Mutants and Masterminds One Shot

Setting

The setting is Seattle, WA - a brand-new tower on South Lake Union whose top floor houses a rather nontraditional enterprise...

Characters

Adam Reyes, aka Helios - Adam woke up in the Wenatchee forest, naked, with no memory of his past and incredible abilities. He spent several years participating in an Air Force research program, and has settled in Seattle to kick off something called "Project Aegis". He's adopted the alias Helios due to the blinding halo of light that surrounds him when his abilities are in use. (Think Superman, or, especially, Apollo from the Authority)

Charles Acton, aka The Thorn - There's a story among the criminal underworld in Los Angeles, that if you harm the innocent or the downtrodden, that a crazy bum who calls himself the Thorn will hunt you down and make you pay, leaving a single red rose at the scene. The truth is that Charles Acton, ex-special forces, legal scholar, ex-judge, and noted vagrant, long ago decided to correct the criminal justice system's faults. He's hitchiked his way up to Seattle for reasons unknown to all but him. Charles is a fearsome hand-to-hand combatant, and a fearsome intellectual adversary as well.

Jonathan DeLaurenti, a wealthy banker, gambler, and noted game theorist. Author of several self-help books, such as "Working Your Way Into Luck" and "Lucking in to Success". The coolest stuff seems to happen to this guy, over and over - what are the odds of that?

Mister Gray, a mysterious and enigmatic figure, and likely the only thing tying the other characters together. While his identity is unclear, is influence is undeniable.

Any of the above characters aside from Mister Gray are selectable for the one-shot.

Summary

The players all met in Seattle as part of Paul Allen's attempt to fund a west coast superteam. Their first assignment: to investigate the disappearance of one half of a priceless aztec artifact on display at SAM, and to prevent the theft of the other half of said artifact. The second part of that task was resolved by going to SAAM, to secure the unstolen half of the tablet. At the museum, a group of people calling themselves the Bureau had beaten the heroes to the punch and were openly threatening the curator to hand over the piece. After fisticuffs, the tablet was secured.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the previously stolen half of the tablet was some sort of recipe for doomsday, so the heroes were compelled to track it down. Their lead was that Jonny Tong, famed LA gangster, had just absconded with it, so a thorough interrogation of Tong's associates at a dingy bar in Little Saigon ensued. San Francisco was fingered as the destination for the tablet - specifically Party in the Park 09, scheduled to take place in Golden Gate Park the next night.

A chartered plane flight (excepting Helios, who got his own damn ass there) later, the heroes set to investigating the park, discovering that one DJ El Dorado was headlining the party, and was reputed to have among his stage props a mesoamerican-y ziggurat. The Thorn found Johnny Tong inside the staging tent, along with a tablet-sized crate. Jonathan DeLaurenti used a masterstroke of multilingual bluster to bluff the rest of the group into the tent, and Helios took the tablet back to South Lake Union with all haste, while the Thorn disposed of his arch-nemesis Tong. That left only the mysterious DJ El Dorado.

Nobody could have guessed (NOBODY) that DJ El Dorado was really Hernon Cortez, attempting to summon an unspeakable Aztec apocalypse atop an avant-garde drum-and-bass soundtrack. A battle ensued! The aztec apocalypse was prevented with DeLaurenti's quick thinking, who had the phonetic rendering of the other half of the tablet (rescued earlier in the episode if you'll recall) texted to his cell phone, and intoning it from within Cortez' strange ziggurat while battle raged outside. The Thorn, Helios, and Brock Samson combined their abilities to mercilessly pummel Cortez, and the world was saved!

Discussion

So, the one thing that was bugging me about M&M was how tough it was to knock someone out. Well GUESS WHAT - we were rolling Toughness saves as DC 10 + modifier, when they should have been rolled as 15 + modifier. There's your problem!

Otherwise I really liked the system.