So I've run two sessions of Base Raiders for my friends thus far, and I have to say both were an absolute blast.
Session One - Black Friday
This was a one-shot origin story game that we decided to play at the last minute while hanging out, and although I improvised about 90% of it somehow it all came together hilariously (Aside from me mangling a bunch of background stuff). The characters were Mike Rogers (Former villain henchman lieutenant, now stay at home Dad of three), Joseph Smith (Art History dropout spending every dime looking for his missing superheroine girlfriend), and Penelope Dean (Hot Topic employee and step-daughter of a supervillainess), who all found themselves in the Vanderburg Mall on the morning of Black Friday. After a brief round of holiday shopping shenanigans to establish the characters (In which Mike bought the wrong version of Pokemon for his kids, Penelope promised the new employees a bonus for "holding the line" with no intent of giving them one, and Joseph failed to buy paint brushes because he was broke) they all found their way to the food court where a man was ranting and raving to a crowd about the dangers of metahumans and superpowers. In order to "prove" to everyone how dangerous they were the man reached into a bag, withdrew a spherical device, and activated it causing a wave of energy to rush through the crowd. Most people were unaffected beyond getting knocked over, but about half a dozen (Including Joseph) began writhing on the ground as they experienced sudden physical mutations.
While this was going on the madman was shot dead by the mall cops, but before they could figure out what was going on one of the newly-awakened mutants transformed into a twenty-tall bastard love child of a crocodile, a venus flytrap, and a deathclaw. The cops panicked and shot at it, doing absolutely nothing, and this set it off on a rampage throughout the mall. By this point Mike and Penelope were fleeing for their lives and Joseph had finished morphing into some sort of feathered, winged, beaked birdman, so the latter attempted to fly away with his new wings and succeeded at smacking into the skylight above the food court. After recovering he dove back down, avoiding the other mutants, and grabbed the spherical device and the bag it had been inside (Which was full of money, documents, and strange-looking vials). Mike and his kids fled over to electronics, narrowly avoiding Satanzilla as it chased after another mall cop, and Penelope fled back to Hot Topic to get her things. While there she encountered a team of men in tactical gear who claimed to be from the city's metahuman response task force, but with her Empathy roll she realized it was pretty suspicious at how quickly they had arrived on the scene. They urged her to evacuate the building, which she pretended to do before doubling back and following them to the entrance to Macy's where they stunned another mall cop with some sort of advanced, non-standard sonic cannon.
Mike managed to get his kids to an emergency exit and was just about to leave the madness behind when it opened to reveal another group of men in tactical gear carrying exotic and advanced weapons. Their leader attempted to convince Mike that they were with the metahuman task force before Mike realized it was none other than Frank, his old buddy from his henchman days! Frank was equally surprised to find Mike on the scene but seemed to be in a hurry, so he "offered" to have Bryan (Another old friend who was wearing some sort of clawed cybernetic sleeves) escort Mike and his kids to their car while the rest secured the situation. Mike agreed, sensing something was up, and spent the walk over to the parking garage thanking Bryan profusely for coming to their rescue. This meant that when Bryan attempted to blast Mike in the back of the head with his cyborg arms he hesitated enough for Mike to dodge around the side of the family minivan, and after a brief struggle Mike managed to subdue Bryan by ramming him with the fucking minivan. At this point Mike retrieved his daughter's little league bat from the trunk, broke both of Bryan's kneecaps, and proceeded to question his old poker buddy on what the fuck was going on.
Meanwhile back in the food court Joseph was examining the contents of the duffel bag to find something that could turn him back to normal. There were two vials marked "Achilles", one marked "Metamorphosis", and an unmarked vial with a sticky black liquid inside, so out of desperation he tossed down the vial of Metamorphosis. Despite suffering almost ten burn as a result of that and his previously gained bird powers he managed to gain control of it as his body turned into liquid metal, giving him the power of shapeshifting and basically making him into a T-1000 Birdman. He also tried to examine some of the documents in the case but they were written in some sort of code using various languages he wasn't fluent in, so he was unaware of what was actually going on as Bryan explained it to Mike:
Frank and the gang from Mike's henchman days had turned to base raiding after their boss, a supervillain named Fallout, disappeared during Ragnarok. They mostly went after lightly protected facilities since all they had was a small cache of Ideal and Lutyen tech and some know-how from their henchmen days, but a few days ago they had been hired by an anonymous client to raid an old storehouse of Biomancer's and retrieve a spherical device. The job was a success and they snagged a case of supersoldier drugs on their way out for a bonus, but when they met the buyer to make the exchange he tried to haggle them down from the agreed-upon price, then simple stole their loot bag out from under them with the help of an invisibility charm. They managed to track him to a hotel in New Arcadia, but when they stormed his room all they found was a collection of notes on the Mutant Gene Activator, plans of the Vanderburg Mall, and a calender with Black Friday circled. According to the notes Biomancer had undertaken research to find a way to trigger dormant mutant genes en masse in 1/15th of the population, but the prototype device he created using reverse-engineered Lutyen tech had an unfortunate side effect of infecting another 2/15ths of those exposed with Lutyen's Disease, a flaw he hadn't managed to fix before Ragnarok. Those infected would remain carriers for 24 hours, at which point the virus would be communicable and the carriers would begin to die; that was the window Frank and his team had to recover the MGA, somehow reprogram it to re-suppress the virus, and detonate it again inside the Mall to prevent an outbreak of one of the deadliest diseases known to man.
Meanwhile at Macy's Penelope watched as the "metahuman response force" used thermite to burn their way through the floor and access an underground chamber which shouldn't actually be there. Two of the men fast-roped down while the one with the sonic cannon (Riley) remained in the store as a guard, but using some cunning Penelope was able to sneak up to him and push him into the hole (The mall cop they had stunned unconscious was a friend of hers), sending him plummeting about thirty feet to land on his weapon's backpack power cell. One of the other man climbed back up to find whatever had pushed Riley into the hole while the other tried to see if he was okay, and at this point Joseph entered the scene with the bag of goodies. The base raider threatened to shoot Joseph if he didn't slide the bag over, which he did, but at that point Satanzilla showed up and chomped the man with its flower petal mouth and harpoon tongue. While it was munching on him Penelope and Joseph scrambled for the hole in the floor, the latter grabbing the bag on his way, and after the screaming died down the monster stalked off in search of more prey and left the three strangers alone in a subterranean basement with no idea who each other were.
Back outside Mike managed to get Bryan's cybernetic sleeves off, which according to him were jail-broken Lutyen riot control devices that could fire stun beams, short-circuit electrical systems, and project searing lethal laser blasts. Bryan also admitted that they had learned of an old safehouse belonging to Doctor Pangloss buried underground where the Vanderburg Mall had been built; they guessed their client had intended to detonate the MGA as a distraction so he could loot the contents while everyone was running away from the crazy mutants, but after double-crossing them he had been in a rush and hadn't accounted for trigger-happy cops blowing him away. One team was sent to investigate Pangloss' safehouse in the hopes it might have information on the MGA, since she and Biomancer had been rivals, while Frank's team went to hunt down the bag and the MGA itself. Knowing that he or his kids might have contracted Lutyen's Disease from the MGA Mike knew that he would need every advantage he could get to recover the device, so he slid the arms on and activated them, miraculously avoiding burn by spending every last one of his remaining skill points and getting away with just the Untrained aspect. After setting Bryan's broken legs and tying him up with seatbelts in the back of the van, Mike (Whom we decided was channeling Bryan Cranston) locked his kids inside and headed back to the mall, once again narrowly avoiding catching the attention of a stalking Satanzilla before heading towards Macy's and the safehouse.
Inside the base Joseph, Penelope, and Jerry were locked in the strangest Mexican standoff in the world over Riley's unconscious form and the bag of stolen goodies. Joseph really wanted the money in the bag so he could use it to find his missing girlfriend (And so he could buy something to fix his now two freakish deformities), Jerry wanted the MGA, the documents, and the super soldier drugs they busted their asses to steal, and Penelope wanted to know what the fuck was going on. After calming down a bit Joseph agreed to toss the bag over, but in the process the black vial slipped out and broke at Jerry's feet. The liquid inside consumed him entirely until he was nothing more than a pimple-shaped blast blob pulsing on the floor, leaving Joseph and Penelope alone with the bag and Riley in Pangloss' secret storehouse. At this point Mike managed to reach the "entrance" and climbed down, retrieving the MGA, and when he found Riley unconscious with two strangers he decided to do a quick search of the base to see if there was any medical equipment he could use to stabilize his friend. Using the arms' EMP setting he managed to open a small storeroom full of what looked like historical artifacts (It seemed this was one of Pangloss' few magical item caches) and a computer room, leaving a third ("Specimens") sealed. With no obvious means of helping Riley and the MGA in his hands Mike left to find Frank so he could reprogram the device while Penelope and Joseph attempted to hack the computer and search for useful information on the subject (With absolutely no knowledge of hacking between them).
After a few failed attempts Penelope went to examine the storeroom full of artifacts, inadvertently knocking one over in the process and bringing it to life; it was a burned piece of parchment with Japanese kanji written on it, and as it touched the floor it burst into flames. When Penelope inhaled the fumes she gained the Strange skill "Spirit of the Dragon" a Superhuman level ability which gave her thirteen burn and bonded her soul with that of an ancient Japanese dragon. Her player took a number of cosmetic flaws that gave her a permanently draconic appearance, as well as a major complication that resulted in her hearing the dragon's voice and experiencing his avarice and greedy urges herself. Unfortunately this didn't come into play this session as we ran out of time, and since we were near the end I just fast-forwarded and resolved the remaining threads. Mike saved Frank and his squad from Satanzilla by distracting it until the NCPD could arrive with Lawgiver (Resulting in a giant robot-kaiju fight in the parking lot), allowing them to reprogram and detonate the device a second time. Joseph failed at hacking into the safehouse computer but was remotely contacted through the interface by someone referring to themselves as "I" with an offer of employment if he entered a self-destruct code into the mainframe (Which he did). Penelope, sporting an obviously inhuman appearance, decided to tag along with him while trying to make sense of the pompous scaly bastard riding shotgun in her head.
In the epilogue the three unwitting heroes and the remainder of Frank's team showed up at Nighthawk's diner to meet a woman named Iconoclast, who offered them a lucrative contract to hunt down and ransack an old supervillain base belonging to some asshole named "Fallout".
(I'll post session two, which was a hell of a lot more coherent but no less fun, a bit later)
