Supers: All-Hyphen's Eve

Hola, amigos! I know it's been a while since I rapped at ya, but you wouldn't believe what I've been going through lately. First of all, I let Ron the Festiva for a beer run last week, but he got pulled over on account of a busted tail light. I'd totally forgotten about it. I'm not even sure I knew about it in the first place, since it's in the rear and I never see it back there. I don't know how it's legal to give a guy a ticket for something he can't even see, but that's the pigs for you. Anyhow, turns out the vehicle registration expired two years ago because I never got around to renewing it during the Christmas rush of '08 when I working at the tree lot, and that plus a few bogus unpaid parking tickets meant they impounded the old girl right then and there. I had fifty bucks' worth of scrap metal in the back seat, too. That's the last time I ever let Ron drive stoned.


Apologies for using the exact same Jim Anchower joke across two blogs.


Anyway, last weekend was Hyphen-Con VI in San Diego, which was, as always, a stunning success. We even had prize support this time, from both DriveThruRPG.com and The Gamer's Torch, an FLGS in Pacific Beach. (I won Gloom, a neat card game which apparently retails at $25). So if there's any doubt that Hyphen-Con is a real thing, let those doubts now be put to rest. As we like to say, "Believe the Hyph."


I didn't run any FATE-based games at the Hyph -- Morgan Ellis ran a lively game of DFRPG, though -- but the night before Hyphen-Con, on All-Hyphen's Eve, I ran another FATE Supers game for four guys from what, in my pre-baby days, was the ol' monthly Spirit of the Sword group. To accompany MVP and Clique, two characters from the OrcCon game, I made two new characters, one an insubstantial-type and the other a super-strong android. Here they are:

Zeitgeist, an ectoplasmic pop-culture blogger
Prodigy, an android "teenager"

Each of them makes use of some new stunts and/or power trappings that weren't around when I made the last batch of characters. Zeitgeist is able to transform from a regular teenaged girl to an insubstantial ghost-like form, so she has a stunt called Alternate Form. As a full-round action, she can turn into a ghost, which gives her form-related powers a handy Snag of "Only works while in Alternate Form" and comes with a pretty severe drawback of its own: While in her ghostly form, she can't affect the physical world at all. But it works both ways. One of her powers has the trapping "Invulnerability: Physical Attacks," which lets her use the power to defend against physical attacks as if it were two tiers higher than it is (i.e., Cosmic vs. Extraordinary). Prodigy has Invulnerability too, but his is against poisons and mental attacks, thanks to his robotic body and positronic brain. Thanks to the high cost of his powers, all of his aspects (apart from his Concept and Catchphrase) are claimed by Weaknesses and Complications. His player (me) has traded in the freedom to define the character as he will in exchange for two Superhuman and two Extraordinary super-skills.

Because Zeitgeist's Invulnerability is so broad, it cost the equivalent of four trappings instead of just one, whereas Prodigy's each cost only half that (two trappings).

BTW, Zeitgeist's catchphrase was "Spoiler Alert!" which I thought was pretty funny. All right, it was my idea, but her player made good use of it.