[Doctor Xaos] Anastasia, heiress to the stars

[Eero Tuovinen]

A second campaign of Doctor Xaos finally began; it took some time, what with summer hassles, but our motivation didn't really flag with time, so here we are. This is largely the same team we had for Age of Aquarius in the spring: myself, my brother Markku, A-P, the other Eero, and for the first time, the enigmatic J. (J's an old comrade of dramatic bend, who I don't get to play with nearly enough, what with his burgeoning family life and whatnot. Unless I misremember, he was with us in the playtests of my own abortive superhero game in like 2002 or so already.) Five players instead of four.

We discussed three deliberate issues with our experiences last time, that we would attempt to fix this time around:
* We would create a more supervillain-y Doctor Xaos, with more concrete interactions, such as actual physically occurring super battles, and less postmodern existentialist angst and futility. Magneto has been name-dropped.
* We would attempt to develop Doctor Xaos in bold strokes at the start, leaving his internal psychology, personal history and so on to be established and revealed by the individual players through play; in hindsight this was a plain application error earlier, although a benign one - the game was still fun despite it. Now that we understood the idea of revealing Xaos over play, similar to how the nature of the zombie threat is revealed in Zombie Cinema, we wouldn't fall in the same trap twice.
* We'd see about making the scope of the campaign less global and more based in a single milieu.
These were more or less already remarked upon in the spring, so this was more of a reminder discussion.

When the brainstorming for Doctor Xaos started, I myself had just one initial request: for the character to be called something else in the fiction. Works better for repeat play to have a clearly separate megavillain identity.

The discussion started with the issue of Russia (Markku outright broke the ice by suggesting a super-villainess named "Rodina"), meandered a bit in central Europe (Liechtenstein of all places, don't ask me why), but returned consistently to our eastern "special relationship" (Finnish players gaming in Helsinki here, for those who didn't know). A-P basically established our Xaos by floating the concept of "evil Superman", which was massaged by everybody in minor ways with various details, resulting in what we got.

Our Xaos

The game is set in the city of Petropolis, basically the Metropolis equivalent of St. Petersburg. The city's signature heroine is "Anastasia", an ambiguously mystical/cosmic being that made an appearance in the mid-'90s and has protected the city since (think Superman). Lately, after heretofore unrevealed events, Anastasia has changed; she was always a rather distant protectress, but now she floats moodily high above the city, gazing unmoving at the horizon. Strange goings-on are turning the populace against her as people disappear and urban structures break and reform in fey ways here and there. Anastasia does not fly in an aerodynamic "Superman style" anymore, but rather floats through the air uncaring, ignoring gravity as utterly inconsequential to herself.

(We're pretty sure that her powers are extensive, and generally seem to involve matter and energy rearranging themselves to her will with little in the way of apparent effort. Sort of like Doctor Manhattan, except with eldritch bands of colorful Green Lantern energies that beam in from off-screen, such as from the sky or the earth or the sea.)

Truth is, Anastasia has decided to return home beyond space and time, which is where the inhuman trade-offs begin: her plan involves not only 1) destructive archeology to unearth her astral power source hidden under Petropolis, but also 2) wholesale kidnapping of a crew required for her journey, and finally, 3) the destruction of the physical structure of Petropolis to make room for her conveyance, whatever form it may take. Pretty heinous, but perhaps her cosmic motivations make up for the terrible destruction implied here.

Visually Anastasia is an alien lifeform taking the form and manner of a high-born lady of Tsarist Russia, pushed through the superhero mill to combine court dress with the sleekness of line essential for a dynamic heroine (the suggested imagery sounded Jugend to me, frankly - wide belt, appropriately slit long dress, etc. - lucky I'm not one of those drawing gamers). Her hair is unnaturally shiny and in bright alien color and so on, generally obvious that she's not entirely human.

The Minor Villain

The Eero 2.0 is playing minor villain this time. His contribution is "Arosusi" ["Steppe Wolf" more or less], an ex-security agent turned assassin, with the goal of rising to rule the savage mobs that control the Petropolis underworld. This required him to 1) assassinate the current kingpin and his employer Grigor, and 2) gather a moot of the gangs and convince them to elect him. Savage yet straightforward, Steppe Wolf is a taciturn killer with clear and cynical goals.

Steppe Wolf dresses in military style, yet entirely in white, and lets his wild hair flow free - signs of savage arrogance, basically. He has some animalistic tooth & nail action going, and a hand crossbow, the works. Think a combination of Silver Sable, Bullseye and Sabertooth :D

The action

I took Xaos for the first episode (I was asked to - I don't think there's any method in the rules for picking who goes first), and opened with Anastasia launching into action without warning after weeks of tense waiting by the city for its protectress to come to her senses. As Anastasia suddenly disappeared from the sky, the very earth of Petropolis started to vomit subway trains (subways are called "metro" in Finnish, so naturally these Petropolitan subway trains were all "petro trains"; we're so funny), emptying the city's subway network in a highly unnatural and destructive manner, leaving massive holes akin to mole hills behind.

Some heroes were at hand to involve themselves here; no doubt the smarter ones had expected Anastasia to go rogue, while others just happen to live in Petropolis, a global city as it is. I was immediately on board with Markku's folksy Redshield, a retired, middle-aged, experienced and very human hero with an old crush on Anastasia and a relatively unheroic general mien - he'll be a keeper for sure, going forward. Zarkov, who proved to be a millionaire oligarch with strong telepathic powers and no morals whatsoever was a a tougher nut to swallow, but once I realized later into the episode that he's basically Lex Luthor, I got on board hard. A-P's choice of playing Grigor-the-mob-boss who Steppe Wolf wanted to murder as his "superhero" character was shall I say challenging, but then that's our A-P right there in a nutshell :D

I found the high-powered, fast-paced fight choreography that resulted to be surprisingly enjoyable, considering the narrative form of the medium; we didn't have very much of that in the last game, but now we got plenty of explosions, force-fields and so on in the first episode already. (Anastasia and Redshield have, initially accidentally, somewhat complementary power sets - his red bubble-shaped force fields are capable of interacting with the strange energies that seem to do much of the heavy lifting for Anastasia, which enabled the two to duel a bit. He's clearly the inferior in terms of strength, of course, but he did hang in there bravely nevertheless.) A possible negative side effect is that we didn't perhaps get as much characterization, and as compelling, as we did in the initial session in the last campaign. Nothing crippling here, but I did find myself remarking a few times about the "masculine code of silence" enjoyed by too many of the characters in lieu of clearly emoting their motivations and attitudes.

As for the card-play, I was determined to go for a somewhat longer episode than we got in the last campaign (where everybody ended play immediately when they could). As Xaos this was an easy intent to keep, as nobody apparently got an immediate meld to build upon for a quick finish, and once I had mine I was pretty certain about my lead only widening if I'd let play go on a bit longer. This proved true as I finished a Gin with pure perseverance a few rounds later; the others barely had three points in one hand, with the other three players showing zeroes. The long play helped a lot in getting particularly Zarkov on board as a credible, strongly pictured character; Redshield was a success from his first appearance, while unfortunately Grigor didn't manage to benefit from the extra screen-time in any real way.

The plot content of the episode concerned Anastasia's ancient power source entombed deep under the city, where she dug it out before floating it up into the sky in a relatively destructive manner. The power source took the form of a 100-meters long Faberge egg, basically, with a green glow radiating from deep within. The tense action featured the various heroes fighting Anastasia all-on-one, with Redshield pleading with her being particularly memorable, as was the way Zarkov cynically mind-controlled two Russian heroes (Sylph and Vulcan, apparently a duo of human-like elemental beings) and forced one of them to suicide in a nova flare in an attempt to destroy the starforged Faberge egg - futile of course, which made the ruthless sacrifice even more chilling.

Anastasia's strong character moments in this episode involved her acknowledging Redshield as a former comrade, her anger at Zarkov for murdering "a beautiful elemental of the Earth, a being immortal, infinitely more noble than any of you loathsome monkeys", and her portrait moment far above the city, alone in space with her egg, gazing upon the distant stars denoting the way home. Anastasia has a cold and aloof social style, although I'd like to think that I didn't fall in the trap of not emoting at all - she did react to events, it was just in a somewhat subtle and detached manner.

We'll continue this next week at some point. I'll be interested in seeing how J treats Anastasia as she starts press-ganging the crew for her homecoming operation. I'm pretty sure it'll involve an expansion in the superhero franchise, this is in the sort of mainstream superhero story style where it's sort of obvious that she'll want to recruit the "greatest heroes of Petropolis" to help her, against their wills or not. I expect that we'll learn more about what made her get out of the reservation to this degree and so on.

Notes

A few rules observations:
* The list of possible villainous Styles does not include "Brawn" in it. This is understandable for Xaos (although I guess it could work with the right scope - and Sebastian Shawn is certainly a brawn-styled mastermind sort, now that I think of it), but particularly for the minor villain this was noticeable enough that we decided to let Eero try it out as his Style pick. Thus Steppe Wolf, whose villainous mien pretty much consists of the Sabertooth/Bullseye package, without pretensions to technology or magic or any of that fancy stuff.
* Is there a reason for why a player could not allocate an "unused" opposition token later into the episode? This is basically only relevant for heroes and the minor villain when they opt to attempt only one goal in the episode. This doesn't seem to come up often, but it seems possible for the players to frame the entire episode in a way where a player simply misjudges the true interests of their hero in the situation at the time when they declare their targets. For example, in this episode certain characters found it natural to ignore Anastasia initially, but as the dramatic and highly-powered violence started tearing at the city, the situation seemed quite different to them just one round later.

[Eero Tuovinen]

We played the 2nd session, 2nd episode yesterday. (Only one episode per session due to family-invested gamers and their tight schedules.) Agreed to play the 3rd session next week, so apparently we're doing this weekly now.

It wasn't the sharpest session of Doctor Xaos we've played, but the rules application went well; mostly we got the same sort of weirdness you get in Zombie Cinema (I'm constantly reflecting upon that one because these games feel so similar in play) when the players aren't quite on the same wavelength about the literary antecedents of whatever it is that they are doing, so that they interpret each other's creative inputs in weird ways and bring in material that does not mesh together very elegantly. Fortunately this is the exact sort of "creative dross" that can be combed for the good bits and otherwise creatively ignored later on, as long as you care to power through it patiently. Doesn't really have so much to do with the game itself as it does with these particular players at this particular time doing this particular style of story.

Another, more practical challenge for the storytelling this time around was that as the story is in bold 4-color "summer crossover" style, with dozens of superheroes in a full-blown superhero setting, it was practically difficult to accomplish the creative necessities in any but the most bare and suggestive manner. I mean things like naming and describing bit-player superheroes, it was a visible effort for any of us to invent much material along these lines at the normal narrative gaming speed (as in, talking out loud while simultaneously putting together the scene in your head). We muddled through with a combination of cliches, selective color where it could do the most work, and generic narration. I could see myself, developing a game of this sort, writing either some compact setting material, some random tables or some good procedural advice for inventing super-characters on the spot, just to avoid the rather mundane difficulties involved here :D

Regarding the story, it was about Anastasia - the ex-superhero-future-supervillain from the stars - mustering a sufficient "crew" for her attempt to return to her home planet (or wherever it is that she's going). The big setting idea established here was that a great proportion of the superheroes of this world are "Chthonic" in nature - their powers and identity derive from some sort of a pantheistic life force of the planet itself, which makes them into elementals or shamans or whatever each individual happens to be. Sort of like how many, but not all, Marvel superheroes are "mutants". Anastasia called together a great gathering of the Chthonic heroes under rather vague political pretenses related to anti-industrial advocacy, the party was gate-crashed by a variety of superheroes who opposed and feared Anastasia, and a grand melee basically resolved the situation.

Anastasia triumphed again this time thoroughly, as J. played a patient game (same as I did last time) and gathered his Gin while the other players were still trying to get their first melds together. Anastasia utilized the Chthonic powers to construct a large, impenetrable, techno-organic structure in the middle of Petropolis, subsuming the Chtonic superheroes into the building in a rather cold-blooded way and forcing the free heroes to retreat for now. She only has one more goal to accomplish, and that goal will spell the doom of the city itself, unless the heroes can stop her. Doesn't look good, considering the fact that while we've had some pretty credible heroes here and there, nobody's gotten experience from the curb-stomps. Assuming A-P plays a strong hand as well, Anastasia could win this campaign 3-0 in the next session :D

We discussed the card play strategy of the game a bit before the session. I emphasized that the hero players are not in fact trying to win early on - they are trying to end the episode before Xaos gets a Gin, while Xaos doesn't really have any motivation to end it early, as time is surely to his advantage without any experienced heroes being involved. So far we haven't had any luck in this regard in this campaign, of course, so Xaos has gotten the Gins and progressed with dismissive victories over the heroes.

An observation about the character sheet of Doctor Xaos: I think that it is a good idea to have a clear place for the Issues on the sheet, broken down by categories, and to mandate that the portrait moment should add and extend to the Issues part of the character sheet. I think that players can have a tendency to shirk - or even utterly misunderstand - the duty and opportunity of making Xaos more relatable. I suppose it is ultimately a player's prerogative to refuse (just like a Zombie Cinema player is not obligated to make their character credible as a person), but having a character sheet where you can clearly see what has been done before, and what awaits doing, should focus the mind to the task better than just talking about it in the abstract.

[Ron Edwards]

Anastasia and Arosusi are fantastic. More comments to follow.

[Ron Edwards]

This is a really helpful and great play report.

Brawn - not a bad addition, but I might specify it further to Savagery or Primal.

The card play observation : in my four games in March and April, with separate groups, each was very clear on "knock ASAP before he gets his damned Gin" without any instruction. They didn't start chasing better results until after some Development and after the Lesser Villain seemed ready to jump either way. Your current group seems rather stubborn about that in a way I haven't seen.

The reason that players' targeting tokens are fixed in place ... well, that may be a legacy rule from when the various outcomes were harder to track, and when I wanted the choices to be more exclusionary. On the other hand, I do want some trade-off, and I also don't really mind leaving in the chance for a "stupid" choice that one is then stuck with. I really don't like the current trend in game design for the mechanics to do their own thing, and for narrations to be utterly free from them. One of my problems with Capes if I'm correctly recalling how it worked, on the other hand, I'm not sure I ever understood how it was supposed to work.

I can see that Anastasia may well take the cake in the third episode, but bluntly, so be it. Clever player play can help survive lesser draws, and lucky draws can decrease the need for clever play, but the fact is, the game is indeed rigged in Dr. Xaos' favor. Only Development and finding whatever might tip the Lesser Villain really make a difference. Playing into the Game Master's chance for Gin simply means losing.

And then there's the part which makes me want to paint "shut up you drama queen" in big badly-aligned letters on the walls of your abode ...

From your first session:

A possible negative side effect is that we didn't perhaps get as much characterization, and as compelling, as we did in the initial session in the last campaign. Nothing crippling here, but I did find myself remarking a few times about the "masculine code of silence" enjoyed by too many of the characters in lieu of clearly emoting their motivations and attitudes.

From your second:

... as the story is in bold 4-color "summer crossover" style, with dozens of superheroes in a full-blown superhero setting, it was practically difficult to accomplish the creative necessities in any but the most bare and suggestive manner. I mean things like naming and describing bit-player superheroes, it was a visible effort for any of us to invent much material along these lines at the normal narrative gaming speed (as in, talking out loud while simultaneously putting together the scene in your head). We muddled through with a combination of cliches, selective color where it could do the most work, and generic narration.

I suggest rather that you are expecting too much characterization in a place where it doesn't need to be. An initially-introduced superhero is absolutely supposed to be "a combination of cliches, selective color ..., and generic narration." The whole point of an introduced hero in this game is to set up for someone else to make it really work.

Similarly, the "high-powered, fast fight choreography" shouldn't be surprisingly enjoyable at all, that's what's consistently enjoyable about the game in the moment, while characterization builds to whatever extent anyone wants.

More seriously, all of your commentary is really helping the game. The Italian and Finnish play groups are making an enormous difference, as you'll see when the next and final pre-publication draft goes up.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Thanks, nice to know that you find the feedback useful.

As a clarification, I'm on board with what you say regarding player characters. In this case we had scenes with literally dozens of NPCs, and even if nobody feels the need to detail all of them at once, it'd be nice to spotlight even one or two per scene just to give a sense for what kind of people are involved, or who a player character is talking to. It was already pretty painful when on my turn I ran through an entire dialogue with a "junior superhero involved with the Federal Extranormal Bureau", all without pinning a name or visual on the guy :D

The entire session yesterday was basically like a Marvel cross-over event with the local Captain America equivalent getting back from retirement and whatnot, so there were a lot of NPC superheroes in it. I personally felt like I had the most difficulty when I had to give code names and real civilian names to them (one or the other for most, obviously), and I fared a bit better with describing merely visual elements (what does this guy's teleportation power look like and so on), but I have to say that it was all around rather challenging. Of course it is entirely credible that there might not be any simple creativity hack for inventing what amounts to a big house setting from scratch in a couple of seconds :D

Also, about choreography: I've previously remarked upon how Finnish gamers in general and much of this crew in particular as well are usually not very big on the show wrestling elements of the superhero genre, being more interested in talking heads, so to speak. Markku is an interesting exception, which means that this game actually suits his superheroing temperament much better than many games we've played over the years. By and large the idea of playing a superhero game with the actual moment-to-moment emphasis in physical activity instead of e.g. an examination of the social relationships of the superhero isn't something we see every day.

In this context, with these players, I was positively surprised by the dynamic imagery in the first session. I suppose it is also indicative of something that a few players were disoriented a few times during that session, exactly because the imagery used so much action visual shorthand, involved lot of milieu switching and storytelling, as it does in good narrative gaming, jumped a bit back and forth as events were arranged and rearranged into causal timelines. When I say that it worked surprisingly well, I'm strictly talking about our own limitations.

The second session also had the basics of the physical action thing, but I feel that the complex setup with the need to establish and embellish so much setting all at once sort of overloaded our meager capabilities, which left the actual action somewhat sketchy and rather disjointed. The muddled creative fundamentals didn't help, obviously - the players didn't catch up on each other's initiatives as much as they should, and too many big moves by the various actors were brushed aside without proper appreciation, which obviously trivializes the events in a game like this without elaborate task resolution rules. A simple lack of practice in physical action expression all around, I think; we'll need to play simpler scenes and pay attention to creating actions that are a) visually interesting and b) narratively meaningful at the same time before trying to do the same with a superhero cross-over event setup.

But anyway, I'm not complaining about these things with the idea that the game designer should or could do something about it, if that's the impression you get; rather, writing down my impressions about the events as they unfold is helpful in improving play as we go forward. I'll definitely pay more attention to the physical set-up and delivery of the action in the third episode myself to get us into rightful practice in that regard. The other players are presumably reading my notes here, so I'm talking to them as much as myself and you, too.

[Eero Tuovinen]

We played a third session, third episode tonight. Took just an hour and a half, which goes to show that we're pretty good with the rules at this point, and also perhaps that we didn't have anything too complex come up fictionally, which kept the turns short.

The episode's stakes were high, as Anastasia had succeeded in all but the last part of her plan: she had her cosmic egg, her fortress of alien sights and sounds in the central park of Petropolis manned by Chthonic superheroes, and now she would destroy the city itself to fuel and prepare her departure from this wretched planet. She began the last stage of her project by stealing a nuclear submarine from the federal navy, with the apparent intent of wreaking untold destruction with the same. Meanwhile Arosusi, in the role of her high priest, managered the towering arbo-organic (large tree, that is) base in the middle of the city, leading citizens in desperate worship of the green light of her power gem (familiar from the first episode, that) that floated gently above the arboreal monument.

Hero-wise, we saw Redshield again, although unfortunately he'd lost the shaky heroic coalition from last episode, so it was just him versus the increasingly indifferent Anastasia. Zukov was again there, I brought him back as the only credible Lex Luthor figure in the entire saga, in the hopes that he'd be able to sneak into her sanctum and mess about with the cosmic egg to stop her at the brink of destruction; my idea was that Zukov's desperation had driven him to abandon the use of cat's paws, putting himself personally on the line in contrast to his previous modus operandi. The third hero was "Metallurg" (I like the name, in Finnish it sounds very Russian, if that makes sense), a steel-framed metal elementalist of some sort, who unfortunately couldn't really form a cachet for himself except as a desperate man willing to put himself in harm's way at a time when most of the world and herodom had abandoned Petropolis as a lost cause.

The session was not extremely short like some we've had, but the Xaos card advantage was felt again, and after three rounds of play A-P knocked, before anybody else could. As Xaos's plan was at the brink of success, A-P had no reason to go for a Gin, so any victory would do; he'd just need to get a minimal hand before anybody else did, which he succeeded in handily despite the extremes we went to with card counting to improve the hero hands. I had a meld of three points for the first time in the campaign myself, but all was for naught, of course, as we'd never had an opportunity to advance a hero; this was as straightforward a curb stomp for Xaos as you can get, basically.

Anastasia's grand ritual activation procedure succeeded as, despite the resistance of the heroes, she used the broken bits and poisonous nuclear materials of the submarine to cause horrifying destruction through the downtown parts of the city, manipulating the machinery of man's industry against him. Once sufficiently satisfied with the levelness of the city center, she ascended her arbo-organic space vessel, integrated her power gem into it, and started a majestic ascent to the sky. The vessel was powered by unknown cosmic principles that leached the world of all color around the ascent site in concentric pulses as the vessel struggled against gravity (unnaturally slowly in comparison to human spacecraft, which hasten to leave the deadly grip of gravity behind as quickly as possible). All that remained of Petropolis in the end was a leveled, unnaturally grey downtown and suburbia in conditions reminiscent of the Roadside Picnic.

As an interesting detail, Zukov managed to penetrate her sanctum moments before the launch, and realized that Anastasia had always foremost been the gem, not the human-like figure everybody had interacted with; certainly explains her penchant for appearing and disappearing seemingly at will, her great endurance and so on. He attempted a coup de main Dr. Doom style on her at the last while having access to her egg/gem, so as to seize "control of her powers" at the last moment, but was overpowered by the cosmic truths, becoming a passenger on her journey to her starry home.

Personally, speaking as a co-author, I wasn't as satisfied with the execution of this story as I was with our "Age of Aquarius" story arc in the spring. The foremost issue, I felt, was that Anastasia herself remained a relatively distant figure, paradoxically more so than Aristoteles Vulcanis, the shadowy mastermind in the earlier campaign, despite Anastasia being all in-your-face and accessible during episodes. To illustrate the alienation: I expected after each episode that the Portrait Moment would reveal to us some concrete, human events that caused Anastasia to turn from a heroic defender of the city into its destroyer (this was something that my hero characters screamed about in frustration through-out, as they could barely understand the depth of the betrayal); however, she never explained her actions, the opportunities were cast aside (from my perspective) in favour of belaboring points that had already been well established in earlier play. I don't quite know whether players shied away from doing anything substantive with Portrait Moments because they didn't have any ideas, or because they were restraining themselves creatively to not "dictate" important backstory to the others - the latter would, of course, be completely ass-backwards as a sentiment here, and probably a habit borne out of other types of games where the idea is largely to delay narrative payoffs indefinitely to maintain a campaign premise.

Another example of the alienation: I thought after the first episode that Anastasia was a pretty romantic figure in the ethereal New Agey space age way you see in some silver age superhero comics and such - there was even a hint of human relationships potentially having existed for her at some point. Think early Silver Surfer, with the existential threat of "does she wish ill upon us" turned up a notch of two. These developments didn't really flower as play progressed, as Anastasia failed to engage in meaningful in-combat dialogue (and when do you communicate in this game if not in the heat of battle, after all) and generally tended towards flouting any attempts at reaching out to her with a quite impersonal and business-like manner, sort of like she was a skirmish unit in a wargame. If I were to personify the creative differences, I'd say that my Anastasia in the first episode had more of an internal life than what was realized in later development.

A third example of the alienation: Arosusi, the minor villain, didn't get much opportunity for character growth through the campaign. Partly this was because of how Doctor Xaos dominated the card play, but mostly it was because of the relatively unimaginative roles and vague missions she assigned to him through-out, to the extent of sidelining most of his potential personal story. He struggled futilely against her, but even that didn't gel into any truly clear moments of character conflict - I am still in the dark about what kind of hold, exactly, she had over him. In the last episode he was literally just a talking head, with no impact upon the events whatsoever.

An illustrative example of how deep into creative muddling we managed to descend at times through the campaign: A-P initiatived the third episode as Doctor Xaos by describing Anastasia stealing the nuclear submarine. Except that his first draft involved Anastasia launching sub-based nuclear missiles at the city (I don't know what it is with A-P and missiles, he's always throwing those at things), which just made the other players go "whut" on it, what with it being so out of her idiom as a cosmic being will ill-defined planetary powers, and her basically throwing a nuke on the very place she had fought for to establish as her base of power in the last episode didn't make an extreme amount of sense to anybody paying attention to the story arc. After Markku called cheese on the nuclear missiles plan, it was revised to her stealing an experimental fusion-powered submarine (that turned into a "catamaran sub" around this time for some reason - rule of cool, I guess) to throw it at the city or some such, at which point Markku got into conniptions about how fusion tech doesn't work like that. We ultimately got past the extremely interesting and plot-relevant issue of nuclear technology ("thorium reactor" apparently satisfied the science geekery sufficiently for us to be able to proceed), but it was certainly a low point in terms of determined and bold narrative brush stroking :D

I can't really pinpoint anything in the game itself as the cause for why the thematic flow of the game felt more disjointed and the contributions of the players generally less vivacious, so it's either the frantic pace of action story-telling (I noticed that the players occasionally spent inordinate amounts of mental energy worrying about the exact timing of who hit who first, whether this kind of blow would go through that kind of force field, would a nuclear reactor really explode like that, and stuff in that vein) stealing attention from the character themes, or the group really playing outside our collective comfort zone in terms of style and such. I've had similar experiences with Zombie Cinema as well on occasion, and I remember thinking how "nosce te ipsum" has special importance for this sort of raw story gaming, insofar as ancient wisdom goes - this type of game will strongly reflect what you bring to it yourself, so if you end up operating outside your visceral creative zone, the outcome easily becomes somewhat aimless and uncertain. In collective average, this crew probably does better with less flashy super powers and more definitive, quick action; a generally more restrained degree of show wrestling aesthetics, one might say. More Frank Miller and less Jack Kirby.

I assume you've already got a surfeit of authentic actual play imagery for your illustration project, Ron, but let me know if you want some word-painting about the fictional details of this particular campaign - I can accommodate.