Last Friday was the latest session of the New Centurions game run by my friend, Clint. Our last session had ended with the White Tower ((The main tower of the Tower of London, the one you see in all the pictures.)) exploding. We started this session a little bit before that, giving us a chance to talk more with the local heroes, exchange information about the Methuselah effect, and generally get some questions answered.
Then, of course, the Tower blew up.
Actually, what it looked like was that a powerful blast of multi-coloured fire erupted from beneath the tower, tearing up through the interior, and slowly ((Well, slower than an actual explosion, anyway.)) eroding the outer walls and tossing the debris high into the air. The fire didn’t radiate heat normally – it was easy to approach to a certain distance, and then the temperature ramped up sharply, as if the inverse-square law was out of whack.
When we determined that we couldn’t get close enough to the Tower to do any good there, we got to the top of the walls and looked out at the city. It had gone completely dark; even the little bits of electricity that we had witnessed since our arrival were gone. Then we started seeing lights in the city, and realized that they were bits of the Tower debris falling into the streets, burning with the same multi-coloured fire.
We decided to split up ((Sort of. Paladin’s player wasn’t able to make the game, and Queen Celeste’s player was playing a different character (Death Nell) while Queen Celeste is doing some off-screen stuff for her character’s advancement.)), with Paladin heading off with a magic-using type called Wicked, and Death Nell coming with Falkata, Widowmaker, and S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. was able to use his predictive algorithms to plot out the locations of the hot spots, and we set off to deal with them.
At the site, we found that the fragment had smashed some buildings, setting some minor fires, and was throwing off tendrils of mystic energy. It had also transformed some of the citizens into twisted, stunted creatures, who fled as we approached. It turns out that that was only so they could get the big creatures to come and thump us.
A little bit of experimentation ((That is, some desperate maneuvers in the battle that didn’t have the results we had hoped for.)) revealed that water could not extinguish the magical “flames,” that non-living things could not touch the Tower fragment, that the tendrils and the areas they created were very dangerous to be in, and that throwing the big creatures onto the Tower fragment caused them to turn into even bigger creatures ((That one’s on me, guys. Sorry about that.)).
The fight turned out to be surprisingly challenging, not so much because our foes were tough, but because the environment had interesting threats that we had to deal with, and we were unable to directly address the root cause of the problem; i.e., the Tower fragment. See, S.P.E.C.-T.E.R. couldn’t touch it, and hitting it with a weapon did no good, and none of the living players wanted to try to touch it after seeing what it did to the creatures. Widomaker was able to contain it in a forcefield, which cut it’s influence off from the surrounding area, but as she can only make one forcefield at a time, that was a temporary solution at best.
In the end, we built a bit of a cage over the fragment using the wrought iron fences in front of the townhouses, and ran off to the next trouble site.
And that’s where we left things.