - which it is, because the front door and foyer are in one dimension and the rest of the house is offset across dimensional barriers. Don't go out the back door unless you're tired of being alive.

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Then there's  Christina Walker, who operates under the "hero name" of Lacuna and is known as Kit by the people who actually want her to like them. (Pretty much only her mother still calls her Christina.) She's been described in other threads here, but let me know if you want me to dig the description out so that it's consolidated into one place.

Edit: A quick skim suggests that her full story hasn't been outlined yet. I'm on my way out to do some errands, but I"ll try to get it up later tonight.

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So far he story is planned in five stages

 

  1. The beginning of the end! Heroes gather and help stop a sect of the cult of Gloom from sacrificing what appears to be a young women to summon an eldritch abomination OR stop what seems to be a new hero in town who has snapped (actually a flesh child) from leveling an old abandoned church (chapter of the Cult of Gloom). They can do ONE of these but both lead to the revelation of the impending conflict of the two groups, gloomweaver and his cult versus Biomancer and his Flesh Children, that is to overtake Angel City.

 

  1. Trapped! The party finds that the Cult of Gloom in an attempt to keep the elusive Biomancer in the city they have constructed a magical barrier to keep all of Angel City trapped and the rest of the world out. The party will then have a few encounters between the villains struggles and saving people from mass panic and the accidents it causes. Eventually they will be lead to one of a few different places to remove the barrier (labs, places of magic, that mad scientist hobo with the trashcannon)

 

  1. The War of the flesh after prepping their method of barrier breaking they see a massive green tower of flames erupt into the sky and suddenly the dead start walking amongst us once more. Angel City at this point now begins to resemble Raccoon City and the few other heroes of the city are now either dead, dying, zombified, or busy helping the rest of the world. So now it's a gauntlet to find the bases of the cult or Biomancer and take them out.

 

  1. The Fall So the party will fail by either gloomweaver being too powerful or Biomancer being another flesh child and now through some investigations and some NPC assistance they discover a dark figure at the beginning of all of this. The Arcanist, a flesh child who gained sentience and and infiltrated the Cult of Gloom to gain the dark powers needed to exist beyond Biomancer's plans. They also discover his ability to undo the barrier.

 

  1. The Final Days So the party will discover the lair of the Arcanist and engage into the final fight, while also dealing with sieges from some doppelgänger fleshchildren and some lesser demons summoned by Gloomweaver. The rest is still kinda up in the air.

 

 

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Sorry - I meant that I hadn't actually written a complete and cohesive backdrop for Lacuna. But, I think the outline of your "collection" sounds pretty spot on.

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It's cool but I posted it more so you can help me find a place for them. I would love to use the bookstore for a method of breaking the dark barrier

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They're NPCs, and always have been. Pretty much any time you need somebody to dig into occult research, you can run them through Bell & Booke, because if Gabriel doesn't have what they're looking for on the shelf, he probably knows somebody who does. I'd probably start by putting them in your "Chapter 2" as a resource for learning how to do the things that must be done.

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Nothing yet to offer, outside of the fact that Dayton has a game store called Bell Book and Comic, run by a fellow named Pete Bell.  :P

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Good to know! And if you come up with anything I need all the help I can get!

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Yeah, I didn't figure the idea for naming such a store was completely original.

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Moved to Off Topic (but left a shadow copy for folks to follow to the new location), as this is not actually about the Sentinel Comics RPG – it's a M&M campaign set in the Sentinel Comics setting. 

Nothing wrong with that! Just don't want folks to get the wrong idea.  :wink:

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I have a great new player and their new character really helps round out the party with a tech hero. 

 

Jet Jumper: Jenna Crane is a Cybernetic hero who has booster jets implanted in their body and uses these for high speed running and flight and has other weapon systems built into their body as well, like rocket fists, laser eyes, and even some micro missles. Initially a young member of project iron clad her minor ability to bond with metal was used to facilitate the cybernetic implants forced on her from a young age. After escaping the government she did a short stint with the Citizens of the Sun before escaping with Lightning Rod. Now she is a resident of Angel City and will use her gift to save her new home.

 

the player wanted to have a shared background with the Lightning Rod character and having a newbie hero makes character exposition easier and less clunky.

 

Edit:oops didnt see the move notice