While my blog itself has been mostly silent through 2022, I have spent an honestly unreasonable amount of time writing play reports for games I've played in or just spied on on Discord. I have, just now, realized that these play reports can, in fact, be used for free blog posts, which is currently the kind of blog post I need.
This game used deus ex parabola's superhero rules, but exact mechanical details are not particularly relevant.
Session 1
As the long-running, action-packed, and generally much more reasonable superhero campaign One Less Fool noticed its fuel-air mixture was terribly wrong and caught fire, the GM attempted to start a side campaign with a pair of its players, who both conspired to send the game’s tone down some unplanned side alleys.
On a wet evening in Destin, Florida, Mr. Jefferies (Shift, Weird - cursed for his sins with the form of a rubbery clown and an endless hammerspace of inedible pies) and Checkmark (Think 1, Weird - a racecar driver dragged back from Hell and turned into an accountant) sit on the curb in front of a nightclub neither of them are cool enough to get into.
Eventually, one of the patrons realizes the two of them are A) superheroes, and B) completely abject, and says he’ll toss them $100 if they go handle a job he doesn’t have time for - checking out a “ghost” sighted in a retirement community’s library. With nothing better to do and the prospect of Real Legal Currency, the PCs managed to drag themselves out of their self-pitying stupor and hike their way over.
By 10 PM they make it to the gate of the Shaded Palms Retirement Community and very suddenly come to the understanding that gated neighborhoods have gates in front of them. After a few minutes coming up with increasingly improbable Doordash-based lies, Jefferies drags his horrid clown body through the network of storm drains under the sidewalk and tosses a rope over for Checkmark.
A little more walking gets them right to the unlocked library
and its decade-old computer lab, which sparked some conversation - Checkmark’s only real useful power is sending objects directly to Hell in exchange for a bit of money. On the one hand, they don’t want to get caught stealing from the public library - on the other, money can be exchanged for goods and services, which is more than enough to persuade them. While they pocket the hell-sent $360, they hear a footstep somewhere outside.
Since he doesn’t squeak whenever he moves, Checkmark creeps up to the second-floor meeting rooms, where he is soon confronted by An Ghost, Or Similar Creature, staring at him through a door. Filled with an excess of courage, he shoves the door open ready to give it the ol’ what-for, only to be stopped suddenly when it doesn’t try to maul him.
As Checkmark runs out of ideas and tries to offer the dog-skull-headed creature a cigarette, Jefferies hears someone running down another set of stairs and leaps up to block her path, starting a four-creature pileup as the dog-skeleton rushes to protect its master, Jefferies tries running down his list of pratfalls to prove he’s safe, and Checkmark runs down the stairs to make sure nobody kills anybody else.
Luckily, no one has much time to talk to anyone or pull their limbs off for fun, as after a few half-introductions, the creature’s controller warns that back when the PCs decided “Ah, the building is simply unlocked, we will open the door and go inside” they set off the burglar alarm.
However, the PCs kind of ignore this and instead drill down into a long and winding conversation about names (the woman introduces herself only as “Friend”), power classifications (Friend describes herself as “Weird ב”, a statement that doesn’t frighten her nearly as much as it should), and personal histories until a dozen police cars fill the library parking lot. Oops.
Friend chops a hand towards the glass front of the library and it shatters as the dog-skull figure slams into it at hundreds of miles an hour, dragging Friend behind as it leaves a trail of destruction.
Jefferies and Checkmark decide that running does seem prudent, and are careful to take a path that leads them away from Friend and her runaway train of a pet.
They manage to get away as the cops stream after Friend, and later meet their patron to shrug and go “yeah, you know, exploding libraries - what’re ya gonna do”, a conversational tactic that works surprisingly well.
Jeffries spends his week of downtime “clowning around” - no further context is provided.
Checkmark saves up money for a handgun and keeps in touch with Friend (now hiding out in a golf course sand trap) over the phone.
Session 2
While Jefferies hovers around a McDonalds waiting for Checkmark to get off his shift, superhuman problems come directly to them as a pair of men in red and blue hoodies respond to the time-honored teenage dirtbag tradition of harassing fast food workers by simply picking them up, biting them, and throwing them right out of the building.
This promptly clears out the restaurant, and as the until-recently-occupants call the police, Checkmark both remembers to blink, and to gather as much information as possible. Luckily, this set of bloodlusted superhumans readily hand out business cards listing them as “Sinistro e Destro” before running out the back door as the cops arrive.
Now that the McDonalds is definitely closed for the day, the PCs hurry through the rain to their local (non-destroyed) public library to feed the rest of the Italian business card through Google Translate, finding (among other things) their Facebook account, where they have just posted a picture of Sinistro standing atop a pile of bruised Home Depot patrons a mile away. More running brings them there, where they’re confronted by reporters for the Destin World-Herald, who succinctly explain their own institutional problems by asking Checkmark about the “dangerous potential space aliens”.
Checkmark is savvy enough to take every opportunity for publicity, even against his better judgment:
though within moments the sheer presence of Mr. Jeffries has driven the reporter into a crisis about spending her career trapped in a Bigfoot-and-Roswell rag in a rainy corner of Florida.
Resigned to not making it onto the front page, the PCs bother the wounded for directions and chase Sinistro and Destro over to a local golf course as the rain transitions to a tremendous thunderstorm. Attempting to rouse the crowd of dried-out retired superhumans into an angry mob based on ideas like “helping other people” eventually gets one of them to admit that this is, for all intents and purposes, where supervillains wind up once the arthritis gets bad enough to stop them from holding cities hostage with death rays.
However, one of the retirees, Clarence (x-ray vision, complete with the risks of radiation exposure) is persuaded (more on the virtue of “beating someone up” than “helping others”) and as the PCs pile into his golf cart, Checkmark texts Friend, finding that not only is she hiding out at this golf course, but that she can currently see Sinistro and Destro beating an eight-foot tall mechsuit with its own arms.
The golf cart slowly trundles through the mud to the 7th hole, where sneakful trick plans like “blow them up with a firework purchased from the Hell Store” are slowly whittled down until “sneak up behind one of them and hit them in the head with a baseball bat” is the only idea left. Unfortunately, Sinistro and Destro are superheroes with abilities like “extra melee damage” and “extra HP”, as opposed to “accountant” and “clown”, so within a round Jefferies and Checkmark are both on the ground getting pummeled and trying to tie a blanket around Sinistro’s neck.
A golf caddy emerges from the rain and simply starts beating people indiscriminately with a club while Destro manages to break Checkmark’s jaw by biting it and Checkmark attempts to stick a utility blowtorch into Destro’s ear.
This at least gets Destro to run, so the PCs double up on wailing on Sinistro until the golf caddy manages to crack Mr. Jeffries down to 0 HP and forces him to drop the strangling-blanket. As Sinistro flees, Friend tries her best to stop him but her pet simply digs a 10-foot deep furrow in the golf green in the wrong direction.
With the time for violence over (at least, after Checkmark clocks the caddy upside the head with a bat, to even things out), the PCs check the injuries of both the mech’s centenarian occupant (a broken arm) and Clarence (deceased) and carry them back to the crowd.
While Checkmark is allowed to shove a golf cart into hell for a clean $1000, his broken jaw ends up hospitalizing him for the rest of the campaign.
Session 3
With Checkmark indisposed, his player replaced him with Meiosis (Weird, Fly), a man who can divide into two at will, and fly by having both of them push against each other, in clear defiance of all physical laws.
While sitting around playing poker with the golfers, the PCs get their hands on, honestly, exactly the kind of problem they deserve to solve - the utterly ancient superman Cab Calloway has lost his cat. Luckily, Calloway’s minder had held onto another one of Destro and Sinistro’s business cards, this one complete with a ransom note for One Million American Dollars, Brought To What Used To Be The Library.
Of course, neither Sinistro nor Destro are actually there, so the PCs wind up having to slowly follow their trail of petty theft and property damage around town until sighting them from the air all the way back at the old folks’ golf course, bent double under the weight of a refrigerator full of ice cream cakes.
Meiosis’s player had, to describe it politely, “used out-of-character information” when choosing his equipment, so after dropping Jeffries on Sinistro he splits - one half attempts to beat Sinistro with a sledgehammer while the other drops out of the air to spray Destro in the face with paint, for Immediate and Permanent Blinding.
The dice do not like this idea, so instead of a clean, synchronized neutralization of both of them, Jeffries ends up wielding a shattered Nokia phone as a shiv and is promptly absolutely turned to paste as Destro crits him over the head with a commercial refrigerator. The fight continues with the PCs hounding Sinistro and Destro as they run to the retirees;
Destro does, indeed, attempt to pull Cab Calloway’s wheelchair out from under him, but as he reaches for it he, Sinistro, and a wide semicircle of shuffleboard court simply *pop* out of existence.
Luckily, as the PCs chased them, Sinistro and Destro ditched their stolen goods - Calloway’s cat, the fridge, and an old lady’s handbag with… an entire human skull, rendered perfectly in a single sapphire.
Mr. Jeffries spends his downtime reading about Cab Calloway - along with the rest of his century-long supervillainy career, he apparently once survived a Soviet assassination attempt with a suitcase nuke.
Meiosis rents out a self-storage garage and furnishes it for Friend to live in, assuming her pet skeleton-nightmare fits well.
Session 4
Rooting through the stolen handbag reveals plenty of identifying information, so the PCs meander over to the house of its owner, one Tanya Halls, who perhaps unsurprisingly for being the kind of person to own a life-size sapphire skull, is also the kind of person to have a six-foot-high oil painting of herself and her late husband in full pirate getup in her living room.
Said late husband ran a “completely above-board” extraterritorial gambling ship, which was “completely legal, no matter what that pesky Attorney General said”, until it sank in Hurricane Andrew. While said gambling ship has since been found, its cargo of millions of dollars in poker chips still sits at the bottom of the ocean since the local Fun For The Whole Family Diving Center took the last of Halls’ money and “””neglected””” to attempt a recovery.
And with the offer of one of the $25,000 cranberry poker chips in exchange for option B, the PCs run off to the Fun For The Whole Family Diving Center with petty vandalism on the mind. Veiled threats of legal action quickly turn into regular threats of sledgehammers applied to windows and doors, and moments after that decay into every staff member of the Center grabbing the nearest blunt object.
Meiosis applies his sledgehammer to a Center worker, suddenly realizing as the blow lands that people tend to stop being alive when you hit them in the head with hammers. As he’s soon pummeled down to 1 HP with a pipe wrench, and the police are already on the way, the PCs decide discretion is the better part of valor and flee.
Epilogue
Now trapped between a building full of angry boat renters and the wrath of a octogenarian gambling tycoon, with no money, no friends, and no plan, the PCs fleeing takes them further than they’d expected at first - certainly out of Destin, probably out of Florida, and honestly maybe out of the United States.
While it did not come up in the logs, Two More Fools managed to have all the structural problems its parent game did - between each session were weeks of unpredictable schedule changes, injuries, and decay.
I hope Friend is still doing well in her garage.
