Sunday, April 17, 2005

Tales of the Old Corps: Kishar Sen (Issue #1, Session 1)

The issue opened with Kishar Sen dropping out of the sky onto a speeding zipcraft whose occupants had just robbed a large currency skybarge. While they were gloating over their ill gotten gains, the savvy police officer had jumped out of a speeding car above them and right into their back seat.

A fight began, though despite superior numbers the criminals could not overtake Kishar Sen. One tried to hit him with a satchel of stolen money, while the other tried to grapple him from behind. Kishar was too quick, though, and grabbed the one lunging for him and threw the thief bodily into satchel-boy in the front seat. As they began to get up, satchel-boy went for his laser pistol, which was blasted out of his hand by Kishar Sen (with a rather good roll, I might say). The grappler from last round tried to lunge at Kishar again, but this time misjudged his jump and went flying out of the zipcraft and into a transport truck carrying an order of too-ripe fruit. At this point satchel-boy got a punch to the stomach for his troubles, which knocked him out.

(This fight took about 3 rounds. To be honest, you put a x2 hero, even one without any useful powers in a given situation, up against a trio of mooks and he's going to drop one of them each round. This was mainly just expositional violence to show off the fact that Kishar Sen could handle himself in a fight, and set up that this was definitly an alien civilization.)

And it was around that point that a space ship falling out of the sky into the city exploded. Kishar Sen put his laser pistol to the driver of the zipcraft and ordered him to land, at which point said driver was tossed into a waste collection bin and Kishar Sen hightailed it after the demolished space ship in time to see a quartet of white creatures with diamond-shaped heads, long barbed tails, and apparently the ability to fly swarm in on a biped dressed in a green, black, and white uniform, with a long eye stalk coming out of her head. She seemed to hold the advantage, until one of the white aliens yelled something gutteral, and then they all turned yellow. She got her ass handed to her, and they flew off.

(Flight. Shapeshifting. Eye beams. Mind reading. Bruce Wayne knew what they were in JLA. Do you? This was really just some further expositional violence that I didn't take part in, but it set up Kishar Sen getting the ring. It was, overall, pretty well scripted.)

Kishar Sen found the dying alien on the ground, and after a short but poetic speech she bequeathed to him her power ring, saying that the ring had found him worthy. With her final dying words, she told him the ring was powered by belief. Then she croaked.

Kishar Sen stood there for a moment, contemplating what to do...and then flew off after the aliens. Literally, he flew. WHich surprised him for a moment or two, but, in game terms, with a Will of 14, a Mind of 9, and a Spirit of 12, he doesn't surprise very easily or for very long. He absently asked himself where the invaders would go...and the ring responded!

(This scene was a bit freeform. With Int 7, Will 14, Mind 9, Spirit 12 you can have a character adapt to just about anything in a few rounds. Which is good when acclimatizing yourself to a Green Lantern ring. Kishar Sen also notably lacked Hal Jordan's threshold of disbelief, as he was already in a civilization with flying vehicles, limited contact with other races, and probably psychics somewhere. So using the ring for flight wasn't too difficult. Its not like Hal spending the first day or so coming to terms with the fact that aliens exist and want to kill him, and then suddenly realizing that maybe fighting the bad aliens with the cool green ring might be a good idea.)

Using the ring as a homing device, he managed to track them to the city's space port...only to find that he was too late! There was massive destruction everywhere, but he found some surviving maitenance technicians.

Or so he thought. An intangible alien reached up through the ground as the technicians moved to flank him, and he realized that they weren't Go'Haran. They were...something else. His laser pistol proved useless against them, as the blast he shot through the one crawling up his legs was regenerated instantly. The alien clawed at the pistol, blowing it up and sending it reeling away from the light and heat, and Kishar Sen falling to the ground from the force.

(The shot would have worked better if I'd rolled at least an 11. I dropped a few Hero Points to the laser pistol's EV of 5, jacking it up to a 7. If I'd rolled an 11 I probably would have done at least a RAP or two. But it was a nice setup for some heroic caption/voiceover monolouging. It also gave me a good surprise round to smack one of them around with the ring. Oh, and here's another hint on the aliens: they hate fire. Catching on yet?)

Kishar Sen lay on the ground as the aliens regrouped and began to move closer to him to check if he was dead. The mauling of the alien on his legs, and the explosion of the gun, would have killed, or at least blinded, a normal biped. But Kishar Sen stood up. And he told them that this ended now. As he spoke, his hands clenched, as if trying to hold something that wasn't there. And then he thought green thoughts. And his thoughts became something. He created a green spear, and lashed out at the nearest alien, slicing clean through it and knocking it out on its protoplasmic ass.

Then the rest of them realized what had happened, and they turned yellow. But Kishar Sen was too bright to fall for that, and he herded them with a few well placed energy blasts, getting them into one group, ready to charge him...then he seemingly missed. A stray blast of energy went right over their heads, and as they moved to charge...a building fell on them. But after a few minutes...they got back up.

TO BE CONTINUED

(This was a great scene. Alexander and I had the classic GL discussion for using the ring. "I'll create a sandstorm! No, I'll blow up the ground under them!" "No! Make a boxing glove!" "No, wait, I know! I drop a building on them!". So that's what I did: I grabbed a demolished piece of building and squashed them with it, thus handily getting around the yellow impurity. It was a nice attack. I jacked somewhere around 5 Hero Points into the EV on it, so that on a 9 I'd knock them all flat on their asses. I rolled a 15. They each took 16RAPs of damage, which would have turned a normal human into a thick, gooey paste. But Alexander and I both felt that was too anticlimactic a way to defeat them, so they got a second wind, which lets us start the next session off with a bang...and also gives me a week to think up cool ways to fight them. I still want to do a sandstorm, lol. This game fricking ROCKS!)

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Heh. Awesome, all around. Including the not-so-mysterious-in-origin aliens.

A little far away from home, aren't they? ^_-

2:48 p.m.  

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