I finally get around to describing the events of Session 2 of the first adventure from my Paragons of Freedom Game. Looking forward to getting to the next event shortly.

Once I decided what I was going to make for people, Lady Bee was the first one that I started working on. A while back when I created a poll asking people what their superpower would be, Leah had answered 'Self Healing'. This brought to mind pure regeneraters like Wolverine of Claire from Heroes but I wanted something a little quirkier.

I drew inspiration from an old (7th Doctor) aventure called 'Delta and the Bannermen'. In it, a young human falls for a human-looking alien queen bee and ends up consuming a bunch of royal jelly to transform himself so he could be with her. Continuing with the Bee theme, this got me thinking of the recent Colony Collapse Disorder. Going with some classic Marvel tropes, I put together the idea of a scientist working on CCD through an enhanced Royal Jelly that ends up in her system. This gives her wings, extra strength and tougheness as well as regeneration. I want to avoid the control of bees thing beause that's a bit too cliched. Instead I wanted to touch on the Spiderman web shooters by giving her a set of invented bee stingers.. basically a dart gun that can deliver different types of toxins or even cures.

For the figure itself, I used astraight forward Wasp Heroclix as the base. It was pretty straight forward to give her a bee themed outfit rather than the red one she came with. The real fun in modifying the figure was popping off the wings so that I wouldn't get the yellow and black paint all over the wings.

This was my gift for Tricia and she was the hardest one for me to do. Over a decade ago now, Tricia played in a Play-by-Email Aberrant game I was running. Her character for that game was a native american powerhouse named Thunderbird. Basically that world's answer to Wonder Woman. My first thought in setting down was to try and recreate that character. Canabalizing my Hero Clix I took Jinx's body for the flowing skirts and general lack of clothes and mixed it with Arclight's head because it had the closest hair for what I wanted. The head was slightly too big for the body. I figured I'd paint it and that would cover up some of the imperfections. This unfortunately just made it worse and she ended up looking like and elderly fae character with exam. In the end I started over.

A year ago on LiveJournal I participated in an internet Meme that was going around at the time. The basic setup was based around a craft exchange. Here, I'll just post the original text as I re-posted it.

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
- What I create will be just for you.
- It'll be done this year.
- You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a song. It may be a something costume-y. I may draw or paint something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well. We all can make stuff!

The Mutants and Mastermind's message boards have a section called 'Roll Call'. The section is for posting character write-ups. Sometimes these are personal characters but more often they are the stats for various characters from comics, TV, and movies (but mostly comics). Years ago, back when M&M was still in first edition I stumbled across a writeup for a character called 'Liberty: The American Girl' which was a poser based superhero web comic.

My first encounter with Darkhawk was back in 1991 when he appeared in Issue #171 of of Dragon Magazine. Back then there was an almost monthly article called 'The Marvel-Phile' running in Dragon where they would talk about various Marvel characters and Darkhawk was brand new, having only been introduced in March of that same year. I remember thinking he was a pretty cool character but as I was neither playing a supers game nor reading comic books at the time my interest was fleeting at best. This was about two years before I took the on-line handle of Darktouch so how much influence was there I can't really say.

I've sort of vaguely known about this game for years as I'm pretty sure I was still reading Dragon Magazine when it first came out. I only recently went looking for it when someone pointed out the system's "Bimbo Mechanic". Who can resist a mechanic with a name like that, I had to hunt this game down and see what was going on.

This post is actually going to be very self indulgent. Recently the Atomic think tank upgraded and given that I'd been on there since 2003 I wanted to go through and document some of the ideas that have come out of my head and seen decent discussion. There is at least one item on this list where no one cared even a little. It is here because I want to delve into that item for some specific inspiration. If you're just passing through, no need to worry about a list of links but if you're curious to see what I get up to from time to time, well then here you go.

Hello Gamers and Geeky Friends,

I tend to wear my geek on my sleeve and spend a lot of time talking about RPGs. The sad fact however is that I haven't played in a game since April and rather than whining about it, I thought I would instead do something about it. With that in mind, I'd like to invite people over to my house to play a game of Mutants & Masterminds. They say do what you love right?

The game would be a 'Paragons of Freedom' style game meaning that it would be set in the fictional world of Freedom City but the style would be heavily influenced by television superheros in the vein of Smallville or Heroes.

I am hoping to start in September (August is a very busy month) meeting once every other month or so on the weekend for 4 to 5 hours. The kitchen table at our house in Bethesda opens up and should be able to support a number of players. I'm pretty relaxed at the table and think I tell a pretty good story that is heavily shaped by the player's desires and the character's actions.

One thing some friends did back in college was play a game called 'Crusaders' that I was always sad I never got to be a part of. The basic concept was that you played yourself, only with superpowers. I think that would be fun but only if everyone else was comfortable with it. At the very least, it should make things easier for anyone who is interested in playing but hasn't done this sort of thing before.

Please let me know if you're interested, I'd love to have you join.
-Bill

In taking a look at converting Aberrant to the 'Storytelling' rules, the first thing I wanted to do is to do is make a listing of the 'core' parts of of the nWoD system and write out some notes as to where the Aberrant bits would fit in there. Not sure I'll ever run this game, but White Wolf has one of the easier character creation systems so a 'write up yourself as a character/here lets add some powers' might make for a fun time at a Con game. (Down side: 15d10 per player)