So we ran Base Raiders last night and the group had a lot of fun with the whole idea. We played a very light game (something fairly unusual for us) where the players were powerless high school seniors in a small American town four months after Ragnarok. Our group artist ended up sketching these completely normal kids and adding things as they found more powers.
Claude Spencer: Resident rich pretty boy, Claude loves the finer things (including flying and boating) and made sure to buy a gross amount of random, hi-tech doodads that might help the group in the base.
Carmine "Big Time" Azzarello: The loveable Carmine runs a fairly large supers dedicated blog. Due to his love of superheroes and the internet he heard about "base raiding" well before most people did. Equipped with some rations, a baseball bat, a headset camera, and a replica domino mask Carmine wants nothing more than to "accidentally" become a superhuman.
Uisce "Fish" Beatha (Pronounced Ish-kay): Carmine and Claude don't know what Uisce is. Despite knowing this person for their entire lives no one has ever asked if Uisce is a he or a she. Growing up in a large, criminally-oriented Irish family taught Uisce a lot about lockpicking, sneaking around, and shooting. Uisce pocketed his/her father's .38 revolver before heading out to meet at the base.
The group originally found the base while on a camping trip in the mountains. During a lightning storm a stray bolt struck something in the ground close to their tent. The next morning they found a hatch made of a strange metal that led below ground. The lightning bolt fried the electronic lock, which caused the dormant hatch to open. The kids decided cover the hatch and come back next weekend to properly investigate.
Overall we had a LOT of fun playing. I decided to roll random powers on the Superpower Wiki and put them in the game in some way. I wanted a healthy mix of power sources and ended up with:
1. Liquid Transformation: Can turn liquids from one thing to another (like Water to Wine). Came in the form of a clear fluid cocktail made from diluted alien blood. No one chose to take this power because you had to inject it. Everyone was REALLY squeamish when it came to needles.
2. Speed Cancellation: The ability to negate movement (including super speed, though this strains the device). Came in the form of a modified Ideal Stun Cannon used by a powerful human soldier who worked with the Ideal (Cpt. Winter). He was right on the cusp of "Is he or isn't he a superhero?" and no one has seen him since Ragnarok. Attaches at the wrist and folds out into a Megaman-esque armcannon. Seen on Carmine in the picture but later given to Fish after gaining...
3. Copper Mimicry: A solid orb of copper was held in a stasis bubble in a repair bay. Fish thought it would be a good idea to undo the stasis and touch the orb because she had yet to get a superpower that didn't involved injecting a needle into herself. The orb fell apart like sand. Turns out it was actually a nanoswarm that burrowed into her bones, muscles, and skin. His new shiny copper body scared him at first. She attempted to return her skin to normal but could only make his face return to flesh. When the Speed Cancellation ISC was attached to Fish's body they melded with the cannon as well, allowing Fish to fire copper flechette and turning it a interesting silvery/copper color.
4. Weapon Hands: A symbiotic purple parasite that can absorb mundane weapons and tools. The user can then transform their hands into a chitinous nightmare version of one of these held weapons. Found on a skeleton in a hardlight jail cell. Only the fleshy tendrils of the symbiote remained on the bones. Carmine tripped and fell on to the skeleton and the alien creature quickly attached itself to him.
5. Elemental Blade (Lightning): A blue crystal from another plane of existence that can be grasped to create a crackling blade. Used by Carmine and then given to Claude.
6. Psychic Bomb Generation: By entering a machine that performs a brain modification (read: automated open brain surgery and drugs) Carmine gained the ability to create small psychic grenades and other explosives. Unfortunately, this power came with the side-effect of intense headaches and pain in the finger joints unless bombs were generated and released (read: you must explode things).
7. Strength Manipulation: A needle labeled “Strength Giver.” Not super-strength as the kids originally thought. When injected with this failed super-soldier serum the subject would gain the ability to instill great strength in others with a simple touch. Because it was a needle the players thought I was doing something evil and didn't use it.
8. Electroreception/Electric Speed: I rolled Electroreception and then rolled Electric Speed one after the other so I decided to combine them. By reading passages of this grimoire you bind an extraplanar entity of electricity to your nervous system. The plus side is that you can now sense things around you as if they were part of your nervous system AND your legs tingle with electricity which, when released, grants to bursts of great speed. The downside is, you bound an extraplanar entity to your nervous system and it's going to make some suggestions on what it thinks you should do in the future. Claude, resident idiot, decided to read the book because he was bored.
In addition they found some mundane things. Fish can be seen wearing a mesh undersuit that they believed might have been the base layer worn under a suit of power armor, some tranq guns, and a bulletproof vest. As for the flashlight... face... thing, Carmine's player loves superheroes and is great at improv. It was a piece of officially licensed memorabilia for Starlight Siren. Also it could scream if you pressed a button. Similarly, the fish head/mask was a replica of the mask used by Manfried Manfish from '98 to '03. The weird crotch thing is a censor blur to conceal Fish's gender in the skintight undersuit. We all got a kick out of the joke.
The base itself was an Ideal facility known as "The Vault." The general idea was that the base was autonomous and staffed almost entirely by robotic personnel. Unknown materials of all manner were sent to the Vault for preliminary testing. The one superhero in the Vault would then decide if things should be stored, destroyed, or sent to another facility. So when Ragnarok came around quite a few things were left unsorted.
Most importantly was the system that ran the Vault. A skilled technopath whose body was broken in a battle with a supervillain volunteered to have his brain installed in a supercomputer which ran the vast majority of the robots and store vital information. In the event of his death or disappearance much of the data would go with him. The technopath got along quite well with the other hero stationed at the base but both vanished during Rangarok. The players found it very strange that the supervillain in the jail cell with the Weapon Hand Symbiote would remain while the brain in the jar was taken. In true Base Raiders fashion I just shrugged at them and went "Who knows?"
tl;dr: High school kids livestreamed their adventures fighting robots, gaining superpowers, performing sweet power combination attacks, and discovering secrets in Base Raiders. We're totally playing again soon.
