Cataclysm Act 2

Letting my mind marinate on Crisis on Infinite Earths for a day gave me an idea for how to manage Act 2 of the Cataclysm Across the Cosmos. I had originally planned to 'write out' some of the heaviest hitters - once Stardust the Super Wizard gets involved, he's able to go toe-to-toe with Kid Eternity, so he kind of imbalances things. However, if I involve him indirectly, he could be an important player in the story, and end up having long-term consequences thereafter. This is one thing I'd like to incorporate - that the events of Cataclsym could potentially matter to your own game world (if you go that way).

Here's the elevator pitch for Act 2, assuming the elevator has like seven stops and the door keeps ignoring the 'door shut' button you keep smashing...

The actions of Kid Eternity on the ocean's surface (as he draws the sunken U-Boat to the surface where he can face his final fate), have disturbed the earth's core, and are destabilizing it. Doctor Haunt has called Stardust to compensate; Stardust is channeling cosmic energy, siphoning off the destabilized energy from the core that is shattering the world. Kid Eternity has summoned a bunch of villains and sent them to kill Stardust. So, the idea is that Stardust spends the whole Act drawing power from the core while a group of heroes tries to keep the swarming villains from killing him off.

- If he soaks D12+6 points per round, he's going to average 12 points per round; if he rolls average, he can soak 120 points in one minute - that's ten rounds. As long as he can keep siphoning energy, he should be okay. He has no access to his SP - he's using all of them to maintain this stunt.

- If Stardust soaks 100 points within 1 minute, he stabilizes the core and is able to go on to his next task, flying off to keep the moon from crashing to earth. He will spend the rest of the adventure using cosmic energy to push the moon around the earth. 

- Each time Stardust is felled, the core is replenished 2d10 points, and Stardust has to get back to soaking as soon as he's back up.

- Here's the kicker - if Stardust is actually defeated, then bad stuff happens. The 'big bad' is that Stardust himself is annihilated - his essence gets drawn into the core, and ultimately pulled into the next world that the heroes will inhabit. In effect, this puts the 'power cosmic' of the PD universe on the board for someone in the next world to capture, fight over, inherit, or reckon with. It becomes a big loose end for the GM to use in their adventures going forward. You could decide to have Stardust reborn a la Gandalf, or you could have another new character take on the identity. 

On another note, I'm starting to conceptualize Cataclysm as a hybrid comic book/adventure in a single package. I'm liking the idea of drawing the cut scenes and introductory passages, and then nesting the Acts between. Moving it from two things - part of a comic and a separate adventure - and into an interactive comic book seems a bit more on brand, and sets it apart a bit. The image above would not have been in the comic (since I was only going to draw part of Act 1), but if I end up drawing a page or two of each act as an introduction, it might feel more cohesive... I'll keep tinkering with it.  

Humble Beginnings

Recovering from chemotherapy is a lot of time just... kinda sitting. I had a radiation treatment last week that required me to minimize how much activity I was doing, and to avoid exercise... so. Yeah. A lot of sitting around. Energy has been relatively low, but the last few days I've started to bounce back, and I keep thinking of things to keep my occupied. I worked on the adventure for Cataclysm yesterday and did some reading this morning to try and get into the zone for that a little more, but I also started something else...

We'll see if this comes to fruition, but throughout high school, I had this massive poster of the Marvel Universe on my bedroom wall. I stared at that thing for hours and hours, considering all of the characters and imagining what it would be like to have a universe that big. Then, I flipped through my copy of S85 and realized - it's pretty good-sized. I mean, I have almost a hundred characters. I figured it would be really nice to have a huge poster that has all of my Doc characters in one place. It would take me a long time to finish, but it's something I can do during days and times where I just need to zone out and have something to doodle on. It would be a cool to have a big poster of 'my characters'. So... here's the anchor for the middle of the poster - Doc.
 

Spending Some Time in the Source Material

I spent some time going through my comic collection in the last month or two, sorting things and selling some older books on EBay. My collection includes Crisis on Infinite Earths #2-12; I am missing issue 1 for some reason (no idea if I ever owned it). This morning, I read through four or five issues and skimmed the rest and... wow. It's a lot. The pacing is really, really (really) fast, and worlds are just constantly getting wiped out. I get that it's the point, and I guess I'd have to put myself back in 1985 to appreciate the emotional weight of watching these worlds that you've read for decades get wiped out, but it's just a LOT. That, and a lot of it is redundant; I feel like it's the same emotional beats repeatedly, watching this hopeless battle play out. 

I'm saying I didn't love it. I was kinda hoping to be more impressed and inspired by it than I was. I understand that 2025 me is a bit more discriminating than 1985 me, but still. 40 years is a bit of time, and I obviously know a bit more about storytelling and pacing and those sorts of things than I did in middle school (you'd hope). All that said, it felt reading it more like an event than a story. It was trying to be a story, but it knew that it was an event. I recently sold the complete run of Secret Wars (same era) on EBay, and had paged through that as well before shipping it off - it wasn't quite this compressed. Secret Wars had a more manageable cast (of course), and a smaller scope, so it gets a pass for having to accomplish less with the same amount of room. It had more breathing space to tell a story.

I was expecting to get more I could beg/borrow/steal for Cataclysm Across the Cosmos, but it really didn't give me a lot. However, it did help me to decide that I'm going to go ahead and layer the Public Domain characters into my own world as well (and you can layer them into yours. Feel free). Ever since I moved backward from the 21st century to the 1980s as my default setting, I've known a few things are going to happen in Doc's future - one of these is that Echo City eventually becomes the main city of the game world. In previous iterations of the game, Meridian falls entirely during an alien invasion and becomes a toxic wasteland. I don't think I want to go there anymore, but I do like the idea that Echo City is directly impacted by the Cataclysm; the city is completely changed by the Cataclsym, its entire history and character changed. It's the more 'pulp' city anyway, and these characters largely have a pulp background, so just making it into a giant pulp action comics playground seems like a decent way to go. If Meridian is Metropolis (Doc's city, first and foremost), then Echo City becomes more like Marvel's NYC where everyone else just happens to be... and a place where I can maybe establish the next great team of heroes that includes a mix of my own original characters and PD characters as I've re-imagined them.

TL; DR

Let's be honest, I don't know if you really really want to read my six pages of playtest notes so far... but if you do, you do. I mean, it's a pretty comprehensive overview of building the Cataclysm Across the Cosmos so far. I'll summarize below:

I set up the first encounter, which ended up being 8 heroes against Gorgo. The heroes won after three rounds, but almost everyone suffered being felled once, and two characters were felled twice before they were able to drop Gorgo once. I was going to have the battle last for three drops of Gorgo, but I got to see what I wanted to from it, and was able to justify having Doc throw him out to sea story-wise, so it's all good. I had to ret-con the story as I went (no Doc at first, then added Doc), but it was no big deal.

I made a few adjustments on the fly, the biggest one being that a successful hit by a superhero against any foe deals at least 1 hit point. Gorgo's invulnerable of 10 against heroes averaging D12 damage meant that it was very unlikely he was going to suffer damage even if the hero rolled pretty well. Once I upgraded to 'all successful attacks deal at least 1 hp even if they don't', the fight sped up a little bit, and they were able to slowly wear Gorgo down. The complications I added at the beginning of the sequence also helped a bit to mix it up from a straight up fight to some strategy and something to do other than punch the villain. 

I went back and forth a bit on SP, but have realized that I have to limit SPs to the 'main character(s)' only or these battles are going to be quick. If all eight heroes had access to their SPs, they'd all be stunting immediately, doing all sorts of crazy stuff and ripping through Gorgo. Because only Gorgo and Doc had access to SP, it made the fight feel more comic-booky and less gamey, if that makes sense. I don't want it to feel like you're playing a tactical game; I want it to feel like you got dropped into the middle of a comic battle as they happen. In the big comic battles, a lot of characters get regulated to the background, doing their 'default' attack while a few others take center stage. The way I've set up SP here emulates that pretty well.

It was nice to crack out the dice and actually play Stalwart '85 again - it's been a few weeks since I actually played the game. I'm adding the Google Doc to the resources for Stalwart '85 in case people want to read through all this - I expect to continue it as I go. 

Unlikely Team Up

I keep wanting to start an actual play experience for Stalwart '85 that actually goes on for a while - I don't know if I'd actually want to do videos or anything, but I'd like to have an actual play that I use to keep the game growing organically. I mean, my home solo campaign I guess. I keep going back and forth between making new characters (I did just roll up Novus Null a few days ago...), but then I go back to the characters from the core rules. I have kept trying to think of the pair of heroes that might go together the best, and this morning I decided to try something else - who are two heroes I'd never think of putting together, and what would happen? Or, which two heroes would I most like to solo play with, and is there some way I could justify putting them in a partnership?

Sure! Zealot has always been a solitary figure to me - he's not much of a team player, and he's quite obsessive, so that doesn't lend itself to the buddy system. Conversely, Bronze Beacon is still relatively inexperienced, and so she doesn't bring a lot of confidence to a partnership. Yet, somehow, it seems like these two might end up being a decent fit together. So, I did a new drawing of them together, and was thinking that I could put them in Echo City (since that city is largely undeveloped), and set my campaign there. Doc could always pop in, but it would mostly be these two. 

I need some kind of hook that keeps them together for a bit, and a 'big bad' with some kind of plan in the background to get things rolling, but I think that this partnership might not be a bad place to start...

Slowly Delving my Megadungeon

I'm actually doing the thing I wanted to do... letting my Moridis' Halls Megadungeon sort of just organically grow over time. I've now played through eight sessions, and my characters are closing in on level 2. I've been logging the actual play as I've done it, and you can read it here if you really want to...

this morning they ended up killing a dragon that I thought they had no chance against after a series of unexpected events put them into a position where they kind of had no choice. It was fun to watch the social dynamics I'd set up for a section of the dungeon play out in a way I never would have expected when I created it. I was forced to react to the situation as it played out, and I was very lucky that my heroes were wearing some stolen garb so they could frame cultists for Mordis for killing a dwarf from a clan they might want to ultimately be friendly with... oopsies. I keep updating both this actual play thread and the megadungeon, and the link is over to the left under resources for Tales of the Splintered Realm.

In the interim, I've also started a map of level 2. I'm thinking that this thing has three levels proper. I threw down the grid and created all of the hook points to level 1, then started to drop in section of dungeons as I created them, starting to frame out connective tissue. I have only a few of the hook points back to the first level defined, and most of the rest I have some thinking to do. 

Felt Like Rolling Up a Character

Decided to crack out the Stalwart ‘85 rulebook and roll up a character for the halibut.

I’m going to play a super-tier character. Let’s start with D10+5 four times… 6, 14, 10, 14. Very good. I end up with D6, D12, D10, D12.

6 gifts

29 ESP

32 Fly

54 Melee

66 Phasing

68 Precognition

75 Resist (Null Energy)

This guy already feels a little Martian Manhunter / Vision-ish. The Latin word for New is ‘Novus’ - I don’t mind that, although I’m thinking he’s from the Null Zone but is actually a ‘good creature’ born there. He’s a rejected ‘creation’ of Hazaaek the Null Fiend. The D6 has to go in either Mind or Reflex, and I think I’ll let that end up in Reflex and pop the D10 in Mind.

Novus Null

Super Hero (D10); Hits 22; Move 30’ (fly 500’);

Might D12 (6); Mind D10 (5); Power D12 (6); Reflex D6 (3)

I will take Monstrous since he still looks like a Null Fiend of sorts. 

To draw him, I went back to one of my concept drawings for Hazaaek and re-did it - so visually he is descended from Hazaaek on my end.

I am back to the idea of making Project Javelin (or at least a splinter research arm) the ‘bad guy’ for the campaign, and an Amanda Waller type the mastermind. If she’s a high-ranking Javelin operative who just happens to be pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with, she’s got the full resources of Project Javelin at her command, which makes her a capable threat. Not sure why I defaulted to ‘her’ here, but Amanda Waller is a pretty iconic character, so I guess I’m looking to emulate her in some meaningful way. 

Maybe go with a female version of the Stalwart Sentinel - she’s an AI-powered android that has been given a mission to investigate ways to use ‘non-humans’ for superhuman interdiction. In effect, every ‘creature’ being studied here has, by some loophole or another, been declared ‘not human’, and therefore subject to experimentation. This could be aliens, outsiders, constructs… lots of options.

My first thought was to make this start with a prison break that then becomes the character on the run… which could work. However, I could instead go all in on one of my favorite movies, Shawshank Redemption, and have the entire story set in the prison, where he’s working from within to undermine it and investigate it. 

This gets closer to a dungeon crawl for Stalwart ‘85, and gives me a justification to stat out a full research facility. There’d be lots of opportunities for conflict (other prisoners, guard uprisings, new arrivals, testing powers in danger rooms - all that sort of stuff).

I’m trying to decide on a remote location to place this:

The dark side of the moon. This has its benefits.

Bottom of the ocean.

Inside a volcano.

Near the earth’s core?

Remote mountain range.

I kind of like putting this inside the volcanic mountains north of Meridian. It actually ends up being within an hour of the city, yet remote enough that nobody would ever know it’s there. Malamus the Magma King cannot be too pleased to be sharing one of his deeper volcanoes with such interlopers, but him and his posse invading the complex at some point could be an interesting plot hook.

I also like that there are lots of windows - the prisoners are well aware that they are surrounded on all sides by thick magma that burns at 1500 degrees, so ‘sneaking out’ is probably a very bad idea.

He's definitely got the whole Martian Manhunter vibe going; I could see him being a key part of building the next iteration of the Victory Legion.