Thanks one and all, I had fun with this one. It's one of those things where Pierce (Smitty's player) was out for this session, and when we picked up in the middle the next time we just said something like "Yeah, Smitty was off shacking up or something". Introducing this 'love interest' into the Story Hour, which I believe is an important part of any good comic book, has been fun for me to write and a departure from what I've typically done so at times I worry that it's a bit too... I dunno, cheesy or something. Funny part is, the last time we played, Pierce picked right up with my 'revisionist history'; the second we came back from our mission, the first thing he wanted to do is pick up a bottle of booze and go see Maggie
(I love it when players take my lies and turn them into truth).
Pierce's Smitty was perfect for this part too, because he is played so hard-nosed and grim at times, while still having a wry sense of humor; the epitome of the weary American citizen-soldier, doesnt give a crap about the army he's just there to do his job and get home. I swear Pierce is so good sometimes that when he is in-character you could just about picture him on the set of Band of Brothers sharing a smoke with Bill Guarnerre.
But anyway, like I said we play this campaign as a one-off or our main d20 Modern campaign, usually when someone is out for a night (or when our usual GM OldDrewId is a little burned out and needs to take a break), and I've labored very hard to try to make the typical game table switch-out of players as seamless as possible in the Story (hey, with this story, there's already
enough trouble suspending disbelief. I mean, we have a character named
Frogbot, for chrissakes
).
Smitty, BTW, has a Blood and Vigilance power called Super Running, which significantly increases his movement rate (as others do too, which is why they
move like they do in the story sometimes) and Super Dexterity. He stunted an additional power under Super Dexterity called "Swinging" that allows him to effectively fly in urban and jungle environments by running around swinging and running up things, and I've really wanted to write up how I thought that looks. Very spiderman-ish, IMO; I just loved the visual of him tearing down a city street at about 4 times the speed of a normal human running, just bouncing and swinging from building to building about 30 feet over everyones head, so I've been wanting to give the write-up a shot for some time. There will definitely be more in the future.
I appreciate the comments; as I've said before, my muse is a fat, disgusting slob that is basically runs off of vanity, beer, and junk-food. I can handle the beer and junk-food, but it's the few nice folks that take the time to read who really gets him off his fat *ss and producing updates.
Thanks for reading folks, and keep those subscriptions up. In the next issue we'll see a person use another person as a missle weapon, meet a new ESS, and wonder how robots learned to surf...