This road is symbolic of the early part of the adventure being discussed today – well-built but with the occasional unexpected bend. Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

This article started out as a way to save time and at the same time present some tips and tricks that often get overlooked in my scramble to get material ready for publication here. It was also intended (originally) to be part of last week’s 1000th-post celebration – so there are certain themes that will be continuation of the discussion of milestones – but that post grew to the point where I hadn’t even started on this and it was time to publish.

It also grew a LONG way beyond anything reasonable in very short order. As I write this, it’s probably only about half-done, and already measures more than 46,500 words!

The only solution is to break it up. And I don’t think I’m safe in breaking it into just two – instead, I’m looking at three parts. The problem is trying to estimate where the breakpoints should be, given that so much of it isn’t written yet.

But, there’s nothing that says that it has to be three equal divisions; that’s ideal, but not essential. So I’ve decided to break it along logical lines. I’m going to start by discussing the structural concepts, and a very broad breakdown of the actual application in play. I’ll conclude part 1 with excerpted synopses from the early part of the adventure and some notes concerning the content in general.

Part 2 will excerpt more synopses from the second major phase of the adventure – the ‘middle part’ of the movie trilogy, as it were – while Part 3 will cover the third part (so far), and look ahead (so far as is possible and practical, given that I don’t want to give my players too many spoilers) to the what will eventually be the equivalent of the fourth and fifth parts of this ‘trilogy’.

Along the way, I’ve observed all sorts of subtle tricks and tips that often get overlooked when dealing with more specific aspects of the art and craft of writing and running good adventures, which I’ll be calling out. These are things that I’m sometimes not even aware that I’m doing, recognizable only in hindsight. and that can be applied to the betterment of any number of campaigns, regardless of genre.

And there will be bits of material generated for this sweeping epic adventure – NPCs, game physics, alien races, local game settings, and more – that will also be potentially transferable to other campaigns.

Above all, though, this will strive to show you what I actually did in terms of writing and refereeing the adventure, and why I did things that way. This is as close a I can come to having readers actually look over my shoulder while I’m working, with me supplying a running commentary – and with (almost) all the tedious bits cut out. It will be a sometimes bumpy but very interesting ride!

As usual, when posting something this big and potentially ponderous, I’ll try to intersperse something smaller and lighter aimed at a slightly different part of the RPG audience. That helps both readers and myself stave off burnout!

The Tangled Web

When the previous Zenith-3 campaign (now referred to as Earth-Halo – something that I’ll explain a little later) began winding its way to a conclusion, there was a serious fork in the road presented by my players. My plans assumed one thing (and had done so from the very first game session), and what my players expected and were looking forward to was something very different.

Well, I could only give them about 70% of what they asked for, but that would be the best 70%. But it also meant that some of what I had originally intended would have to intrude upon, and form another layer of, this revised campaign.

This diagram illustrates the situation, and the solution, reasonably well. The players expected A, and then B, and then C. I expected to give them just C, with the occasional side-dish of A or B. My solution was to give them mostly B with recurring forays into A, conducting the two in parallel. That makes perfect sense because A, B, and C are all set in different parallel worlds. The way it works is that I can given them about 95% of A, about 5% of B, and about 50% of C – just enough to tie up all the loose ends, resolve every plot line that I intend the campaign to resolve, and for everything to climax at exactly the right point.

In fact, once I started compiling notes and plot arcs and putting everything together, the final plan came to look not only far better than either ABC or C alone would have been, but also pretty inevitable. I might have found this optimum configuration of ‘going where the story was’ without this compromise of expectations, but I equally might not. So I am far from unhappy about the outcome.

But that did mean that the plots weren’t entirely of the shape expected; when an important piece of a plotline in C is now happening in A, without any reasonable connection between them, you need to cut the diamond in two. Plotline A1 now needs a new resolution, while Plotline C1 needs a new “A1 equivalent’ component to make sense of future events.

Most of those problems weren’t too difficult to solve, using a variety of techniques. You’ll get to see some of them, and the inter-dimensional interplay that they created, described at the start of the first extracted synopsis.

One in particular, though, was more of a mess. The only way to solve it was with a protracted plot arc set in C. And thus, “The Tangled Web” was born.

The idea was, essentially, to create a whole new campaign set in C – call it D for identification purposes – in which all the pieces of this complicated plot arc, utterly necessary to other things along the way, could play out, essentially using the exact same technique – a campaign within a campaign within a campaign. In essence, every now and then, the PCs would jump out of the AB/C depicted in the diagram and instead jump into D for a while – and then go right back to where they had left from.

The adventure that this post (and the next, and the next) are all about is the one in which that D campaign gets established.

The Road To Hell is paved with plotlines (because intentions are never enough)

Have you ever noticed that pilot episodes of new TV series, or series reboots, are often double or even triple the length of any one episode? It’s not always the case, but it’s often true. That’s because there’s a lot to establish for the first time before the series can be considered a “stable” platform for the rest of the stories in that particular season, or the whole series, to play out in.

It’s often so with RPG campaigns, too – the first adventure is usually far longer than the expected norm.

“The Tangled Web” is certainly not an exception. In part, that’s because I felt it necessary to immerse the players in the new environment for a while. In part, it’s because I started using the creation of the campaign infrastructure as a vehicle for encounters and plots. In part, it’s because the PCs abilities effectively gave them almost unlimited time to get themselves set up and that takes a while to play out in real time. And, in part, it’s to give the new sub-campaign a concrete sense of plausibility. This was no light “what if” being played out, in which there could be lots of hand-waving; the players would be making decisions that would affect not only the course of the whole “D campaign”, but which would have ramifications and consequences back in the normal AB/C campaign.

The “Tangled Web” Itself

The sub-campaign’s plot framework rested on the PCs adopting a whole new set of identities, and adventuring in the guise of those identities. When you boil it down, the current adventure is fairly simple in structure:

1. Establish the need for the new identities
2. Establish a problem that meant it was these PCs who had to do the work
3. Establish the new identities in the minds of the players
4. Get the players used to the new identities
5. Explore the short-term ramifications of the new identities
6. Establish the basic infrastructure of the new campaign
7. Establish the new identities in the minds of “the public”
8. Resolve the original problem

Hey Presto! – ongoing sub-campaign that could progress at the speed of plot, and would last until it was no longer needed.

Items 1 and 2 on that list were taken care of in game session 2, after game session 1 was used to advance other plotlines from the AB/C campaign and tie up a few loose ends that I didn’t want to leave dangling for the whole of this adventure, effectively creating a baseline, character-wise.

Items 3 and 4, and some of the campaign background, formed a little mini-campaign inside the sub-campaign. So now we are four layers deep!

Items 5, and 6 are the part of the adventure currently playing out, and also form a mini-campaign within the overall adventure.

Items 7 and then 8 are to be the ‘operational phase’ of the new sub-campaign.

An Established Campaign

Ah, if only it were that simple. The Tangled Web came with a number of complicating curses.

• Legacies of the originally-intended campaign structure;
• Legacies of the ‘brilliant compromise’ (both of these should be no surprise, they were implied by what I’ve written above);
• Legacies of the fact that the AB/C campaign had been running for years, and the players were starting to get fairly comfortable with their characters’ situations, and seeing regular progress on some of the ongoing plotlines;
• Legacies of the fact that the AB/C campaign had been running for years, and the characters were fairly well established in the minds of the players; and
• Legacies of the plot elements and situations that had to come out of this ‘black box’.

Accommodating all of those meant that there was more campaign to establish than usual, and a few revelations to disburse, and some sacred cows to slay. In particular, I needed time for the players to settle in before they started making decisions about their futures, and that gave me the opportunity to introduce them to some building blocks for the future.

Some of those were always intended to be there, and some of them were simply me being creative – “I need something, this is a something that I haven’t done before and it makes sense in context, connecting the campaigns past to its future”. In other words, things that seemed to be good ideas at the time – time will tell whether they are as good as they appeared!

Structure Of this particular sub-campaign

If you look at the adventure from a high-level overview perspective, it becomes even simpler than the 8-part listing given earlier:

• Phase One: A Sense Of Reality / Spy Games
• Phase Two: The Long Walk
• Phase Three: The Road Trip
• Phase Four: Putting Down Roots
• Phase Five: The Final Plotline

But that’s a very superficial view of reality. When you display the logical structure, it becomes a bit more complicated:

• Phase One
  • A Sense Of Reality
  • Spy Games Pt 1
  • Spy Games Pt 2
• Phase Two: The Long Walk
  • Brazil to Jamaica to Guatemala to Guatemala
  • Guatemala to Tabasco
  • Tabasco to Veracruz
  • Veracruz to Leon
  • Leon to Coahuila
  • Coahuila to Laredo. Texas
  • Into Yesterday (times 30)
• Phase Three: The Road Trip
  • Road Trip Prep – Laredo Texas
  • Texas to Texarcana
  • Arkansas, Day 1 [Now!]
  • Arkansas, Day 2
  • Arkansas, Day 3
  • Arkansas, Day 4 & Rendezvous
  • Player’s Option: Missouri, Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
  • Player’s Option: Kansas Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
  • Player’s Option: Nebraska Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
  • A Place To Call Home
• Phase Four: Putting Down Roots
  • Player’s Alternative: Days 5-16
  • The Quest For Fame: Days 17-25
  • High Commerce & Misdemeanors
• Phase Five: The Final Plotline
  • On The Road Again (Day 26 to Oklahoma)
  • Rendezvous
  • Mission
  • Homecoming I: Shadowbase
  • Homecoming II: Zurich
  • Gifts For The Giving (Political Ramifications & Thank-yous)
  • Homecoming III: Be It Ever So Humble (Earth-Regency)

Even that view doesn’t capture the whole complexity. I can’t go into too much more detail at this point, because we’re still in Arkansas Day 1 – and I’m still writing (almost finished) Arkansas Day 2.

So let’s take a closer look at the five phases, and their content, and I’ll tell you what I can – ie, what the players already know.

Phase One: A Sense Of Reality / Spy Games

This provides the foundation for the sub-campaign. It divides into three key parts:

• A Sense Of Reality
• Spy Games Pt 1
• Spy Games Pt 2

The first part is simply housekeeping, moving the main campaign forwards, establishing the state of the PCs at the start of the adventure, and foreshadowing what was to come.

The second part was mostly an info-dump, dressed up as interactively as I could make it. After some color to show the PCs “the state of the technological art” – i.e. what was possible and what wasn’t (important since they were used to 2055 in Dimension A (Earth Regency), about 100 years more advanced than Dimension C (1986 Earth-Prime), I briefed the PCs on the relevant local parts of the game history (in more detail than they had seen before, and advanced by about 2 game years since the last report the players had read), and established the need for them to Go Covert to deal with the immediate threat, and any similar threats that might arise in the future. It also dealt with the “how” of that covert operation.

The third part was a deliberate tonal contrast to the grim seriousness of the second, and dealt with the question of how you sneaked into someplace that was both paranoid and had state-of-the-art technology and lots of it. It also showed that global politics produced some strange bedfellows, which in turn influenced those bedfellows in unexpected ways, and broadened some of the simplistic views held by the players on behalf of their characters.

Phase Two: The Long Walk

Phase Two gets the PCs into position to start their primary mission. It uses distance as a plot vehicle, and had almost as much in common with a fantasy campaign as it did super-heroics.

It breaks down naturally into seven legs, most of which are very similar in nature:

• Brazil to Jamaica to Guatemala to Guatemala
• Guatemala to Tabasco
• Tabasco to Veracruz
• Veracruz to Leon
• Leon to Coahuila
• Coahuila to Laredo. Texas
• Into Yesterday (times 30)

The first part simply used Spy Games Part 2 to propel the party from Brazil to Central America. The Jamaican intermission laid groundwork for what was to follow and did a little foreshadowing, while drawing a line under the “Spy Games” – it marked the completion of the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2. And, appropriately therefore, it had one last little gasp of the Spy Games.

Parts 2 through 6 essentially had the same basic internal structure:

• Border, first impressions
• Transportation Tech
• Border to Ruler, Local color along the way
• Interaction with the Ruler & Court, Assigned challenge / mini-adventure
• Ruler to scene of challenge / mini-adventure
• Challenge / mini-adventure
• Progress to next border via intermediary points

Each one would put a somewhat different spin on this basic formula; it would have its own technology, its own society and culture, it’s own roleplayed interactions, and so on. There was also an ongoing plot thread as the team and their escort first came to respect each other, then to trust each other, and then to become friends and (unofficial) allies. This also created fresh perspectives on the political briefing that they had been given, and further advanced plotlines that had started in preceding adventures, so it greatly enriched the game world as experienced by the PCs.

In terms of game sessions, the basic structure generally broke down into two game sessions in each Mexican Kingdom. In general, each challenge / mini-adventure started with a cliffhanger, so that marked the dividing line between the first game session and the second. But I did not hold to a slavish consistency; I simply stopped play at the first “good” point when time was running out. A “good” point was one that was convenient first, and dramatic, second.

Those trends all came to a mini-crescendo (the imminent end of the world) in part 7, which also gave the players the tools for part 8, which is where the players were “given the keys” and started actually dictating the pace and content to at least some extent.

It should never look like there’s a GM pulling the strings, at least not to the PCs, even if events are the result of complex interactions between GM and players at a meta-level. While some things will be the result of “life just happens”, if it’s an important decision, players should be given as much latitude to decide things for themselves – even if that involves a certain amount of tedium.

In this case, the players decided how far back in time they were going to go. There were obvious benefits to them of having more prep time, but there were also obvious difficulties and consequences made clear to them. The rational minimum choice was 4 days, the maximum reasonable was 30 days, and it was up to them where they landed in that range. They decided to push things to the maximum, which simply meant that the consequences of that decision would be more severe and require more effort to overcome.

Phase Three: The Road Trip

Phase two had used distance as a plot vehicle by spacing disparate cultures and situations far enough apart that one was distinctively different from another. Phase three uses travel itself as a plot vehicle; instead of events dictating where and when the PCs go, as in phase 2, in phase 3, where and when the PCs go dictates events.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Road Trip Prep – Laredo Texas
• Texas to Texarcana
• Arkansas, Day 1 [Now!]
• Arkansas, Day 2
• Arkansas, Day 3
• Arkansas, Day 4 & Rendezvous
• Player’s Option: Missouri, Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
• Player’s Option: Kansas Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
• Player’s Option: Nebraska Days 1, 2, 3, & 4
• A Place To Call Home

The breakdown is more complicated, simply because it has to accommodate decisions that the players haven’t made yet. The original plan that was given to them was that they should do a little basic research on the four states most suited to their various purposes – Arkansas, Missouri,, Kansas, and Nebraska, that they should spend a day or two finding a base of operations in their chosen state, then rush off to Oklahoma and what is now Phase 5.

The players were more pessimistic, and decided to give themselves more time to thoroughly explore each state instead of making a relatively blind choice. And that their lives would be considerably easier if they established their new superheroic identities in the public consciousness (and in the consciousness of law-enforcement) before the real curtain went up. So they decided to spend 4 days on each state, then establish their chosen base of operations (which is what’s now Phase 3), spend as long as necessary making it ready to operate and getting that 15 minutes of fame (in Phase 4) before putting it all to its intended use in Phase 5.

So, if that’s what they decided to do, that’s what we would do. But I think they underestimated how successful they could or would be; having made a start in Arkansas (simply because it’s the closest one of their targets to their Texas starting point) I doubt that they will feel any need to look at the others. Which means that instead of only having Days 17-25 to set up shop and get semi-famous, they will probably have days 5-25 for the purpose.

In fact, I expect there to be serious hesitation about continuing the search past Day 1, but think that the NPCs have a reasonable argument about it being worth at least doing the one state properly. And that hesitation will probably double after Day 2! I’ll do my game prep according to what they look likely to decide, using the prevailing winds; if there are any interesting encounters that get bypassed, I’ll involve them in Phase 4.

Each of the “Days” can be further broken down into a series of overlapping repeated structures, each elegantly simple. The main one is:

• Drive to the next town;
• Check their Guidebook’s entry for the town en route;
• Drive through it looking for potential Bases Of Operations (BOps);
• Evaluate the suitability of the town;
• Evaluate the suitability of each potential BOps;
• Leave town.

Repeat, again and again. It’s the difference of one community from another that makes each evaluation, each in-game event, more than just a repetition. The PCs have broken up into two teams with one NPC and two PCs each operating independent of the other, doubling the speed with which events occur in-game.

Over the top of that, and helping to draw out or add to the distinctiveness of each local exploration, are a number of other recurring loops:

• The roads are in different conditions, and that makes an occasional point of difference;
• The cars they have chosen have limited range. Every now and then they have to refuel – but they are on a very tight budget (not as bad as it originally looked, but still…
• A ten-minute break every couple of hours to freshen up and grab a snack, depending on what’s available;
• A driver change every 4 hours behind the wheel, or more often as necessary;
• Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. The basic plan they have chosen is to rise at the break of dawn, Eat, and get underway about 20 minutes later;
• After 12 hours (which includes the lunch break and the scheduled rest stops, they are finished for the day and can start looking for a campsite with about an hour’s daylight to set up their tents, and get an evening meal;
• Once the sun sets, each team goes over the choices they have encountered each day, and winnows their list down to the best three candidates so far (assuming that they find that many; one has, so far, one hasn’t – yet). They then have a team meeting to discuss any team policy questions and generally check in with each other before they call it a night.

Spicing all of that up even more, there are occasional encounters of an interesting nature. These started back in Phase 2, and will continue throughout Phases 3 and 4 – and, presumably, into Phase 5 as well. Those become more frequent on Day 2 (at the moment, I haven’t started really preparing Day 3, that will depend on decisions the PCs will make at the end of Day 1).

Each community is being extensively researched and illustrated.

And yes, for those who may be interested, I’m not only tracking how fast the cars are traveling at any given point, what that speed is doing to their fuel economy, how far they are traveling at those speeds (to the 10th of a mile) and how long travel and exploration are taking each team each time according to the size of the community and what there is to see (to the minute) using a spreadsheet created for the purpose. It also tracks time spent on the breaks and refueling, and on other interruptions, and how far ahead or behind schedule they are.

So it’s going to be up to the players when they end Phase Three by moving to the final part – the purchase and setting up of their chosen base. I don’t even know what that will entail at this point, because it’s going to depend on which location they choose. As the time gets closer, I’ll have a better idea – for example, right now, there is one leading contender. By the end of Day 1 (if not sooner), there will be a short-list, and the methodology that one of the NPCs came up with – (a) because that’s kinda his Shtick, and (b) because it did what the players wanted it to do in an obviously-rational way – keeps that shortlist down to three contenders each. So I will have a shortlist of maybe six to deal with when the time comes.

Phase Four: Putting Down Roots

If the players cut their road trip short (I expect them to, but don’t know how short), then game-time days will move from Phase Three to Phase 4. The first listed part of this phase is nothing more than a placeholder for any such ‘extra in-game time’; officially, Phase 4 starts with Day 17:

• Player’s Alternative: Days 5-16
• The Quest For Fame: Days 17-25
• High Commerce & Misdemeanors

Any extra days will be exactly the same, content-wise, as days 17-25. I actually expect this to be about 50-50 GM planned events and player-chosen activities. It will be interesting seeing what they decide to do to fill their time! Large parts of this time will also probably be hand-waved.

Day 26 is when things start getting real. Half of Day 26 is in Phase 4, and half in Phase 5 – the PCs have to do certain things with financing to preserve the timeline that they have already experienced, a card that I can also use to make sure that Day 2 (and potentially, days 3 and 4) of Arkansas exploration take place as planned. This will also let me increase the amount of hand-waving that I do, and potentially complicate the PCs lives for a while in days 5-16 if they choose The Player’s Alternative.

This is an important point that’s worth emphasis: the structure, for all that it looks quite structured and orderly, is actually dynamic, and will change with PC decisions. Variable constraints like “Experienced History” give me a measure of control over what game prep I have to do!

It’s probably worth noting, too, that if it weren’t for Covid lockdowns (which have cost us about 6 game sessions, to date) mean that right now, the campaign should be close to finishing up Day 2, instead of being in the middle of Day 1..

Phase Five: The Final Plotline

Which brings me to the last part of this adventure, and the reason why it is all one big adventure – Phase 5 is all about preventing the problem that the PCs were hit with back in Spy Games Part 1 from becoming an emergency that could and would reshape world politics, undoing a lot of the progress that has been made behind the scenes in the campaign over the two years (game time) that I mentioned earlier.

The structure is quite straightforward:

• On The Road Again (Day 26 to Oklahoma)
• Rendezvous
• Mission
• Homecoming I: Shadowbase
• Homecoming II: Zurich
• Gifts For The Giving (Political Ramifications & Thank-yous)
• Homecoming III: Be It Ever So Humble (Earth-Regency)

It starts with the PCs driving to Oklahoma from wherever they have set up their BOps. This will be a very compressed variation on the basic pattern of Phase 3. On Day 27, in Rendezvous, they will meet up with the Agent who discovered the problem (and who has continued to investigate it since his initial reports). It’s also when there starts being two copies of the same character in the same dimension at the same time (even though they are different points on their personal timeline), which is extremely wearing and will reduce the PCs firepower significantly, a consequence the PCs have already experienced, and noticed, but whose cause they misinterpreted at the time.

That then leads them into the actual Mission that they have done all this traveling to complete. They have no idea what’s going to be involved but they know that the critical day will be Day 30. At a specific time on Day 30, for a few hours, there will in fact be three copies of them co-existing, and they will really feel the strain. Again, they have already experienced this, though they misunderstood the real reasons why it was happening at the time.

These effects were deliberately set up to avoid “The Cheating Student” solution to PCs with time-travel capability who are experiencing time pressure.

A student who can time travel is facing a big exam. He knows that with an extra week/month/whatever to cram, he can get a passing grade. So he time travels into his past to get that extra time prior to the big exam.

The superhero equivalent is, “We’ve got this problem, let’s time-travel into the past and spend a month or two coming up with strategies and tactics and rehearsing them endlessly”.

It makes problems too easy to solve, and makes gameplay boring as all heck. The general principle that gets applied is that if there are N of you active in the same space-time at the same time, each of them is diminished to only one (N+1)th of their usual capabilities. The in-game physics that justifies this restriction is complicated and not really relevant here.

The alternative is to permit time-travel to generate infinite points of skills on demand. And the dues-ex-machinas that it circumvents are enormous. “Okay, so we need a supernova reactor to stop this guy? I’ll just go back 25 years and start whipping one up – and here it is, now.”

Not on my watch, bucko.

Oh, and you can’t use a different dimension to get around this restriction because the two parallel worlds are linked by your personal timeline for the duration – so, in this respect only, they can be considered one for such purposes.

Homecoming I takes the PCs back to their new base, wherever it is, and mothballs it ready for the next time they need it.

Homecoming II then has them head off to Zurich to report to the agency that put them onto this sleight-ride in the first place.

Gifts for the Giving is all about saying thank you to those who helped them achieve the mission; they include setting up a more formal informal relationship with their new ally, and pleading the case of a bunch of Alien Refugees that they have encountered, and so on.

And finally, Homecoming III takes them back to Earth-Regency and starts reintegrating them with the lives that they had to put on hold back in the first part of the first phase.

Just The Beginning

Of course, at some future point, they will be summoned to resume their lives as Team Shadow. It might be next week, or next month – it’s unlikely to be tomorrow, and it’s very unlikely to be more than a couple of months away, but within these limits, all bets are off!

The Size Of The Web

This adventure ie reasonably vast in scope for all that it’s been fairly tightly confined, and sweepingly epic in many other respects.

So far,

• 3,887 words of high-level planning, and
• 249,632 words of adventure (on 381+ pages), and
• 12,315 words of reference material, and
• 36,145 more words of research (some of which was described in How Good Is That Rust-bucket In The Showroom Window?), and
• 768 words of notes, have been done – that’s about 302,747 words in total!
• …plus 4 spreadsheets (including the one offered in The Price of Bricks and Soil (and more) a couple of weeks ago, and
• 1,593 photographs & illustrations, including maps (with some duplication and redundancy)…

…have all been done, and I’m doing more all the time. I want to at least get to the end of “Day 2” before stopping work.

All that represents a huge investment in time, too. But that’s how it is that I am 6-7 game sessions ahead of play in my game prep, and, of course, I started about two years ago.

More Complications: Day 2

I wasn’t originally going to explain this, but it gives a false impression if I don’t.

On Day 2, there’s an option (that the players will decide on at the end of Day 1) for a side-trip for one of the cars. I started by writing one version of Day 2 where they take that side-trip, and found that about half-way through the side-trip they would probably conclude that it had served its’ purpose and cut it short.

Now, I’m working on the version of Day 2 where they don’t choose to make the side-trip. The way I have structured the documents

This is not wasted effort, because if they do take the side-trip, these locations will get visited in Day 3, and if they don’t, some of the ‘best bits’ will reappear in the “get famous” segment of Phase 4. The only real content that can’t be ported across completely is in locating and setting up their campsite for the evening, and the evening meal.

Still more complications: Day 3

The same team also have the option of a side-trip on Day 3. This probably won’t be undertaken if the do the Day 2 side-excursion, but might if they don’t. So I would, in theory have to write their content four ways:

• No side-trips;
• Side-trip one only (means they start Day 3 in a different location and will end it in a different location);
• Side-trip two only (means they will end Day 3 in a different location); and,
• Both side-trips.

At the same time, the other team will also have the opportunity to choose to make a side-trip (which I’ll refer to as ‘Side-trip 3 for clarity). Unlike the first two, which are into the neighboring states of Mississippi and maybe a bit of Tennessee, Side-trip 3 simply takes in additional parts of Arkansas that the original schedule didn’t have room for.

It’s also worth noting that long before I have to actually start work on these variations, I’ll know which ones are really going to be needed, and which ones won’t.

Still more complications: Day 4

And, on Day 4 (if they continue that far), there’s potential side-trips for each car, both of the ‘Side-trip 3’ kind – entirely within Arkansas, simply adding more places to the list. I think both of these are, at best, 50-50, a lot depending on what earlier choices have been made.

The Tangled Web Synopses (so far) and supplementary notes

And so we come to the heart of this three-part article. At the start of each game session, I provide a synopsis of ‘the story so far’ for the benefit of the players (and I use them too, as reference in writing adventure content). I have excerpted those synopses as a series of snapshots of the adventure as it has unfolded.

In some early cases, no synopsis was preserved for some reason, so I’ve crafted new ones as necessary just for this article. Perhaps it was because those parts of the story were so strongly episodic, were completely wrapped up in the one game session.

Things to watch out for:

• The Evolution of the campaign-within-a-campaign as it progresses – this was a deliberate feature, starting with the PCs having one impression and discovering that there was more to the story.
• The embedding of plot hooks – raw material for future plotlines, many with no fixed purpose – as the sub-campaign progresses. If you ever thing to yourself, “I can see a number of potential plotlines using that” about some piece of content, you’ll have recognized an embedded plot hook.
• The impact of PC Decisions – while certain signposted content might be deliberately incorporated, a substantial amount of that was actually delivered in the second game session. Much of the rest of the adventure was either there to justify giving the players that briefing, or as a consequence of the briefing content. Which meant that I was happy to adapt and evolve the content in response to players making decisions for their characters.
• There are a lot of mini-adventures along the way. Some of those were deliberately emplaced, some were used to plant plot hooks, some were there to layer additional ramifications from the game background, and some were just for fun or to control the pacing. But, once the principle of using the trip from nation-state to nation-state as a plot vehicle was established, each leg needed one – so you will have to look fairly closely to see which category any given mini-adventure fits into.
• As part of that: I deliberately set out to make each challenge to the PCs (and hence the players) of a different kind. I’ve talked around that point in the structural discussion earlier in the article, so won’t belabor the point further here.
• Plot Twists & surprises – There have been a number of these along the way. I’ll try to point them out in the rather broad ‘notes’ content after each synopsis (and sometimes inserted into the middle of the synopsis.
• Tonal changes as the plot moves from section to section.
• Pacing changes, both section to section and within a section, and the buildup to important crescendos.

If my intended structural technique has worked (it didn’t but I persevered and overcame!), then you will find each synopsis color-coded, so you’ll be able to see immediately if what you’re looking at is a continuation of the synopsis you were reading or is the start of something new. I’ve tried to use headings to help with that as well.

It’s important to remember, as you read them, that these were written to be contemporary to the game session in which they were delivered. While I’ve tried to go through and set all of them into the past tense, It’s inevitable that I’ve missed bits here and there.

Synopsis, Session 1

Thursday, Feb 16, 2056, The Knightly Building, Earth-Regency [NB: Calendar does not quite match up with ours]

The adventure started with a debriefing following a mission conducted in between game sessions at Paris Island. While the mission itself was relatively straightforward, it was complicated by strange psychological changes within the team.

The trouble started when Vala reported that the former Blackwing kept trying to pull away from her mental link. He proceeded to hesitate repeatedly and seemed to lack confidence.

At the same time, Runeweaver seemed to suffer from the opposite problem – he was aggressive, over-enthusiastic, almost manic, literally blowing the tops off roofs and ripping walls open to get to marine out into the open.

And, when the former Blackwing did engage, in the form of a faceless metal man, he almost beat the ex-marine to death, seemingly afraid of using less than his full strength.

Vala, as the ex-Blackwing is explaining himself, you suddenly realize that every time you had previously made mental contact with Blackwing, it was actually with the Suit’s simulation of the person inside. This was the first time you have actually made a link with the real Paul Delancourt, and with the recent discovery of how the suit had been manipulating his thoughts, it’s no surprise that he’s a little sensitive to mental contacts of all sorts at the moment.

Blackwing then explained his mindset during the mission, stating that he was still in a state of shock over the revelations of Morbane Alpha, and at the same time every time he had gone into battle in the past, he had either been wearing a suit of armor or it hasn’t really been him. Even though he had shape-changed into a metallic form, it still felt like he was charging into combat naked. And then, when he did engage the enemy, that same feeling wouldn’t let him use less than everything he had; he couldn’t seem to pull himself back into line because he was afraid it wouldn’t be enough, even though intellectually, he immediately knew better.

Defender offered to teach the former Blackwing a training technique that combines what he learned as a Kzin Warrior and the lessons of “Master Dragon’s Claw” called the Soul Walk. This offer was accepted, and it was generally agreed that Blackwing, now released from the curse that was tainting his soul, just needed to get used to his new situation. He also felt that it was time to adopt a new superhero identity, or more properly, to return to his original one of Knight. It was then suggested that actually manifesting a suit of armor might alleviate the sense of vulnerability that had affected him on Paris Island, a notion that he immediately took on board.

Attention then turned to Runeweaver, who said that he had found it so pleasurable to be able to cast spells without worrying about the spell going out of control as they had done on so many recent occasions that he simply went a little overboard in the resulting head-rush. But a Mana Recharge had been the equivalent of taking a deep breath and let him get a hold of himself.

The others, aware of his deepening dependence on the euphoria of his Mana recharges, were concerned but this was at least plausible. Time would tell whether or not this was the beginning of a new stage of his problems or an isolated occurrence.

Defender was uncertain to what extent a soul walk would benefit Runeweaver, but it would not be harmful and might help him ‘recover his center’. He was also concerned that Runeweaver had neither mentioned, nor seemingly made allowance for, the influence that the Blackwing Armor was exerting on Runeweaver’s emotional state by shifting every doubt and uncertainty from Blackwing to that of the mage, almost as though he was denying it.

St Barbara decided not to use her authority to order either of them to attempt the Soul Walk or to undergo professional counseling under Vala, at least for now; having identified the problems, she would give both the chance to sort themselves out. The newly-renamed Knight seemed eager to undergo the process, and Runeweaver seemed intensely curious about it, so both were strongly motivated to take positive steps. And, aware of the problem, the other team members could be on the alert for it.

She had hoped that the team was getting out from under a shadow when Blackwing’s probation was reviewed and cut short, but it now seems some even deeper, darker shadows were lurking behind them, just waiting for their chance to leap out at her.

With the mission evaluation complete, Kira – the building’s AI and newly-hired secretary – then advised that the recent interactions with the Texas state police had resulted in greater enthusiasm for the proposed Liaison Program than expected; 143 applications for training in coordinating with the superhero team had been received from different law-enforcement agencies, divisions, and precincts, and were now being held for Knight’s approval.

After the meeting, Knight had trouble lifting the super-dense coffee mug that he had been gifted by Warcry. In fact, he could barely budge it; only after shape-changing into a metal form with enhanced strength could he move it. Clearly, he would have to learn and adapt to a more human level of casual strength. Taking a sip of the extra-strong blend that he preferred, he discovered that he could not taste it at all – he may as well have been pouring the black brew down the throat of a steel statue. Shrugging, he reverted to human and pulled down a standard-sized coffee mug, which he dipped into the bucket-sized orifice of his Blackwing-sized mug – and almost gagged on the strength of the indescribably-bitter concoction. Clearly, he would have to make some adjustments.

Later that afternoon, Defender took Knight to the Danger Room where he had prepared the Soul Walk, as it provided a reasonably resilient environment to anything that Knight might inadvertently throw at it. He explained that he would create a very cloudy fog which would numb the hero’s conscious thoughts. He would start to see shapes in the fog that weren’t really there, but that would be manifestations of his inner thoughts. The fog would respond to his thoughts of what he was seeing by making these creations appear more clear and solid, but they could not harm or be harmed by the Soul Walker. Some people saw many things in succession, others a more profound single image; either way, most things experienced would have multiple meanings to the individual and most would have some spiritual or allegorical relevance. Some might be straightforward, others might be attempts to self-deceive, and some might simply be obscure. Even seeing nothing would have a meaning; the Soul Walk did not provide answers, it asked leading questions that only pretended to be impertinent answers. As the Guide, Defender’s physical reality would also be reinterpreted by the Walker.

Blackwing discovered that he equated punishment with the attention of a parent, because that was the only attention that had been paid to him as a child. Accordingly, he had lived his life creating such situations for himself. This had led him to give in to the corruption of the suit of armor that had possessed him, and let it assume responsibility for life even as it kept him feeling safe and warm. He desired to leave innocence behind and take charge of his life, but feared that he was nothing but the child and the pain. But that was only the beginning of what became an even more profound experience, as his future choices (as he perceived them) were laid bare. His task was to decide how to fill the empty shell that was his self-perception and with what. He was going to be learning what it all meant for some time to come. He also had a newfound depth of respect for the combination of Kzin Warrior Philosophy, Kzin Social Customs, and Eastern Martial Arts that compounded to create his teammate. His abilities might be the flashier contribution, but his spiritual guidance was, perhaps, the more profound.

After he had cleansed himself of the residual effects of Knight’s Soul Walk, Defender summoned Runeweaver for the mage’s experience. After explaining what to expect, and answering a few questions, the session began with Runeweaver as a young man, fishing with his Grandfather, who was dispensing sage advice. Their conversation suggests that the mage’s life choices were, at least in part, an attempt to run from grief over the loss of his father, and in part an attempt to prove to himself that he was ready to live without that father – significant, because he had never been especially close to his father. And those choices then led him to make commitments that kept him from being with his grandfather when he passed, adding a layer of guilt to the motivational brew. He discovered that his early life had taught him that he could get approval from adults by studying hard, making him something of an over-achiever, almost ready to bite off a bit more of a challenge than was already on his plate. His childhood experiences also led him to take setbacks personally, blaming himself for being insufficiently prepared for the challenge. Again, there was more to the experience, in particular concerning the mage’s relationship with his mentor and father-figure, Ivar. The sum of all his experiences had led him to spend his life raising his personal standards until no-one could possibly live up to them, then engineering excuses for his failure to live up to those standards so that he could not be blamed. The significance and meaning of the would take longer to prize out than the comparatively straightforward vision experienced by Knight.

Later that afternoon, Defender made his way to Vala’s quarters to consult the alien telepath; he had realized that the team had a possible problem, but wanted her opinion on whether or not it was important enough to lay in St Barbara’s lap immediately. Most of the team were not native to the Earth-Regency space-time; Karlos Green, the Royal Family’s problem-solver, who they had recently recruited, knew that they were from elsewhere, but not from where. Inevitably, a mission would arise that would summon them back to Earth-Prime; statistically, they were overdue for one, and it would probably be big enough that the team would need his assistance. In an emergency, the team might not have the luxury of breaking the news to him gently; might it not be better to educate him in the things that he would have to know, if-and-when, in advance? He had designed such a program, but the optimum delivery method needed to integrate Runeweaver’s Magic and her Psionics – two normally incompatible ways of manipulating reality. Could she, for example, create the education program and ‘project’ it into one of her psionic crystals, while Runeweaver created a ‘reader’ for such a crystal. Intrigued by the prospect of doing something that she had previously thought impossible, Vala grew excited over the project and insisted on taking the proposal to St Barbara immediately.

The team leader, meanwhile, received a message encoded “Cypher Black” and rated as “Priority Alpha-Two”. ‘Cypher Black’ was a code produced by UNTIL [of Earth-Prime] for absolute top-secret communications with the Champions – things that must never appear on any official record. Priority Alpha-Two sounded like an UNTIL designation as well, but Zenith-3 didn’t use those message flags, she had to look up what it meant in her UNTIL Operations Manual – 1,570 pages of teeny-tiny type written by UNTIL’s legal division, and annotated into Plain English (or Japanese, or whatever) by UNTIL’s Command division so that you don’t need a lawyer to understand it. Fortunately, a copy came with the job of being Team Chairman, and had been gathering dust in her Safe. Alpha designated a crisis or emergency situation requiring immediate attention, while the sub-designation “-two” meant to ‘prepare to commence operations as directed within as a matter of urgency’ but permitted a short interval of time for the Agent receiving the instructions to make any preparations for a lengthy assignment that they deemed necessary.

Putting all that together, it suggested a classified Black Op, probably lasting more than a day, being instigated by UNTIL behind the Champions backs, in response to some crisis or emergency – but nothing so critical that the team can’t take an hour or so to prepare for it, whatever it was. It sounded like they were all suddenly in the Spy Game, whether they liked it or not.

That was when Defender and Vala arrived with their proposal. It was a nice idea, but depending on the sealed orders (which St Barbara still had to decode and decipher). might be a little too late. Karlos was more of a natural secret agent than any of the team; depending on the nature of the mission, they might find his presence invaluable. Since he would need to know about the team’s extra-dimensional origins and horrendously-complicated command structure sooner or later, and the underlying physics of dimensional/time-travel, and the practical consequences, she sent the pair to ‘educate’ him. Every experience told her that he was trustworthy. It would be a rude awakening that they were more than defenders of the British Empire, but since that political institution formed a subset of their responsibilities, she thought that he would be onboard – and deserved to know the scale of the problems that the team occasionally had to deal with.

Decoding the message, she found it long on urgent orders and short on explanations. A full briefing would be provided at UNTIL Headquarters at 2300 hours Monday June 31, 1986. The rest of the message told her that the team had to attend, how to disguise themselves, how to travel to the meeting to minimize exposure, and NOT to tell the Champions about any of it. They had to think that the team were still in Dimension-Regency, until UNTIL were good and ready to tell them otherwise.

Cloak-and-dagger – not something the team usually got mixed up in. She could already sense a headache in her near future.

Shortly before 11 PM, Monday June 30, 1986, Earth-Prime
UNTIL Headquarters is located in Geneva, Switzerland. Once, it had been a single building; it now occupied an entire valley in easy reach of the Swiss capital, a suburb in its own right (albeit a small one).

There is a railway station linking the facilities to the rest of Geneva and an underground Maglev for UNTIL personnel use that links the 43 separate multi-story buildings together, which were dug more deeply into the rock than they projected skywards.

It was a routine security measure not to use the front entrance of the building that you were actually there to visit; instead, you picked any other building, used it to access the high-speed Maglev loop, using it to reach the building you actually wanted to go to.

Building Delta proved to be one of the largest buildings in the Headquarters, and was the designated hub of Active Operations. Different geographic regions of the world were assigned to different floors (including a few exotic ones located off-planet). Sub-regions had individual corridors containing offices devoted to individual countries; in addition, some had specific operational interests being pursued outside the scope of the National Commands, with their own offices. Every floor had a different shape, with a different number of corridors running off from the central hub.

Room 1317 was on the 8th floor from the bottom, in the Pan-American section. There was a corridor for South America, another for Central America, and three more for (respectively) Western, Eastern, and Northern North America. At the end of the Eastern and Western America corridors was a large curving meeting room connecting both, labeled Room 1317, USA Operations. There was probably a similar joint command linking the South and Central Commands.

A large collection of senior UNTIL brass was waiting in silence in the room when the team arrived, obeying large signs that read “Your silence is required until Command deems it safe for you to speak”.

Present, in ascending order of rank, were:

• Captain Reginald Schwartz of the Resources Division;
• Major Heinrich Wasser, Chief Strategist of the Operations Division;
• Colonel Mason Courage III, Commander of the North American subdivision;
• Colonel Pablo Martinez, Commander of the South American subdivision;
• Brigadier Norma Raid, Head of the Champions Division;
• Major-General Dennis Smith, Commander of the Intelligence division;
• Major-General Patrick O’Kelly, Head of the Political Division;
• Major-General Oscar Holder, Head of the Legal Division; and
• Brigadier-General Isobel Dimitrov, Head of the Command Section of the Operations Division.

Some cloak-and-dagger with high-tech voice transformation devices followed so that operational personnel could participate with no chance of their identities being compromised. These gave every participant a random voice and random national accent. UNTIL had not yet been able to miniaturize them sufficiently for field usage, but they were used in the highest of high-level meetings for added security. They also briefed the team on how UNTIL had adapted to keep meetings secure in a world with Telepaths.

Backlash, the ex-head of UNTIL and current Chairman of the Champions (the PC’s parent organization and their superiors when they are on Earth-Prime) then made a spectacular entrance, announcing, “Ah, there you are Brigadier-General! I had to look all over to find you. You didn’t really think you could pull off something of this magnitude and only tell me after the fact, did you? Or did my invitation get lost in the mail?”

It soon became obvious that the two were old friends, and in fact, Backlash was once Dimitrov’s “Boss”. In the course of their re-acquantance and discussion, Dimitrov let slip that even allies being told could get them all locked up without keys, the matter was so delicate.

Key Points & Notes

You get a completely different sense of relevance from the first part of this adventure when you realize that the characters will soon get to spend a prolonged period pretending to be someone other than themselves. This content will also be relevant when we get to the encounter with the Coahuila Oracle, and goes to who the PCs actually are.

Other aspects of that early part of the story that will be relevant later are the role occupied by Defender as “Spirit Guide” and the peculiar fusion of the culture created for his species and the Samurai/Eastern philosophies he later adopted – parts of the resulting combination are strongly reminiscent of Amerind culture, but that was only realized after the fact. It comes across a lot more strongly in the synopsis of play than it did at the game-table at the time.

For some reason, no synopsis was actually preserved from the first couple of game sessions; the preceding and what follows below have been newly compiled from the original adventure notes.

These synopses (when we actually get to one produced for game use) were never intended to be a complete ongoing narrative summary of events; they were a reminder to the players who participated. That means that they often leave a lot of things out.

These omissions are most readily noticed when one compares the situation at the start of play (i.e. after a synopsis has been delivered) with the narrative of the next synopsis, and notes things that have been taken for granted because the players actually experienced them.

Some of the omitted content will be inserted here and there as I go along; more will be gathered into post-synopsis sections of analysis like this one, together with other notes that I feel worth calling out.

As with most of the adventures that I run in this campaign, I like to start by anchoring the events in the personal lives of the PCs, making them more than just ‘crime-fighting machines’. Events in these personal lives passages often presage or influence character states of mind during subsequent decisions, and sometimes provide context, subtext, or counterpoint. They can also sometimes provide a narrative thread binding loose plot elements into a cohesive whole. Quite often, its the players who decide what their characters make of these things; I focus on making sure that they fulfill any plot need and sound credible, and any additional meaning that the players read into them is a total bonus.

It is also worth noting that many of these character developments are not pulled out of thin air, but are the result of conversations with the players about their characters, sometimes from months or years earlier. On rare occasions, they can be completely wide of the mark, but my understanding of the characters is fairly substantial at this point; that doesn’t happen often.

One other subtle point that I’m not even sure the players have noticed; I’m very careful to refer to the characters by their “operational identities” at the time. The early adventure, therefore, has references to St Barbara, Knight/Blackwing, and so on, but once they assume their new identities, the references will be to Nightshade, Basalt, etc. They may be the same character, with the same player, but this helps distinguish between the two.

What’s not quite so clear in some of these synopses is whether or not the characters were acting in civilian guise or super-identity. I did contemplate using search and replace to name characters according to civilian guise at the time, but decided that this would only make things harder for the casual reader to know who was doing what.

Besides, at this point in time, those civilian identities are just a ‘cloak’ that the PCs happen to be wearing; they haven’t actually been playing Clark Kent, they’ve been playing Superman in a three-piece suit. That changes with the last part of phase 3, when they start playing those identities as the default. It’s probably fair to say that their “real” civilian identities didn’t get a lot of air time until I deliberately began exploring some of those identities a few years ago, too – they had been superheros pretty much full-time for years of play prior to that.

The entrance of Backlash is actually more important than it seems at the time. When he offers up the equivalent of “I have my sources” as answer to the unspoken question of how he knew about this top-secret meeting, and then focuses on his friendship with his former subordinate, there’s such an obvious unspoken answer that the players didn’t give it a second thought (they were too busy laughing at his intrusion and the by-plays that followed). That subtle unanswered dangling plot thread would become a lot more significant later on in the adventure!

Synopsis, Session 2 (from Session 3)

The team began to assess the impacts of the recent changes to their roster. The revelation that Blackwing’s armor had been corrupting him while sloughing any resistance, uncertainty, doubt, or hesitation off onto those nearby had profoundly impacted several members. In some cases, this had exacerbated existing psychological problems.

After taking the first steps to understand and come to terms with these influences, the team were summoned to Earth-Prime and a meeting with UNTIL that had been bathed in secrecy. Some of the biggest brass in the organization were present, but so far it wasn’t clear who was giving the briefing, and who was here to listen to it and decide what to do about it – a meeting that had just been crashed by the PCs superior officer in the Champions Organization, Backlash.

The most senior officer in the room, Brigadier-General Isobel Dimitrov, Head of the Command Section of the Operations Division, had just let slip that the content of the briefing could get everyone locked up in dark cells without keys if the wrong people found out about it.

St Barbara realized that all this “secrecy of identities” was for the purpose of protecting you from being identified by the Officers in the room. The UNTIL Officers all know each other, and you all know each other – and that meant that St Barbara had been correct when she characterized this mission as a top-secret Black Op – so much so, that UNTIL’s Field Commander was protecting her subordinates and peers from prosecution if it all went pear-shaped with some fairly extraordinary measures – including going completely outside the usual personnel pool for Agents to deal with the situation.

Colonel Courage then gave a brief background to the current political situation in what was now known as the USNA (United States Of North America). That country had withdrawn from the United Nations years before, and it was absolutely forbidden for UNTIL to even step foot on American Soil without permission from the American Government – but there were elections looming later in the year (in November as usual) and the two political parties that had emerged from the collapse of the Republican and Democratic Parties were both planning new policy directions, either of which would see the US emerge from its splendid isolation, eventually. The negotiations would stretch on for years when that started. He also revealed that there had been somewhat closer cooperation between the US UNTIL-Analogue, Thunder, and their own operations – strictly unofficially of course. For various reasons, the Americans were hyper-sensitive to political interference in their domestic affairs at the moment. It was even possible that the WiLL party, currently in the White House, would dis-endorse their own sitting President, so complicated and chaotic was the state of politics there at the moment. Worst case, they end up in a new Civil War, or in a war with the rest of the world. As a result, the official policy was to keep the US at arm’s length for the time being.

The South American Sub-Division’s commander, Colonel Martinez, then revealed that his division had learned that the WiLL party had fallen under the control of a House Of Demon, who were responsible for the change in political policy. That House of Demon had itself been infiltrated and were now dominated by skilled mages who had escaped to Earth-Prime in the course of Ragnarok and integrated themselves into the local society. The other political party, meanwhile had fallen under the control of a second House of Demon, one with more noble ethics and ambitions than the first, who were opportunists seeking personal power. Those were the ideologies who were about to clash, through veiled proxies, in the National Elections. Some of this, Team Zenith-3 already knew; some of it was news. They also had a level of wary respect and mild trust in one of the Houses of Demon, whose leader had rescued Knight from the Armor that had transformed him into Blackwing.

One of those Houses also controlled Central America, and now based itself in California; the other was New York based.

One of the many maps and diagrams created for this adventure, this shows the political ‘state of play’ in North, South, and Central America at the time – so far as PC-accessable intelligence sources knows, of course!

After a brief rest-break, the briefing resumed, this time with Martinez doing the talking. He expressed a preference for making sure Field Agents didn’t know everything as a means of keeping them on their toes and reacting to situations as they were rather than as command thought they were. So his briefing left a lot of information unsaid.

Mexico had fragmented into smaller nations in the social collapse of Ragnarok, and what social order emerged was at the behest of this House Of Demon, who had installed dictatorial regimes with selected puppet rulers selected from the local populations. They then dictated policies to these local front-men that have slowly been lifting the Central Americas out of Anarchy and toward more civilized behavior. The further north one goes in the region, the greater the influence that their big American Neighbor has had and the more civilized the Latin Countries become.

Brazil’s Fifth Reich had conquered many of its neighbors, whose governments had collapsed when The Great Poppy Plague had genetically altered the plants so that they no longer produced Opiates. So far, for a Nazi, Dr Muerte had proven to be a relatively benign, if ruthless, despot, who not only had a genuine concern for the welfare of his citizens, but had regard for his relations with the international community. Relations between the West-coast House Of Demon and the 5th Reich have also been surprisingly cordial, and the two have been working together to restore basic services and prosperity to the region. Muerte himself has become the most beloved figure in South America, and – significantly – the Reich has normalized relations with the Americans. He is everyone’s friend, at least at the moment.

UNTIL operatives normally sneak into the US via the 5th Reich, who have established a policy of ‘not noticing’ irregularities in paperwork and facilitating such transits. The Reich provides transit to Mexico and the Dictators then pass the agents toward the border as part of their cooperative attitude toward the Reich, and eventually smuggle the Agent across the Border.

With that information delivered, he wished the agents good fortune and left the room. Some of the lesser ranked officers had also made quiet exits.

The team took that to mean that the Agency was about to get down to the nitty-gritty, an impression reinforced by the fact that it was suddenly okay for identities to be revealed and introductions made. Brigadier Dimitrov again assumed the role of Ringmaster, which seemed to come naturally to her.

The functional nature of these introductions emphasized the operational nature of the meeting. Dimitrov was in charge of, and responsible for, everything that went on outside of Headquarters. Holder made sure that what UNTIL did was legal, especially when it wasn’t, and acted as a conscience for the organization. O’Kelly looked at what the others planned to do and what others were doing and advised on the repercussions – making him someone that even Dimitrov had to satisfy before a major mission could get underway. Smith knew more secrets than anyone else on the planet – in UNTIL’s estimation. Raid was in charge of the Champions from a global governmental perspective, and the Champions were in charge of their satellite programs like Zenith-3, making her the PCs boss. She actually regarded herself more as a Liaison, and was there because the Operational Personnel for the mission that was going to be proposed came from her Command. All of the above had to sign off on the Operation before it would be green-lit.

Wasser was the most gifted strategist in UNTIL and had planned the mission. Schwartz was there to provide technical support. And the team? They were there to carry out the mission – if it was green-lit, and if they accepted the responsibility.

Wasser informed the assembled group that a major incident was being prepared by a coalition of radical groups based in the American South who weren’t happy with the changes in policy that they were seeing. They are to make their move on the 4th of July. UNTIL had few other specifics at this time, but one of their operatives was presently in the US and would have more intelligence when the Operatives contacted him. All they knew at the moment was that whoever was behind it had connections with the Sons Of Liberty, who had connections with the Freedom Brigade, who had connections to the Rebel Tide.

A South African arms merchant by the name of Emil Zutzanger had sold Group X, the plotters, two stolen Russian nuclear warheads. His intelligence sources believed that they intended to detonate one or both as a political stunt and act of revolution in four days time. Worse still, through the Rebel Tide, UNTIL had become aware of several sympathizers within Thunder, so that organization could not be trusted to handle the situation. UNTIL’s second choice would be to work through the ex-Champions members known as the Crusaders, but the last time that they did so, they employed what UNTIL considers excessive force with an unacceptable loss of civilian lives; as a result, they are in internal turmoil and may even have splintered into two groups at war with each other. Their third choice would be to send in regular UNTIL agents – but the political situation in North America is too sensitive for that. UNTIL can’t be seen to be conducting an operation in the US at the moment. So their solution was to create a new set of identities for Zenith-3 and send them in to deal with this problem – and, having set them up, to maintain these covert roles until the North American situation stabilized politically with respect to the rest of the world.

UNTIL characterize the Zenith teams thus: Zenith-1 are good at finding things out, but are slow to get things done. Zenith-2 are good at blowing big holes in things, but slow to find the right things to blow up. Zenith-3 are somewhere in-between, without the failings of either.

So they proposed that Zenith-3 become – in addition to their other duties and assignments – a covert North American Field Branch of the Champions, capable of handling problems like this one, or rogue Crusaders, or anything else that might be beyond the capacity of Thunder to deal with.

That meant that they would have to be given new Superhero identities as well as new Civilian cover identities. Resources division, with Wasser’s assistance, had devised ways to camouflage the visual effects of their abilities.

The team can’t just teleport in, because the Demon House would detect that, and so might Thunder. Instead, they would have to go through the South-Central American channel like any other operatives and set up a Base Of Operations. In that, they could install equipment that would permit them to come and go covertly.

From time to time over the next year, when UNTIL need an operational force within the USNA, the team would be inserted back into their US cover identities, do whatever is necessary, and then exfiltrate to resume their normal lives and duties. Whether or not we need to continue the charade after that depends on the results of the elections there, something that we – and you – are not permitted to interfere with.

Officially, this Field Branch would be designated Team Shadow – what the members of Team Shadow decided to call their fictitious alliance of superheros in public was up to them.

Their followed a formal approvals process – one that flowed surprisingly quickly and seamlessly. The Legal department insisted on making it clear that membership in a subversive organization was not in itself necessarily an offense. The bottom line, expressed by Backlash (who could have vetoed the whole idea), was: “Operational Nuclear Weapons in the hands of radicals can’t be tolerated. Someone has to go in and get rid of the damn things, and I trust my people to do it in time more than I trust anyone else to do so.”

The final approval had to be St Barbara’s, but she got a commitment from each team member before giving it. And just like that, the process began of turning them into someone else.

The Political Officer listed a number of potential targets for Group X – ranging from Nuking the President on down to a demonstration and blackmail – but couldn’t give any indication of which one might be correct.

Captain Schwartz then led the team to his workshop and started throwing ideas at the team, in sequence from Easy to Hard.

He started by handing Knight a sketchpad of designs for him to choose a new appearance from. He chose a man made out of rocks, and the name Basalt.

He advised Defender that there were plenty of Kzin tourists roaming the US these days. Schwartz knew that the striped markings on his fur were clan markings, and asked if Defender was willing to change them; the answer was no, but he would forego wearing any while on this assignment. Schwartz then offered up a sort of ragged warrior look for him, and he chose the name Zantar.

Next was Karlos Green, whose best idea for a superhero identity so far had been “Mr Image” (Image being the organization he had previously worked for, the Earth-Regency equivalent of UNTIL in many respects). He was equipped with a standard UNTIL Force Field belt, a Force Utility Band – a blaster, in other words, designed to look like the beam was coming from the palm of his hand – and a union jack -based costume. This inspired the name, Union Jack, which he liked so much that he though he’d keep it.

Runeweaver was given a hat with a semi-invisibility generator that made him look semi-transparent, de-tuned so that parts of him in shadow would be fully invisible but the rest would not, and a head for his staff that created holographic glowing ‘spirits’, with a costume suggestive of a civil war officer and a mask, and a cloak that twists as though it had a mind of its own whenever magic was around, which he could deactivate if he wanted to. He chose the name Specter. It was suggested that he look for ways to make his spells look like ghostly powers.

St Barbara was given a comb that turned her hair raven-black or return it to blonde, a black outfit that covered her almost completely (unlike her usual choice of outfit), and finally, some contact lenses that shifted her perceptions of color into the ultraviolet. The absence of the usual colored sparkles that resulted made her energy blast look like a shadow leaping from her hand, accompanied by little bursts of light-devouring blackness that broke up the edges of her form. She became Nightshade, especially after Schwartz figured out how to use her flight to enhance her acrobatics surreptitiously. His piece-de-resistance was a disrupter that eliminated her distinctive personal force-field.

Vala was the team member who didn’t like what Schwartz had to offer. Any figure with wings would automatically remind the public of her true identity, as she had (without knowing about it) become one of the most recognizable people on the planet. She decided that she would simply use her powers to make people not notice her – and if that left her short-powered for doing other things, so be it.

Next, attention turned to the civilian identities that UNTIL had concocted:

• Knight: Frank Hudson, Manhunter
• Defender: Brust, tourist and inveterate explorer
• Mr Image: Roger Woodchild, Prospector
• Runeweaver: Isaiah Lucas, Ski Instructor and Competition Wood-logger
• St Barbara: Sue-Ellen Wilson, Talent Scout
• Vala: Carmen DeLambert (french name), Heiress, recovering from extensive plastic surgery performed in the South of France, and so swathed in bandages.

They certainly looked nothing like their usual selves when they were dressed in the appropriate outfits!

Finally, practical matters of finance were arranged; each team member was given a small amount of funds to carry; collectively, they would be enough to hire or buy a couple of cheap cars and other supplies, which they could use to search out a Base Of Operations. Once they had one selected, a phone call with the address and a local bank account number, and more money would be tracelessly wired in for the purchase and for equipping the facility.

They were given a precise rendezvous with the UNTIL officer who was, even then, gathering intelligence on the who and what of their mission. Using mechanical educators with many refinements and safeguards added over Behemoth’s original model, Spanish and German were then implanted in those who did not already speak the language, to two different standards – conversational fluency for some, and fluency to an expert level for others. Some final ‘good lucks’ and parting words, and the team were on their way – to another highly-secured building within the complex.

There, they learned that UNTIL had secretly copied the Champions Teleporter for point-to-point ultra-secure transits from UNTIL HQ to Permanent Bases within different nations – including Brazil.

Key Points & Notes

A huge info-dump, which I’ve largely just summarized here. There is some assumption that you know who the different entities are, but that’s not important enough to be worth the time explaining them. They have all changed so substantially from their original source material that they would be largely unrecognizable, anyway.

Take Demon, for example: a group of 13 groups of supervillain magi, a strictly-enforced meritocracy, there have been at least two major revolutions in their administration since their first appearance. Whatever you may have thought you knew about the organization is just their history.

The whole point of the briefing, then, is to remind the players (and tell readers) of the way things are, as opposed to the way things were.

Info-dumps are the most boring element of gaming. Every time one has to happen, I pull out absolutely everything in my bag of tricks to try and make them interesting.

I remember very well (and quite painfully) the lessons learned in the past, detailed in 2009 in My Biggest Mistakes: Information Overload in the Zenith-3 Campaign – but you can never avoid info-dumps completely. I’ve broken this one up with interruptions, and moments of humor, and interpersonal conversations, and putting personalities on display, and gaming visuals – maps for the most part, and anything else that I can think of.

One of those tricks is the mixture of old and new information – if players feel they already know something, they will tend to start ignoring it and engaging in side-chatter. Since it’s unrealistic to expect a briefing not to contain any old info, I permit a little more of that than I otherwise would (especially if it can be interpreted as being in-character side-chatter).

If you do it right, you can have your NPC interactions segue back from such side-chatter to signal the transition to new information or updates. Do this consistently, and players will eventually start to subconsciously cue off the trigger. That means that you can let verbal horseplay between players break up your larger info-dumps.

Another trick is to pass as much of the info-dump as your can to elsewhere in the adventure, passing the ‘responsibility’ for delivering that information to some other NPC.

The more information that you can pass in a two-way conversation, the better. That breaks up the info-dump with conversational phrases. In terms of this info-dump, there was certain information that the PCs needed in order for the players to base reasonable decisions on it; but anything they didn’t need to know until after their BOps was established was pushed off to the planned meeting in the “Rendezvous” section of Phase 5. And even then, I took a whole lot of background material and shoved it onto “reading the guidebook” en route to that rendezvous, and will punctuate that with visuals. There will be still more that I can offload to narrative accompanying specific locations that the PCs drive through en route. A casual contact at a gas station can let me sneak something extra out of the info-dump. And finally, the plan is for the Agent not to have all the answers – just places to look for more answers. That makes acquiring a large chunk of the prospective info-dump, an interactive process of investigation by the PCs.

Put all that together, and this was a successful info-dump that kept the players engaged and interested. Compared to some (like the example linked to earlier), it was even better than that!

Something else to note is that some of the new identities were expected to be accepted, some were for NPCs (but it was reasonable that they would also accept them), and there were some that were more problematic, or even expected to be rejected.

That was – in part – where the revelations from the very first part of the adventure made a difference. In particular, the psychology of Knight – the former Blackwing – was critical; this was a character that had just reclaimed his humanity, it was rather unlikely without the prompting from the Spirit Walk that the player would have thought that the character would have accepted the new identity of Basalt, for example.

Synopsis, Session 3 (from Session 4)

Zenith-3 have been recruited into Team Shadow, a covert branch of the Champions to operate behind the lines of North America every now and then – starting now, because Domestic Terrorists have bought two stolen Russian nuclear weapons are believed to intend to use them on the Fourth of July, somewhere in the US of North America. Political sensitivity and the fact that they have no legal authority there mean that UNTIL cannot be seen to mount operations there, so the plan was for the team to infiltrate America via Central America and Mexico, guided by a contact of a House Of Demon that would be arranged through the Government of the 5th Reich.

To keep their true superhero identities a secret and avoid diplomatic entanglements, new identities both civilian and paranormal had been crafted for each member.

Before they knew it, in their new civilian guises, the team were teleported to Base Fortaleza in Brazil, where they were met by Agent Indigo, a dark-haired Hispanic woman in a very angry frame of mind over the inconvenience of arranging a last-minute meeting with Senior Government Official late at night on a Monday without advance warning. She demanded to know what was so urgent that it couldn’t wait until morning.

So the team told her part of the story – stolen nukes and someone intending to use them – which calmed her down somewhat. This was the first indication that things were just a little different to what they had expected, here in South America.

She gave them temporary visas assigning them Protected Diplomatic Status, giving them the protection of the Reich and encouraging cooperation from any official who might be encountered, then led them out into the street. The city was not at all what they expected, it was bright, shiny, and modern.

As soon as they left the UNTIL Field headquarters, some of the team noticed that they had picked up a Shadow. A man in suit and tie with glasses and a cocked hat, who occasionally mopped his brow with a red silken handkerchief, but otherwise pretended to be inconspicuous without trying too hard. Agent Indigo told them that the spies for the various agencies all knew who one another were, and so followed each other around. Because the group were strangers to him, he was naturally interested in their identities; there were few secrets on the streets of Fortaleza. If he wasn’t thrown off the scent, he would follow them all the way to their meeting at the central command and might even blow their cover. To do this, she took them over and introduced him as “Comrade Osselzlekzy of the KGB Central Intellat, Division 9, who was stationed there because no government in the world really trusted Fuhrer Muerte but no-one has so far been able to catch him out.

They quickly realized that the spy subculture went even further than this impression; they socialized, attending the same functions, sometimes cooperated and sometimes interfered with each other, and generally treated it like a fairly cordial game. Agent Indigo gave him a code-phrase to take back to his superiors that he obviously recognized after he announced that he knew of their late-night appointment already; “Hard Rain Umbrella” meant nothing to the team, but it caused the KGB man to shudder despite the heat and wish them all “Very, Very good luck”, which suggested that she may have even told him something like “Rogue nukes”.

But the encounter had cost the team time, so they had to take a “Putt-putt”, a small two-cylinder three wheeled van with seating for a half-dozen people, the most common form of transport in Fortaleza, and a short-cut. That in turn required them to walk down an alley in which, they were warned, they might see, hear, or smell distressing things; she warned them not to be too quick to judgment.

The alleyway led directly into what could only be considered a slum of the destitute, families living in squalor and misery. Agent Indigo explained that Muerte, to his credit, had tried giving them homes in clean, serviced apartments that were big enough for their families, but the locals expected it to be taken away from them on a whim, and so didn’t value the accommodations or maintain them. Soon, they start to look like what the team saw around them.

The Reich, to their credit, seemed to have found a solution to the social problem of slums that was starting to make inroads into the problem, a combination of socialism and fascism that she detested but that at least created the opportunity for upward social mobility. Once, hundreds of thousands had lived in squalor like this in the Capital; now there are that same number spread all over the Reich, the 3% on the bottom rung of the society. The rest had managed to bootstrap their way into a growing middle class.

As they walked, twisting and turning through several of the narrow corridors between buildings, she continued to describe the society that had been erected in the South American nation. Eventually, the group reached a “proper” alleyway; between them and its mouth were five men and a woman of rough looking people, ranging in age from late teens to late fifties, carrying various weapons. Agent Indigo told the team not to panic, just make sure that their rank buttons were showing, and advanced half-way to the group. She then stepped forward and announced loudly that she was about to turn around and walk back to the people she was escorting, who out-ranked her; anyone looking for a confrontation with the Reichsmarshall should still be there when she turned back around. She then turned her back on the thugs who looked at each other, startled, and then bolted like startled rabbits.

Past the entrance lay one of the major tourist thoroughfares; the group had no trouble hailing a couple of putt-putts. Agent Indigo gave the driver of the lead vehicle directions; he abruptly turned white, vacated his seat and brushed down the plastic-covered passenger seats. You would guess that Indigo had impressed upon him the VIP nature of her ‘guests’. The driver of the second putt-putt, observing this reaction, did likewise before, unsatisfied, ripped off the seat covers and dumped them in a waste-bin on the side of the road.

One road flowed smoothly into another as the putt-putts exerted their full 75 horsepower; the drivers proved adept at judging how fast they had to travel in order to avoid being stopped by traffic lights. Ten minutes later, they pulled into an otherwise empty boulevard. Indigo waved her rank badge at a checkpoint manned by an armed soldier, who saluted her. The putt-putt slowed to something less than a walking pace as you drove around a gardened area until a large building became visible, then slowed even more so that you could get a good view.

Indigo shouted over the noise of the engine, “The Palace Of Reichenfuhrer Muerte. Few get to see it so closely, fewer still to tell others of what they have seen. But you have the authority and it was on our way, so…” Glancing at her watch – one of those newfangled digital devices being sold by the Koreans, she gestured to the drivers, who immediately got underway.

Another ten minutes conveyed the group to a black building bathed in green spotlights with a three-story-tall Reich flag fluttering atop an enormous flagpole. After rating the job performed by each of their drivers, the team were escorted by Indigo into the Central Command of the 5th Reich.

The interior of the building was all red and gold and dark wooden paneling. Despite the warm colors, there was something clinical about the execution of the building – a pattern that seemed to apply to a lot of other features of the society, now that the team thought about it. The receptionist soon proved to be someone else charmed by Agent Indigo, who seemed perfectly suited to this social environment, at once disciplined and exuberant. When asked whom they wished to see – most general staff having left for the day many hours earlier – Indigo advised that they had an appointment with Oberster Fuhrer der Schutzstaffel ReichMuerte.

This name brought the flirting between the two to an immediate end as the reception officer, “Franz”, was suddenly all business. Passing through metal detectors and saluting guards, the group were directed to Room 1101.

The ‘Interview’ with Oskar Von Peirera, Doctor Muerte’s Oberster Fuhrer der Schutzstaffel ReichMuerte (Chief Of Intelligence), consisted of equal parts polite chitchat, canapes, wine, and banter with Indigo. Eventually, he asked a serious question about the mission. Indigo then began to work hard at convincing him that it would be of great importance to the Reich, and that at its end, he would want to have done everything in his power to ensure its success.

Evidently, she did not give her word to him very often, because he accepted the assurance, socialized a little more, and then wished the team good luck and whisked them on their way.

When they reached the ground floor, the guards were all carefully looking the other way so as not to see them depart, and the receptionist was nowhere to be seen. Exiting the building, they saw three black limousines waiting at the curb; choosing the middle one, as instructed, they noticed that the identical vehicle ahead and the one behind appeared to carry close doubles of each team member, including a Kzin in tourist get-up.

The convoy raced through the streets, one vehicle almost on the bumper of the one ahead of it; traffic signals mysteriously changed as the convoy approached, so they were never delayed. Other traffic made a point of getting out of their way. At a four-way intersection, the three identical vehicles split up, each exiting in a different direction; the one containing the team made a high-speed transit through a hotel’s underground car park and then a slow-speed transit through a car wash, which stripped away the black coloration and revealed the white paint and gold logos of a hotel shuttle service.

At a completely normal pace, the vehicle then conveyed the group to the Airfield and pulled up right at the entrance of a black-painted light aircraft, which they quickly boarded. The aircraft then took off without running lights; once in the air, the struts dropped away and the wings folded back into a delta-wing configuration, a small explosive charge shed the propeller, turning it into chaff, and revealing a hidden Magnetic Pulse engine; the aircraft accelerated smoothly to Mach 1.2.

The group were impressed by the level of organization needed to pull all this off at short notice; until they had walked through the front doors, the Nazis would have had no idea of genders or appearance, let along that they numbered a Kzin amongst them.

Two hours and 45 minutes later, the aircraft touched down in Maracaibo, Venezuela – which, the pilot warned, was in a different time zone to Fortaleza. The local time was 1 AM, and the team were officially tumbling down the rabbit-hole….

Key Points & Notes

My conceptual touchstone for the entire Fifth Reich was that nothing was exactly what it seemed to be on the surface, which is why every spy wore what they really were on their sleeves – for the contrast. It also made sense in a reverse-psychological way – if someone in such an environment looked like a spy, then “a spy” is probably what they weren’t.

The slums were another example of this, borrowing from some of the public housing history of native Australian populations.

There was a logical discrepancy between an intelligent and creative man – no matter how villainous – and such an obvious social throwback as a “Fifth Reich”. I therefore decided that his villainy was the result of his means of achieving ends that he thought justified – which is that the government function rationally, by force if necessary. This was such a contrast with the usual anarchy of South and Central America, that it could be argued that strict and militant applications of force were the only means of rehabilitating the culture. It probably didn’t help that the cartels which had propped up several of the governments had collapsed after intervention by another PC in an earlier phase of the campaign to eliminate the “narcotics problem”, and that this was followed by the global catastrophe of Ragnarok. These lines of thought led to the policies of the Fifth Reich, which were also intended to touch on another theme of the adventure – the value to be placed on liberty when it is self-destructive.

There are those who will read connections to the current global Pandemic into that theme, but these notions went onto paper long before I’d ever heard of SARS-Cov-2. The current situation in the US is just an ironic counterpoint. Where the PCs, who hold liberty in extremely high regard, come down on the issues raised was intended to be just another in a long line of such moral quandaries that they have encountered.

It took something that the PCs had always viewed as black-and-white and mixed a substantial amount of gray into both sides. Now, the PCs were able to take a pragmatic view, and ignore the broader questions this all raised for the most part – but the final Mission won’t give them that luxury, as they encounter a situation in which others have the same basic black-and-white philosophy that the PCs have espoused, and use it to justify things that the PCs find unacceptable – forcing the PCs to be the ones mixing in the gray, and broadening their horizons of what was acceptable.

The whole “Fifth Reich” concept should NOT be interpreted as a support or justification for Fascism. My personal opinion is that it’s a bad political system that crushes and oppresses, and I’ve seen nothing in the last 10 years or more to change that judgment. But the only acceptable answer to questions like “Should Axe Murderers be denied their Liberty?” leads inexorably to the conclusion that in some cases, society can benefit from the removal of individual liberty. The argument then is about where you draw the line, and about safeguards, and other real-world consequences.

In fact, a previous adventure was deliberately placed so as to make Muerte a villain of the blackest sort, and it remains just as valid in this continuity. For every Schindler, there’s a – well, take your choice, there are no end of options!

As stated elsewhere, another factor is that I wanted this part of the adventure to be more of a lighthearted romp, after the heaviness and ponderous tones of the “Briefing”, and despite not being able to lampoon the Fascists for the plot reasons described, I think that it succeeds. This is a society that’s on its way to transforming from Fascism to something else; at this point, they still have some fascist trappings, but the change is clearly underway.

And that’s where I’m drawing the line under part one. Parts two and three will follow as soon as I can get them finished. That’s right, I’m changing things up in recognition of this being my 1001st post – a little flexibility will give me cover to clean up some of the loose ends that I have let accumulate over the last 11-12 years. My original intent was to use the Thursday article slot in this fashion, but weakening health has made it impossible to get enough productive hours a week for that.