Anyone want to help me brainstorm a convention one-shot?

Anyone want to help me brainstorm a convention one-shot?

Anyone want to help me brainstorm a convention one-shot?

I posted a few weeks ago about putting together an all-star team of monster hunters for an event I’m running for Chicago Gameday. I settled on Buffy Summers, Hellboy, Harry Dresden Abraham Lincoln, and Velma Dinkley.

Now I need a monster for them to hunt! Ideas? I’ve played PbtA games before, but never MotW.

I was considering some sort of meta-explanation for why all of them would be teamed up, such as being drawn together across the multiverse in order to fight a similarly drawn-from-media threat. I.e., they are all fictional in each other’s worlds, and thus confused why they are actually together int he flesh.

Anyway, what I need is a Big Bad that would demand such a team-uo. I was considering the idea of a nerd who’s stumbled onto heavy-duty powers bringing about threats from his own media obsessions, and thus why four fictional characters need to team up to fight them, but I have no idea how that would work in MotW.

Anyone want to throw some ideas at me?

Also, any suggestions for handling this offbeat team of media heroes for a one-shot?

24 thoughts on “Anyone want to help me brainstorm a convention one-shot?”

  3. If you are going with some sort of super-nerd coming into power, then perhaps the heroes are drawn from the same source. Kind of like in the old Secret Wars, when Dr. Doom accidentally brings back the heroes because of his own paranoia.

    Perhaps in the end everything – the heroes, the monsters, it’s all been Freddy Krueger toying with someone’s dreams. Dream endings are cliche but it might work okay for a con game!

  4. Adam Schwaninger Buffy has already beaten Dracula in her show, though. He’s actually not a very big bad in the Whedonverse.

    My first thought was Cthulhu. I mean, if we go with the magic nerd, what bigger bad would they conjure?

  5. Sort of. It is strongly implied that he let her stake him because he wanted to. He’s a much bigger deal in the setting, but he doesn’t play on the level of individual slayers very often.

  6. Michael Phillips I suppose, but even in the Buffy comics he’s more of a ally than an enemy (and occasionally used for comic relief).

    Still, Buffy’s been there, done that. SO ten years ago! 🙂

  7. The villain could be Old Man Smithers, who finally stumbles across the Necronomicon Ex Mortis and gains true supernatural power, summoning up various classic monsters that soon run amok!

    That way Old Man Smithers is behind it all, which is a nice nod to Scooby-Doo but you still have actual supernatural threats.

  8. Old Man Smithers, who ran the old movie theater that got bulldozed as part of the modern convention center’s footprint! That way you can get even more meta, and gives Smithers a motive and the geekery necessary to match up with your plans. Maybe.

  10. Thanks! I see Harry Dresden’s not in the lineup, but you could swipe a page from Proven Guilty and set the thing at SPLATTERCON!!! There’s your Chicago connection AND your convention center all tied up with another pop culture reference. 🙂

    Plus, then the heroes and monsters alike can be mistaken for cosplayers.

  13. At the very least, three of those characters have come across a version of Dracula (not familiar enough with all of Hellboy), so that could be appropriate: just not a version any of them are familiar with. It could allow them to “compare notes” and contrast the differences between there universes’ versions of the character. Or, it could be a collection of their different Draculas, although that could leave you a couple of comic relief versions in the mix.

  14. Insofar as tips for running them…

    I’d actually include more possible characters, maybe have a pool of 6 to choose from. Just to offer people a level of choice. I’d also have maybe a quick “cheat sheet” to help people who aren’t super-familiar with the characters (or just rusty!). Maybe jot down the twenty-word pitch on who a character is, have a bullet-point list of some of their catchphrases, and sum up their general personality and maybe a couple quirks.

  16. – “The Father of Knives” an animated mass of obsidian shards that’s an avatar of nyarlathotep that ask you to pray to your god and when you don’t pray to him, you get skinned alive.  Could tie in with the Old Man Smithers angle.

    -My personal favorite, were-hummingbirds.  6ft man-birds in aztec garb.  Really fast, really strong.

    -If you’re going the splattercon route, the movie theater is actually alive or inhabited by some pain/soul eating entity, it manifests characters of flims being played to eat their fear/pain/death?

    -Look on line the Meslissidae – clan ventrue.  Its this breed of vampire that controls insects and turns people into mindless drones.  You have have a bad guy that can stuff re-animated dogs with bears and have the dogs run and people and explode so their covered in bees.  Dogs and bees…funny and terrifying.

    -If you’re going the dream route like Adam Schwaninger suggested the bad guy could be someone whose mucking around with Lucid Dreaming and several times through the game reality shifts so Chicago becomes Wild West Chicago and then High Fantasy Chicago and then Scifi Chicago.

  17. Adam Schwaninger The convention route is a great idea. ValorCon is happening the same weekend as Gameday — those jerks stole a bunch of my regular GMs! I could use that as my setting, but go with a gaming-related explanation for the mystical occurrences. Plus, the venue for ValorCon is a notorious location in Chicago (a mall that refuses to stay occupied), for which general maps are available. And, yeah, the cosplay angle is great, or having people constantly coming up to Buffy and asking for Michelle-Gellar’s autograph.

  20. Ha! You got me thinking about this earlier and I ended making some six-advance characters for the heck of it. Though my idea was going to be to let players pick the famous dudes at a first come, first serve basis and one per show then just pick the best Playbook for them.

    As to a scenario, somebody has “brought fiction to life” in Velma’s world including the other heroes (it’s happened before) and along with it something horrible like the Palladium style vampires (extensions of an eldritch abomination that seek to reproduce in enough numbers that their tentacle monster “vampire intelligence” can manifest. Or something equally horrible.

    Or else the book that summoned the monsters will just keep summoning random fictional monsters which try to do their thing until the book is dealt with. (Maybe the fairy tale book from the Librarians TV show) and all the heroes can return to their respective universes.

    The famous fictional monsters would be treated like minions rather than the true monster, which would be the book.

    Also. I’d suggest maybe eight characters. For a convention game it is always better to have more than less. I generally do con games with at least six pregens but as many as twenty four. I keep GM notes as to what elements to add to the story for each character brought in.

    In this case, keep a portfolio of one character for each of the Playbooks. And a GM note sheet for what sort of minions and obstacles each different character brings.

    Maybe Hellboy brings Rasputin. Dresden brings Denarians, Winchesters bring Lucifer, etc.

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