Hey all! Something really special today for my Tabletop post, and that’s a video live play of Mutants & Masterminds, from Green Ronin Publishing. The session was arranged by Bag of Giving, which is an awesome wee idea put together by Brandon Crilly and Michael R. Underwood that puts together authors and other creative types with tabletop board games for one-shot sessions—and, more importantly, try to raise come cash for some awesome charities (and there are prizes!). I’ve you’ve never played a TTRPG with a group of authors, allow me to tell you, in the shortest possible terms, what to expect: weird, but funny.
Or at least, that’s how it seems to work out for me. Maybe it’s me. Wait. Am I weird but funny? (Cue “Agatha All Along!”)
Our Heroes
For this session, we had four amazing characters:
Ivy Logan—(Played by Pheobe Barton.) Ivy Logan doesn’t have a heroic superheroine name, because she’s a trans woman who can grow to forty feet tall—being forty feet tall rather stands out—a domino mask isn’t going to help much. Also, it allows her to lend her full presence to social causes (and a healthy dose of intimidation, frankly). Phoebe is awesome, and you should check her out online and definitely sign up for her newsletter, which I adore reading as there’s a perfect mix of down-to-earth and don’t-forget-to-breathe alongside the solid advice and updates.
Steel Slash—(Played by Marco Cultrera.) A man out of time, Steel Slash found a magic sword, but when he swung it at something evil, it sent him forward two hundred years in time, and he’s been since mostly flummoxed by stuff like the internet, phones, and all the other accoutrements of technology. His magic sword allows him to teleport whenever he strikes at something, and he’s not sure if he’s just one good deed away from being able to back to his own time, but he hopes so. You can check out one of his stories here!
Whisper—(Played by Kate Heartfield.) A sleek, chic psychic with abilities that just spontaneously arrived as a wild talent, Whisper has telekinetic abilities as well as a psionic ability to make other people completely unaware she’s right there in front of them. She also seems to warp luck a bit to her own favour, and has a captivating effect on people attracted to women. If you don’t already know Kate, you can fix that here, where you’ve got so much amazing reading ahead of you, you lucky jerk.
The Jurassic Punk—(Played by Erin Rockfort.) An actual lizard who through some totemic shenanigans is now human-sized humanoid, only with the whole tail, spitting-paralytic toxin, climb-on-the-walls thing. The leather jacket completes the look. You can find Erin at ErinRockford.com (you were right, Erin!), and you should definitely try all the social medias searching for “PineappleFury” because not only is Erin smart, that’s just fun to say. Pineapple fury. Pineapple fury.
I want to quickly note that I mentioned a few weeks ago how easy it was to make characters with this gaming system, and that post is here, but we got together for a quick Zoom session prior to gaming and everyone used that system to make their characters (with a few tweaks thereafter) and once again, I have to say how wonderful those quick-create tables are. Whisper used the Psychic table, The Jurassic Punk used the Totem table, Steel Slash used the Weapon Master table, and Ivy Logan used the Shapeshifter table. Everyone did it à la carte rather than rolling dice, and had a character ready to go in no time.
We were live last night, but through the magic of the interwebs, and if you’d like to watch it, you can see the whole session here, on ArvanEleron’s Twitch, (he is great, by the way, and is kind enough to host us ancient un-hip types who don’t have our own Twitch streams and also use terms like “hip.”)
I mention it in the video, but I also want to shout-out to Crystal Frasier, who wrote the original version of “The Reign of Cats and Dogs” (you can pick it up here, from Green Ronin) before I hit it with the Canadian equivalent of the platypizer gun, and adjusted the already a-plus puns into eh-plus puns. (Sorry. Not sorry.)
'Nathan Burgoine 
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