The New Centurions

[Baelor]

I hope to post some of the builds for various heroes [Player character and otherwise] and villains for the campaign I am currently running - The New Centurions.

But before I post builds, here is some background on the world.

Note: Although I make mention of some IP from another game company. I do not intend any infraction on their IP, in fact quite the opposite. The New Centurions is sort of an homage to the fantastic Spirit of the Century RPG [see below].

The genesis of the campaign was based around a game that one of the New Centurions players ran a couple of years back called the Century Club, a pulp game using the Spirit of the Century rules from Evil Hat games. It focused on the New York chapter of the Century Club [members were referred to as Centurions] in the 1920s. Although very cool, the campaign never got the critical level of traction to continue and passed into the 'Vale of Lost Worlds' [tm].

Here is the very brief outline I gave the players before the first game [I had only a few days to plan the campaign, learn the rules, and work out villains, etc.] to set the tone:

9/11 was just the beginning of the end for New York. In the last decade things have gone from bad to worse. Crime and corruption - sure, that has always gone part and parcel with the bright lights of the Big Apple. But in the last ten years, things have spiraled out of control. The twin towers were only the first disaster. The Quake of Year 3 leveled a third of Manhattan, collapsed the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the waters of the East River.
You are among the first to step forward - unusual, high-powered individuals capable of defending the city and beyond against a new threat that has appeared - beings and organizations that are equally powerful and seem bent on bringing civilization down.
When the big quake hit Manhattan, tearing across the island and out in to the Atlantic. Tens of thousands died. Many more times that were injured across the eastern seaboard. Manhattan was hit the worst. Subway lines collapsed, bridges fell, as did dozens of brownstones and skyscrapers all over the island. Fires raged for weeks as overtaxed emergency crews struggled to preserve life and property. Manhattan emerged tattered and nearly broken. Wall Street is a shambles, Broadway a twisted, hunchback. And it all trickles down. The rest of New York, America, even the world, is suffering alongside, but here it is the worst.

Now the players and I had worked together to come up with some of the themes for the setting, so the state of the world is sort of our fault collectively. But they did not know anything about the broader background that I had in mind for the game – not even the GM of the Century Club game. So in the first scenario the characters, who have come together through pursuing their own independent investigations into a series of mysterious cave-ins and landslides in New York city, stumble across a ruined building in lower Manhattan. While not particularly unusual in the Manhattan of this world, the characters investigate and find the shapes of several people seemingly frozen in the middle of a ball room. While not appearing to be actively engaged in combat, it looks as though there is one man facing off against the others there in some sort of confrontation. The figures appear completely solid, but they cannot be touched or interacted with in any way.

The players started to figure out what was going on when I began to describe their characters [the people frozen in the ballroom] from the Century Club game. And then they figured out who the fellow they were facing off against was – Dr. Methuselah, the virtually unbeatable, nigh cosmically powerful villain from Spirit of the Century [Thanks to Evil Hat once again]. Then I told the players that their characters had never heard of the Century Club or Dr. Methuselah, and that the very idea of superheroes and such was very new, that the PCs were amongst the very first to appear, and the notion of being a super hero just sort of occurred to them one day in the recent past.

And then, while they were mulling that over, a shadowy figure appears amid the heroes and the frozen figures and, after a brief interlude of threats and near-violence, did something with a key-card and disappeared with Dr. Methuselah.

Nothing else had changed and the characters’ attempts to trace the mysterious interloper came to nothing. So they start researching the building and the past. They find that some event in 1933, which they have since come to term ‘The Methuselah Effect’ seems to have rewritten the history of the earth b y removing the very concept of superheroes or anything to do with that notion from the world. They decide to renovate the old building [the former HQ of the New York Century Club] and make it their base of operations and at the suggestion of one of the players, adopt the team name – The New Centurions. They don’t know what has caused the Methuzelah Effect to wind down either.

Of course while all of this is going on, events carry on, and the plans of others continue. Amid gang wars, the appearance of new supers and super groups, and the advent of new government agencies and forces to try to deal with the phenomenon, Manhattan is invaded by squid-headed aliens from another dimension.

That’s when it starts to get a little weird.