New thread to discuss the possible restarting of Generation Legacy, among other things.
__________________ Of course I wanted Jim to find the mallard. Make him feel safe. Did you really think I would put my primary listening device in a wooden mallard? I'm not insane. - Dwight K. Schrute
__________________ The purpose if good rules is to remove the necessity of GM fiat as much as is humanly possible.
Rules are required for role-play for the same reason as they are required for combat: to replace the skills of the player with those of the character.
Edit-Oh, can anyone even remember what's happened most recently in the game? A quick recap would be nice. Heck, we could easily fill a small wikipedia with all the game info/background =S
One of the great things about Tokiwong was just how he was so thorough with all his background info/worldbuilding, even though I don't remember all of it I'm stilled wow'd
Last edited by Sollir Furryfoot; 15th June 2008 at 01:51 AM..
I got into the bad habit of not reading the parallel plot threads that didn't involve Mark directly, originally so I wouldn't slip up and have him being more informed than he ought to be and then just because I'm lazy. I remember the broad strokes, mostly.
The Overseer was born on the cyclopean highlands of the big bang, a few billion years ago, but he is still alive. He is an immortal Endless entityish thing, the personification of law and order. He often manifests as a posterior-mounted shaft several miles in length.
The Cardinal created elites to fight the Overseer, but she and Ryan are actually not elites and rather hold some fraction of the Overseer's power. He needs to take their heads and with them, their powers, so there can be only one. Tommy was aware of her nature, and his. He's at least somewhat older than he lets on and may or may not be a conventional elite. I'm foggy on how exactly Kelly fit into all of this. The Cardinal is of the opinion that elites are her property and to be disposed of if they do not serve her will. Bishop is less sanguine about this whole slavery to the Cardinal business and has split from the Cardinal's movement over it.
Cassie is a non-elite, but some kind of genetically engineered supersoldier from the future that was built to battle what might have been Tommy's army of Starbots without personality. They were definitely Star models. I think at some point we discovered that in this future elites and baselines had gone to war and wrecked the planet in the process. I recall an implication that Cassie was created by the Vanguard company, which might have had ties to that bad dictator from Zaire that was recently overthrown.
The Overseer sent to our world some of his major lackeys and I think we were in the process of taking down or had just taken down Genocide on behalf of the Red Witch because we needed to save Kelly's soul. She sent some kind of arcane doppleganger for Yoshi to fight us, which was very upsetting to Mark since he sort of saw Yoshi as where he could have been if he'd done things differently in his life.
Anika appears to be a real-for-real elite, but it seems that her powers actually do involve putting her in touch with something that answers to the names of the Norse gods. When her powers were sitting in Ryan's body they were quite upset to see him on the caller ID.
Mark is the only person that knows him who isn't convinced that he's gay, largely because he has a bit of a block pertaining to things sexual. He's recently noticed that he feels "differently" about some of the guys around the school but so far his Platonic filter is intact. He's an awful leader, as always, given to trading on his personal appeal more than any sense of authority, but damn is he pretty. He's lately realized not only that the UN has done some dirty things like sterilizing elites and working on a way to get rid of them permanently, but also that he's not taken especially seriously by field commanders who are in theory his peers. A few times in recent missions the local UN field command was on an entirely different mission that they didn't bother to tell him about. He came out as an addict, at least to his closer friends and Jun Min put a temporary block on his cravings. There were plans to make a big event out of his coming clean and turning it into a positive for the UN. "Buy my shoes and stay away from drugs, kids!"
I don't remember exactly what Gilden was involved in (save for it not being Anika) or who Anika was currently dating (save for it not being Gilden).
Oh yes, and on Gilden's silver age home world Tommy is a perfectly nice boy that has a dog named Star.
That's all I can remember right now.
__________________ The purpose if good rules is to remove the necessity of GM fiat as much as is humanly possible.
Rules are required for role-play for the same reason as they are required for combat: to replace the skills of the player with those of the character.
Thanks for starting the new thread, HH. I came here to do just that.
Hmmm. I'm pretty sure now that I want to do something (looking through Paragons last night and watching Hulk tonight may have helped somewhat).
I'm not sure I'm convinced I could do GL, though. For starters, it'll be a lot of catching up. Like Samnell, over the last few issues especially, I pretty much skimmed other players' arcs and concentrated on my own due to time restraints. That only makes the fact that I don't really recall what was going that much worse.
Add to that the fact that I've only got the slightest idea where Toki was going with all this. Whenever I thought I was starting to figure things out, he'd throw out a 180 degree revelation that put me back at square one. While I found that cool as it happened, it's a tad confusing to me now as I try to assemble the pieces.
That said, I'll throw it out to you guys. What would you rather do? I think I'd prefer to start my own game, thematically similar to GL, and hold out hope that one day Toki may return. But if you all want to give GL a shot with me at the helm, I'm willing to try, with Toki's blessing, of course.
Oh, and Anika is with Sami. Gilden's crushin on Gadget. I recall Cardinal and Metatron blowing up the school to get Cassie...or was it James? Right, James got kidnapped. Kelly died there. Shal's new PC is Clover. Chaos got demoted, they call him Robbie. The team defied orders to go save kidnapped James. I believe they are about to be blown up by an orbital satellite, thanks to Clover's dad.
'kay, I kinda remember what was going on. Still, lots of reading ahead to try and figure out where everything is going if we go this route.
Maybe if everyone who was still around at the end can post their part of the metaplot, for the sake of catching up and then any greater details
Greater Details: Tommy & Erica being Cardinal's/Erica's children? Tommy killing his sister and then Bishop being Kelly's real father. There was also some side snippet about an anti-elite group called Purity
I'd like to play a game but I haven't had the best track record with being responsible so I might bow out if there's enough people wanting to play (as I'm sure there will be ). I'd definitely watch from the sidelines at least. Probably a new game or at least an AU version would be best, though I would really miss the kind of character depth everyone's characters had (such as Samnell's development of Marc going from drug addict/phony team leader/someone kind of responsible, that could've only been done over a few years IRL)
I think a similarly themed game would be the best bet Agamo, bu it should be up to you.
Legacy info: Kelly was an Elite Mark 2, her mother created the elite nanobots, and then cardinal somehow delivered them world wide. Kelly died fighting Cardinal, Killing Metatron, and possibly the Cassie double in the process. Currently Tommy and her mom are still being held by an American team to try to force them to create super-elites.
Clover had just arrived at the school before the attack by Cardinal and had helped the school pick up the pieces as well as fight. When Legacy was going to kidnap Ryan's friend from the mall to use her power to locate James, Clover stepped in and copied the power going with them instead of letting them kidnap the other, insuring that the UN would have a way to track the team and get Bishop back who the team was jailbreaking.
At the rescue attempt, the teens fought with the UN squad in addition to the enemy, and Clover left with the UN Squad commanded by her father. There is a Sat strike in bound on the location where the teens currently are.
I think an Alternate Universe kind of GL would be best. I doubt that even if we all put our heads together we could reconstruct everything, let alone what Toki had planned. Maybe it could commence a ways into the school year or something to justify some similar-to-before relationships? It could be interesting to re-run things and see if the same stuff emerged too, though.
Since it's unlikely we could figure out the whole Overseer/Cardinal business how Toki would have done, maybe the origin of elites is different and the role of our big bads isn't the same. That's sort of the A plot of the old GL, but are we more invested in that or in the particular characters we were playing and playing with? I realize this is a pretty easy choice for me to make since Mark's main plot points are fairly independent of it, but I understand it would be a harder call for HH and Shal.
There's room for compromise, though. The Overseer could still be the Galactus or Darkseid looming over the metaplot and the Cardinal could still be our Magneto sort of figure. Ok, arguably the Overseer is more like the Anti-Monitor or the Beyonder (now if he shows up with a man-perm...) and the Cardinal is more along the lines of Darkseid. Sheesh, Toki had big enemies for a bunch of teenagers with bad leadership. Fighting Strength and Honor felt a lot more like battling Dr. Doom or Magneto than it did pounding on Sabertooth despite their role as goons-for-hire and sort of personal nemeses for Mark rather than world threads.
__________________ The purpose if good rules is to remove the necessity of GM fiat as much as is humanly possible.
Rules are required for role-play for the same reason as they are required for combat: to replace the skills of the player with those of the character.
By "thematically similar" I didn't quite mean the same game all over again. More of a "ordinary people in an ordinary world with extraordinary abilities" similarity. Doing a reset might be kinda weird.
Hmmm. Could be interesting, too. I gotta say, the school setting is great, lots of mentors and peers to play with as a GM.
There is familiarity in the setting, too. That's both good and bad. It's good to have everyone familiar with the setting, but not so much with the plot.
Then again, I'd change a lot of stuff up. Paragons has some cool concepts that would fit into the Legacy universe really well. Probably start at a lower PL, make whole setting lower PL to ground it a bit more. I think a complete reset would be in order, starting at the middle somewhere might be even more confusing. I'd probably keep some NPCs, change others, add new ones. Heh, Ultimate Generation Legacy, if you will.
Huh, this would be doable if everyone was up for it. It wouldn't be the same thing all over again. Just starting with the similar basic assumptions and taking it in different directions from there.
Bialaska, I think I'd like to cap number of players to start with at 6, so if less then that come back, you're first in line to grab a spot, if you like.
I would prefer AU but the biggest question at that point would be which character, Kelly or Clover. I would like to play Clover, but Kelly was part of a lot of major plot upheavals. Then again she was also super depressing to play at times, though her backstory could be changed to make her a happier person in an AU.
What PL were you thinking of starting wiith? I know there was a slight believability issue with Kelly being able to drop the whole world into an ice age in 6 seconds at PL 9.
Last edited by Shalimar; 15th June 2008 at 10:09 PM..
Can we assume this is the route we'll go then? It is a good compromise between going with something new and keeping the old one going. If so, then this is what I'm thinking:
Core Assumptions:
The beginning of this game will correspond pretty much with the beginning of the original, with similar background:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Toki
The world of the Legacy Universe is one going through several changes, as the world adapts to the appearance of super-human beings with powers beyond the ken of normal mortals. World Governments have banned together to assess the threat that the Elites pose to normal humanity, or "baselines" as most people refer to non-powered humans.
Elites have been in existence since 2010, after the arrival of Ghenther's Comet, an unknown comet that passed through Earth space in the summer of 2010. The first documented elite was Michael McCoy, also known as Miracle, an elite capable of controlling the primal forces of the world to great effect. He was able to manipulate the Earth to create a barrier in order to shield himself from an out of control semi-truck. Since his appearance, elites have appeared consistently over the intervening ten years.
One of the best-known elites is the international hero, Paragon, an advocate for peaceful integration of elites and baselines. He is one of the most powerful elites on the planet and the team leader of Justice Elite, an international team of elites who work for the newly strengthened United Nations to protect baselines from elite threats. They do double duty as spokespeople and humanitarian throughout the world, with such efforts as the terraforming of the Sahara desert, and furthering study into the elimination of disease and cancer.
In general elites tend to be viewed with awe by most folks of the world, powerful beings who are capable of either great good, or even greater evil in the eyes of most baselines. They often make headlines, and live public lives if they do not maintain a secret identity.
PCs are teens, aged 15 through 19, having developed their abilities recently, and have joined the Mudaba Adin Institute for Elite Children to learn about their new power, be with those like them, or maybe because they were sent there, whatever.
Also, do what you like for a PC. No one is beholden to their old PCs if you want to go with something different. Make no assumptions as to who is important to what, why, when or where. To make the game fresh and interesting, all of that needs to be dropped.
Though things like will look similar on the surface, I've already got a good idea on how to change the fundamental structure of what's going on and why.
Of course, backgrounds, personality and motivations are most important in these games, but if you want to mess around with builds, I'm thinking an 80 point, PL 6 ceiling to start, with 40 points minimum going to the baseline build and then the rest going to adding the powers, feats, skills, stats or anything else enhanced by elite powers. You can use Ultimate Power if you have access, and in fact, I encourage that.
Last edited by Agamon; 17th June 2008 at 12:49 AM..
Would you be open to things from Hero High? Feats like Cool, Disarming, and Untapped Potential, or is that stuff out of bounds?
As a siide note I think I would like to go with Kelly although it would be a Kelly with a lot less drama in her background. I'll also build up a Clover to see what she looks like at a low PL 6. I'll make a final choice at that point based on the group and the builds if Agamon is willing to have me.
By "thematically similar" I didn't quite mean the same game all over again. More of a "ordinary people in an ordinary world with extraordinary abilities" similarity. Doing a reset might be kinda weird.
Fair point. There are degrees of similarity. Ultimate Spider-Man, at least while I was reading, seemed like a modernization that was extremely faithful to the basic essence of the original character. Ultimate X-Men...not so much.
I was thinking aloud about a game that maintained most of the major figures, but maybe not their plotlines. Then again the Overseer/Cardinal/Ryan/Kelly business was a major series of major revelations to us so it does straddle the line a bit between same plots and same people. Anyway, just ideas. I'm quite content to start from scratch-ish again. I really liked the Bronze-Age-but-realistic sense GL started with. I suspect Toki's inspiration leaned more towards Teen Titans than my own New Mutants fixation, but the young heroes genre is broad enough for both to coexist.
Quote:
Hmmm. Could be interesting, too. I gotta say, the school setting is great, lots of mentors and peers to play with as a GM.
And you never need an excuse to introduce new powered people. They're new students or teachers.
Quote:
Huh, this would be doable if everyone was up for it. It wouldn't be the same thing all over again. Just starting with the similar basic assumptions and taking it in different directions from there.
I'm in!
__________________ The purpose if good rules is to remove the necessity of GM fiat as much as is humanly possible.
Rules are required for role-play for the same reason as they are required for combat: to replace the skills of the player with those of the character.
Damn... I really don't know if I want to reimagine Mark or try something completely different. It's not helping that several times I half-wrote a dream sequence where Mark grew up happy and well-adjusted in an affluent home, had a little brother named Tommy, was Platonic life partners with Star, and best swim team buds with Yoshi. At one point it was going to be a recurring dream to juxtapose with his flashbacks to breaking the hand of a freshly-dead acquaintance to get the drugs back.
But I have lots of other ideas for teenage heroes too and I could always mix some of the traits I might want to revisit from Mark with some of those.
__________________ The purpose if good rules is to remove the necessity of GM fiat as much as is humanly possible.
Rules are required for role-play for the same reason as they are required for combat: to replace the skills of the player with those of the character.
Would you guys be going with Mark, Ryan, and Cassie again?
I'm far from deciding, myself. There's a lot about Mark I could see revisiting, but a lot that also depended on original GL continuity that would not necessarily be the same. I might end up with someone thematically similar to Mark but with different powers, somebody completely different with the same powers, or something totally unrelated.
Whatever I make will definitely have a few twists and kinks to the personality and backstory. I can get really excited about making a gosh-wow-honest-to-goodness type, but I can't sustain interest in playing them very long. I'm too cynical for Superman's personality.
__________________ The purpose if good rules is to remove the necessity of GM fiat as much as is humanly possible.
Rules are required for role-play for the same reason as they are required for combat: to replace the skills of the player with those of the character.
Whatever I make will definitely have a few twists and kinks to the personality and backstory. I can get really excited about making a gosh-wow-honest-to-goodness type, but I can't sustain interest in playing them very long. I'm too cynical for Superman's personality.
What you need is someone that isn't really gosh-wow-good, but trying their damnedest to be so. Anika was fun to play.
Speaking of which, Anika's one of the regulars that definitely won't be in this game. I'm way too attached to that character, and there's nothing I hate more than DM's with their pet NPCs.
AU Gen Legacy universe sounds good. I really need to spend at least a day to evaluate if I can commit to a game, I'd like to think I'm a bit more responsible these days but I haven't had the best track record for keeping them up. I know a few folks here were going to be in a PBP I started called Transcendence Now, depending on how many are interested I might try resurrecting that if I come back to play in this one.
). I'd definitely watch from the sidelines at least. Probably a new game or at least an AU version would be best, though I would really miss the kind of character depth everyone's characters had (such as Samnell's development of Marc going from drug addict/phony team leader/someone kind of responsible, that could've only been done over a few years IRL)
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