I’ve heard “don’t include the doomed” as advice for running one-shots. This last weekend, I ignored that advice and I’m glad I did because the Doomed really drove the climax.
The Wildcards consisted of:
Sol the Outsider
Shadow the Doomed
Exo the Transformed
ATLAS the Newborn
Glimmer the Delinquent
Since ATLAS was a robot and Glimmer and Exo were both the victims of unethical experiments, I decided that they would be facing Iron Flag and Rampage, respectively the nazi robot and the unwilling experiment from the villain deck. I also decided that both villains would have been coerced into this attack by Shadow’s nemesis, a dark wizard.
The fight started in the park, with the villains trying to get inside the adjacent “History of Science” museum for an unrevealed reason. It was rough for the wildcards at first, but Exo and Glimmer managed to trap Rampage in a sculpture while ATLAS, Sol, and Shadow put a lot of dents in Iron Flag. When a villain’s monologue revealed that Shadow’s nemesis was behind this, Shadow used his dark vision doom sign to learn exactly what the bad-guys were after.
Since I hadn’t included any of Sol’s backstory yet, I decided that the villains’ goal was something from her people’s homeworld. Sol’s player decided it was a probe sent to Earth, the first contact between Humans and her species.
And when he learned this, Shadow decided that the probe must be destroyed so that his nemesis couldn’t acquire it. Not only did he destroy the probe, he also used his doom sign powers to crush what was left of Iron Flag like a soda can.
So Sol the Alien got to see her teammate destroy an important artifact of her people, while ATLAS the robot got to see his teammate destroy a robotic being without any hint of remorse. Normally after that intro fight, my Masks one-shots go to NPCs showing up and cheering the team for their heroics and/or berating them for their failures–but this time, the fallout was all internal to the team. Somber reflections on the price paid in desperate situations, New grim lessons on what humanity was capable of for the non-human members of the team.
Was this at Big Bad Con? I swear I was talking to either you or one of the players, because I remember the bit about destroying an alien artifact, but I can’t remember exactly who!
Sounds like a great moment! I can see that the Doomed in a one-shot doesn’t get to really experience most of what the playbook’s about, but I think that’s really okay. The Beacon doesn’t really get much of their playbook happening either, nor do others. It’s okay. One-shots are just meant to be fun.
Noel Warford, yup. This was the game on demand that I ran instead of Urban Shadows.
Speaking of Urban Shadows, I stole a page from it’s one-shot rules for this and had the Doom mark 3 boxes in his doom track at the start of the game. That let him mark a second doom sign after only one use of dark visions and one instance of endangering others–bringing the clock to the forefront helped push this to the endgame it did.