Based in the years before Season 1 of Maximum City, this tale follows a young Lotus (aka Magaskawee Dowanhowee) on her early years as a new mutant in a new city.
Magaskawee, May I call you Maggie? you find yourself once more looking upon the shining visage that is Maximum City. From your seat on the bus you can see the massive walls that support the interior infrastructure of the metropolis. At this distance the monorail is a silver streak darting between skyscrapers like a minnow among reeds.
You can almost pretend as if you belonged there among their silver spires. That is until the bus screeches to a halt.
Hey mutie! Here's where you get off! The bus driver rudely motions for you to take the nearest exit.
Enjoy the walk! The driver cackles as the door closes and the bus drives onward. He's dropped you off a good 100 meters or so shy of the actual bus station.
Your destination today is the small apartment in the sub-city that surrounds Maximum City on the east side of the river. It is mid March and it has only been 3 months or so since the Freak Wave upended so many lives. Damage to the main section of the city has mostly been repaired but some of the services are still on the fritz. You have just returned from re-connecting with your family on the reservation. Given the recent changes to your body the reunion was a bit...strained. Especially since Uncle Mika kept calling you cursed and trying to exorcise the evil "goat-spirit".
You should probably try to reconnect with your friends in the Sinkhole (this is the local term for the same sub-city I mentioned earlier). You are also a bit tight for cash as the Freak Wave had put a hold on your burgeoning singing career. Might be good to try to contact your manager, Slim, at some point as well.
Following the events in Maximum City from Season 1, the hero Timeline (aka Emit Nile) finds himself flung to the far future by Maximum Silver. Silver reveals only that he must keep secret a failure of his that has imperiled the planet.
There is too much at stake. Return to your time, traveler. Perhaps history will forgive me.
Silver's last words echo in your head as whatever force kept you anchored to this time lessens, sling-shotting you forward through time.
As you hurtle forward you can see the timelines arrayed before you vibrant and full of life. Curiously, silver flecks of energy distortion fill each one compressing the timelines and increasing their vibrancy tenfold. Ahead, only a few short months, they twist towards a temporal node, a fixed point in time. This node is corrupted, laced with veins of black and crimson. Beyond the node...nothing. There is no timeline past this cyst in time.
Perception DC 15:
You catch a glimpse of a corrupted Earth. The moon is but rubble ringing the dead surface of the planet. There is no activity on the planet. It is but dust and ash. It does not spin, it does not breathe. There is no water or vegetation. Just red ash. With a chill you realize it has been drained of every last iota of energy. Shortly the mass will simply fall into the sun and be no more.
As Silver's power over you drops completely, this node fades away revealing the prime timeline you are familiar with. With horror you find that you can see the corruption leaking through from that alternate history in small gaps in the prime timeline centered around Silver's era.
DC 25 History or DC 20 Power/INT check:
Maximum Silver's timeline is in fact part of the prime timeline but something, apparently Maximum Silver, has compressed time in order to delay reaching the corrupted node. The corruption is draining the energy of anything it touches and is a temporal anomaly not normally part of the prime timeline.
***
You spent your starting Hero Point to give Maximum Silver more time before their timeline bubble ends. I am giving you 3 Hero Points for the following starting complications: You arrive powerless from your tumble through time, the fact that Maximum Silver was able to affect you without a save, and there is a specific point in time I want you to arrive at.
You have a headache. This sounds ridiculous to you because it does not even begin to describe the painful ringing in your head. You can vaguely make out that you are propped against a large white refuse container between two tall buildings. The sky is overcast but the world is silent. The street is clean, the area has a sterile feel. There is a single faded poster on the building across from you. Can't quite make it out from the awkward angle that you are sitting/laying at.
< < < Woot! Here is the promised intro post! I will post again when we are ready to begin. Please use the Discussion thread until then. > > >
The year is 2024. It has been almost 12 years since the event that the Mayans referred to as “the World’s End”. Well, the world may not have ended per se, but it sure got a hell of a lot weirder.
It all started at midnight on December 21, 2012. The “Freak Wave” as people are calling it now hit everywhere on the planet all at once. Some places, like Australia and Russia got hit the worst, 8.2 on the Richter scale. A few other places had quakes as high as 6.9 but the majority of places suffered only a few collapsed buildings and fewer casualties. The aftershocks continued for a week afterwards. Seismologists tried tracking the Wave’s source only to find that it had none. It was like the entire planet had just…shuddered. And then there were the Lights.
Visible from miles away, beams of Light were confirmed by governments around the world. As the last of the aftershocks receded, they faded away. Each appeared to point straight into the sky, piercing the clouds. To date, only two of the Light’s sources have been discovered. One originated from the Great Pyramid in Egypt. The other source came from the Chichen Itza temple in Yucatan, Mexico. Investigators reported that the interior layouts at both locations had been rearranged revealing previously unexplored additions…and dangers.
After several archaeologists failed to return from the first exploratory mission into the depths of the Great Pyramid, investigations at both locales have been slow-moving. The Mexican government is reluctant to allow any investigation of the Mayan temples but has had limited success keeping trespassers away due to the vast number of Mayan sites populating Mexico’s southern regions.
And that’s when the really weird stuff started. Slowly at first but in ever-increasing numbers, people worldwide would wake up to find they had…changed. Meta-humans, or “supers”, have been around since World War II, but never had such a large number of them discovered their powers so quickly. For some their powers were easy to accept and be accepted. Some were not so lucky. After twelve Michigan police officers and several civilians were incinerated during a shootout with a deranged pre-adolescent that developed pyro-kinesis, many began siding with the usually ignored Factor X anti-mutant group.
Not all norms would come to think like Factor X though. Maximum City was built as a safe haven for supers and norms alike, and is the US’s fastest growing metropolis. The city teems with citizens intent to prove that supers and norms can live together as equals. A major branch of the world superhero organization known as Guardians of the Earth resides in downtown main street. The local police force has developed it’s own division to handle incidents involving meta-humans. Maximum City’s Special Hazard Response Unit, or S.H.R.U., keeps the streets as safe as humanly possible. It is a hotly debated topic whether or not any meta-humans will be allowed to join this special division, even those that pass the qualifying exam.
Technology:
As if in response to the rise in meta-humans and the tensions that they caused, technology has grown at break-neck speed. Japan was the first to recover from the effects of the Wave and soon after footage was leaked of their newest defense units: Mecha.
Desperate for a counter-measure, and knowing their own attempts at mechanized armor suits were years behind the Japanese, the US began searching for alternative methods of defense. Nanotechnology research was escalated until the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma was wiped out by an inadvertently released nano-plague.
At the behest of the US, the United Nations voted to ban any and all research into nanotechnology for reasons of global security. Cuba, Germany, and many European countries opposed the ban and the movement was defeated until 2019 when Cuba’s main research facility reported an uncontrolled explosion. Only days afterwards, all communications to and from Cuba ceased. Initial reports from surveillance craft showed nothing but a black, glassy mass covering the countryside. An emergency session was convened and in perhaps the closest vote in UN history, it was decided to detonate a thermonuclear device in Cuba. Nothing survived the resulting blast…we hope.
Magic:
Although usually dismissed as hallucinations or the work of hidden meta-human influences, it can no longer be denied that magic is beginning to come back into the world. Multiple reports lend credence to unicorns preventing loggers from clearing forests in northern Wisconsin and ogres stealing cattle in Australia. Who knows what else will come out of the woodworks next?
Those learned in the subject of course scoff at the idea of magic being “back”. To them, it was never gone, only hidden. But even the most esoteric practitioners of the arcane arts will grudgingly admit that the Weave has become stronger since the Wave hit…perhaps too strong?
Ridleyopolis is a city like few others, a shining star of civilization on the grand U.S. of A's southwestern shore.
While not as large as New York nor as grand as Washington D.C., it nevertheless has grown to be a burgeoning city of 200,000+ souls. It boasts of deep woodland parks and crystal shores, where the wartorn and weary might rest their heads and recover from life's untold woes.
But alas, as each cloud has its silver lining, all silver clouds have a dark underbelly. This underbelly is located in the worst section of town, known by a select few as the Trench.
None know what exactly fostered this areas decline. Some say it was the unfinished tenements that mysteriously lost their financial backing during their construction.
Others say it is a curse brought on by the Crimson Eye cult, doomsayers of some ancient apocalyptic prophecy.
Yet even others say that Ridleyopolis's shining outer demeanor is naught but a fraud to ward off do-gooders like the self-proclaimed Galatic Justice League. If this is the case, then truly there is great evil capable of great deception...
This thread is for the posting of my Skull & Shackles campaign journal. I am running this campaign Friday nights in the mystical unseen dimension known only as the REAL WORLD.
After some consideration, I have decided to write the journal from Sandara Quinn's point of view, adding in additional journal entries from other NPCs as appropriate.
This is intended as a readily available "catch-up" and "sum-up" thread for my player's convenience and as an alternative to repeating everything from last session in the current week's session. :)
I will try to make this an entertaining and rewarding read (especially for my players!).
The next campaign i plan to run will be with pathfinder rules and I's really like to use your products to help with the overall experience. however, approximately two weeks ago i attempted to purchase for the first time through Paizo.com and my debit card was declined. I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked my information but every single attempt I made was declined. After reading one of the similar forum posts in the messageboards I realized my bank address was still my old address and i believe paizo had my new address. So I changed them both to my new address (It will be listed in my address page now)and tried again, but to no avail. Realizing that I still had several "false" orders pending in my bank account I simply waited for the three days to drop the hold from my bank before finally trying again tonight (5/7/2013). Still declining my debit card. I have more than enough funds for the purchase, and I've tried every iteration of adding punctuation after my middle initial, or after the abbreviation of APT but I am at a loss. Unless you are able to fix this, I may not be able to deliver these goods to my players in time. :(
Please help!
