The Replacement JLA: Session Three - Blink's mom has got it going on

We had our long delayed third session of the DC Adventures campaign on Saturday. (Sometimes it sucks being adults with grown up responsibilities.) It's not easy gtting all of us together but kudos to Casey who has the longest trip and to Eric for running the game after he put in a very long shift. I think it's a tribute to Eric's skill that we were still enthusiastic after the lengthy delay.

Link to the first session
Link to the second session

Everybody was there this week. The crew:

• Eric was the GM.
• Casey played Blink, a brilliant geneticist who developed a process for granting super powers. Before the game started, he gave himself teleporting powers and then made sure that his notes on his process were destroyed forever.  FOREVER.
• Frederick played Rächen Bloodson, son of Etrigan and Morgan La Fey.  He's a treasure hunter, recoverer of supernatural artifacts. We haven't really explored the angle, but Eric says that if we need a change of pace for a session, Rächen's day job is a ready made hook for Indiana Jones type adventures.
  
• Frederick's stepson Danny ran Plastic Man.
• Dave played the Great American Hero guy he ran in the first session. He still lacks a heroic and an actual name. When we need to talk about him, we call him "Ralph" or Mister Hinkley.
• and I was Dawnfire, the Super-Ingenue.

The game opened with a fight against a pair of PL 14 bruisers who were harassing some made men. These guys were monsters. At one point Eric mentioned that they had a toughness score of 20! Fortunately, their will value was only 6 and Rachen has an attack that targets his opponent's will. If they were played to the fullest of their abilities, I don't think we would have beaten them with the amount of teamwork we displayed, but they were just a pair of two-bit goons amped up to superhuman levels, so fortunately they were as bad as their jobs as we are.

The fight wasn't my favorite battle of the campaign. We had a bunch of participants, and Danny bogged it down a little with Plastic Man deciding if he should move from place to place as a pogo stick or a hang glider or an Easter Bunny on tank treads or whatever. A couple rounds in, he settled on a putty-colored T-Rex with goggles.  Eric's good at responding to that kind of behavior without encouraging it, and it did lead to one laugh out loud moment where the T-Rex ate one of the mafiosi by mistake, prompting Frederick to quip "Itsa me, Mario!"

We finished the fight, rescued the civilians, and did do the thing that you do in a comic book super brawl. I was on the roof top when the battle ended. Eric had been calling for perception rolls the whole time and despite having a decent score and super senses, I kept missing it. What were rolling to notice was the bomb and the camera strapped to each of the bad guys. We were apparently being monitored by a shadowy mastermind and he detonated the bombs when he saw his goons were licked. Of the PCs, only Plastic Man was close enough to be hurt by the explosion and no tears were shed over that.

After the fight we performed super hero damage control and talked to the "legitimate businessmen" who had been the targets of the goons. They said there was a push to consolidate the gangs in the absence of super-powered opposition, and they were seeing a lot of pressure from the one gang in Metropolis that used a lot of alien technology.  I knew, as the group's resident Superman fanboy, that that the guy was talking about Intergang, but that's not something my character would know, so I just kept my mouth shut.

I called my dad at Cadmus to help with the cleanup, which pissed off "Batman", (I again failed my perception roll. Cadmus rolled in while we were still rescuing people and I was totally oblivious to my dad in the hazmat suit waving and mouthing "Hi, honey!") and we traced the signal (and the trail of destruction) to a nearby apartment. The apartment housed a lab where the procedures had been performed. Blink felt the techniques seemed awfully familiar.

We beamed up to the JLA satellite, and Mister Terrific ("Fair Play!") was tasked with analyzing our clues. (I think this is another way where Eric's format for the campaign really works. We have a lot of NPCs in a support role, allowing us to focus on playing characters that interest us and not worry so much about what they bring to the party's capabilities) He determined  that the process to which the bad guys had been subjected was still on-going. The way I read that was that they were subjected to the procedure and then released to cause havoc while they were still metabolizing this Vitameatavegamin cocktail. That implied to me a time limit, that they were going to burn themselves out in short order, so this sinister mastermind behind everything cut them loose as soon as as was viable in order to maximize their time in the field. That's just conjecture, though.

Dave's character figured that that the explosives were of extraterrestrial origin, leading to this exchange.

Mister Terrific: Cadmus would love to get their hands on that.
Katy: Hey! Cadmus does a lot of humanitarian work!
Rächen: So does Lexcorp.
Katy: *sulk*

Mister Terrific mentioned something about Ohio, which reminded Blink that he needed to use the bathroom. He teleported to his mom's house in Ohio, which tipped Mister Terrific that something was up, because he had only mentioned the general location and not that exact address. So "Batman" gathered us all up and we teleported down to Blink's mom's house, and his past came out. He had been involved in the family business as a slightly younger man, and the family business was super-villainy. His dad, apparently, was still active, and he seemed to be the ones creating the supervillains with Blink's techniques, and he was going to use Mrs. Blink (Maggie) as leverage to keep junior out of the picture. Blink did an end-run around that by moving his mom up to the satellite. (Somebody mentioned that in two days, we're going to find her smoking a post-coital cigarette with John Constantine.)

It was a short session, but I'm glad we had it. We laid a little more groundwork, and there's a love triangle developing between Blink, the Huntress and Ralph. Ralph and the Huntress had a nice meal together, and she apparently digs his magnificent perm, but Blink is exploring their shared history. (Both of them come from criminal families)

Overall? Solid, if short outing, with a good mix of action and RP. I'm looking forward to the next one.