My Mask’s campaign ended and boy did it end.
It all started two sessions ago.
After being directly attacked by the villain they were hunting down, they interrogated her and found out she was Rex King’s (Lex Luthor) clone and that Rex was planning on unleashing an army of super clones on the city. Feeling guilty, the Doomed stuck around with the clone and learned her life’s story. Feeling pity, she offered to help her get a new life. Meanwhile, the Protege was researching the tech in the superweapon she stole. His mentor interrupted and demanded they give them the villain for their own interrogations. When Rex’s clone (named Iconoclaust) kept using her influence to convince the Protege that his mentor brainwashed him into being a hero and didn’t respect him, he accepted it. He tried to reject his mentor’s influence and failed: he reluctantly agreed to give them the prisoner and got angry.
The Doomed’s ritual works and Iconoclaust has a new face and name. The paragon they send to collect her doesn’t recognize her and the Doomed convinces him she escaped. The Protege sees through this and called the Doomed out. The Doomed said he had no spine because she knows she called the paragons here. The protege punches the Doomed in the face and walks off.
Next session, the team is in shambles. The Nova, who was missing last session, reveals he was on a mission with a paragon of the city into the syndicate, the first supervillain society that is both the first one and recently formed. The paragon was captured and he lost control of his powers: destroying the base that had vital information. The Doomed decides to go with the Delinquent to talk to the Protege’s mentor. Using Adult moves, she convinces not-Batman to stop being hard on his protege and gets him to back off.
While the Protege and the Nova debrief, the Delinquent looks into the superweapon and accidentally causes it to detonate.
Working as a team, they successfully stop the device from going off and taking out a city block: for the first time in the entire campaign, they stopped something without causing any collateral damage. A fact they quickly take note of and feel proud of.
They didn’t have time to celebrate, as the Paragon’s orbiting watchtower begins to go on a collision course with the city. Working as a team, every member successfully holds it off/ fights off the army of clones / gets their ally up to the watchtower / activates the emergency rocket boosters. In the process, the Delinquent is left outside the city limits and the Doomed is knocked out. The leaders of the Syndicate reveals themselves: Rex King, The Sorceress, and the Clown. Revealing they used the captured paragon’s security codes to get into the watchtower, they reveal they have transformed all the paragons into farm animals and have super clones ready to kill the Doomed on command.
With no other option, the team stands down and is captured.
In the final session, the Outsider, who missed the last two sessions, reveals she was undergoing a biological update to enhance her shapeshiting powers and it would be dangerous to wake her up midoperation. The Delinquent begins all the other heroes super tech to arm himself to rescue his team. As he does, he comes across the Outsider in cryosleep and forces her awake: do to his misunderstanding of alien tech, he has made her biologically unstable.
As they bicker, argue, and yell, the protege awakens. Finding himself suspended in a pod alongside a rune sealed Doomed and the Nova being used a battery, he pushes his powers farther than ever (we houseruled it so he could use psychic powers) to completely dominate the guards so they let him out and tie themselves up. As he does this, the Doomed awakens, activates her moment of truth and teleports to Rex King asking to resolve the rest in a later scene. The protege tries to free the Nova from the device draining his powers for fuel, but accidentally trips a fail safe that blows it and severely wounds the Nova. As they discuss brass tacks, the base’s alarm goes off.
Back at their homebase, the Delinquent and the Outsider get in a heated argument as the Outsider fears for her life. In the middle of their argument, their joke villain shows up. A golden age villain whose joke is he is a scifi supervillain who is behind on technology and just catching up. Like, he had tech impressive for the 50s in their first battle, but laughable in 2016. He reveals his army of robots that he designed after seeing DARPA show off their new machines. Basically, those new machines that can walk perfectly on four legs.
Entirely a non-threat, they successfully provoke him and tell him they don’t have time because they need to save, literally, all the world’s heroes. Shocked, the villain — who reveals he was on vacation in the bahamas as one should enjoy their golden years — is annoyed that this syndicate is ruinning his favorite hobby. “Those whippersnappers don’t get it: heroes are supposed to win and we are supposed to lose. We understood this back in the day: the only reason we fight is to inspire people to be better. Than power hungry idiots took it over in the silver age and eh!” Correctly identifying what idiots would do this, he reveals a note he got to join the syndicate that has an address and pass code to a secret portal in Rex’s headquarters.
Back in the villain’s base, the Protege and the Nova fight off a legion of smaller villains until the Sorceress appears herself.
Using her psychic powers, the Outsider helps them stay invisible as they walk past the clone controlled steets of Halcyon city to Rex’s HQ. As they activate the portal, the Clown appears, shuts off the portal, and sends his henchman after them. A quite fight ensues. The Clown then fills the room with poison case. Throwing acid pies from the dark, the Delinquent fails to take a powerful blow and chooses to flee by reactivating the portal and abandoning his teammate. The Outsider quickly follows while very, very annoyed.
The Protege and Nova do their best against the sorceress. They even manage to remove her foci and weaken her, but she opens a portal to space and tries to suck them out. The protege sacrifices himself to keep the Nova from flying off. The Nova returns the favor and puts the Protege and the unconscious super villains into gravity bubbles. The room is completely devoid of air as the Sorceress hides in her shield.
Rex King reveals himself and does a quick volley: the portal is destroyed in the process. The Protege and Outsider get into an argument that almost costs them their lives. Then, the Doomed shows up. Using her moment of truth, she breaks the runes. As her doom was that she’d be sucked into hell, she grabs Rex and takes him with her: saving her teammates. She once told the Outsider about her doom so she is devastated. The Delinquent doesn’t get it until the Outsider explains it and the both remain quiet for a moment. In her anguish, the Outsider sends out a psionic blast that I fiat gave everyone the afraid condition as she broadcasts her despair.
Feeling the hit, the protege and Nova both know what happened, fall to sorrow, but use the knowledge their ally is there to tell them of their predicament. The Outsider, afraid to use her powers due to her instability tries to use it harder than ever before to make a form that can allow her to move/survive in space. Doing something she thought impossible, she shapeshifters into a mystical beast, a dragon, and flies through space to the Sorceress with Delinquent in tow.
As they arrive, the Sorceress throws an arcane blast at them to kill them, but the Delinquent, guilty about abandoning her before especially after seeing the Doomed sacrifice herself, defends her and takes the hit. As his power is power negation, he directly engages her and takes away her shield and portal: knocking her into the wall and on her last legs.
As her last ace in the hold, the Sorceress threatens to kill the captured and transformed heroes by cooking them alive. The Nova uses his moment of truth. Realizing that space and time are intertwined, he goes back to the moments when the heroes were transformed into animals and push them forward to this moment while collecting random animals to replace them in the past. With the paragons in their full glory, they finish off the Sorceress.
The paragons then congratulate the team. The protege’s mentor admits that he was wrong for doubting him and says “it seems you were the leader this team needed. That the world needed.” The other paragons who mirror/ had a past with the team all honor or apologize for past behavior in their own way. For example, the not-Flash apologizes for getting mad at the Outsider for screwing up his stakeout of Pig God.
As all seems cheery, the not-Spiderman asks where their last member is. They mention she died. There is a moment of silence and the not-Superman says they she lived well and she will be honored and remembered.
As our last scene, the Doomed is reunited with her family in heaven and begins to them the story of her team over tea.
We then did an epilogue where I asked each hero a question about what happened afterwards. The heroes finally decides on a name for their team, something they couldn’t do all campaign: the Gatekeepers. The Doomed’s name was Gateway. They got Rex’s base as their new hideout and used it as a place to teach the super clones to use their powers for good and become heroes.
As the last question to the group, I looked to the Doomed and asked if his character was happy and he said she was.
Honestly, it was a good campaign.
