The 10th Anniversary

 

Golden Griffon goes to work

Well today marks ten years since the shutdown of City of Heroes. Yes, we have the game back now and have for a few years but it's not quite the same as when it was a going concern. My post last year covers most of my thoughts on this but in the year since I have spent more time on the current version with Homecoming and it is better - they've made a lot of enhancements this year and I've had a ton of fun playing it with my friends. Halloween, especially, was a blast this year. 

A league gangs up on Jack-In-Irons

I'd say the only downside now is going to happen with anything that you do with friends and family over a long period of time: remembering what all was going on back when and occasionally being reminded how much has changed over the years. It's not a negative, just a side effect of sticking around for a long time. It's easy enough, relatively speaking, to keep a video game going, but it's impossible to return to a particular place and time in one's life ... we've had some moments though. 

I'm just glad it's back and still going strong.

Phurious Pharoah takes one for the team here. Witches...

9th Anniversary of the City of Heroes Shutdown

 

I haven't noted this every year and yes there is a version of the game back online for a good two years+ now but I still felt like mentioning it this year. Homecoming and the others are great and they have added some new stuff to the game but it's not quite the same. 

I'm not sure why it feels different but it does on some level. With none of the old characters or supergroups carrying over there was some loss even after recreating many of them. It's a different crowd these days. The loss of the old forums that were such a repository of knowledge and a ton of fun. A lot of it may just be life changes over the past nine years. Time and life march on, tastes change, people come and go ... it would probably be different now even if the game had never shut down but it did so we had a clean break for almost 7 years for things to drift.

This is certainly not intended as a complaint about the revival - far from it! I was super happy when we were able to log back in again and I'm still glad it's around even if I do not play as much as I did those first six months it was back. It's nothing but a positive development. 

I am a little disappointed that we don't have "more". We have the original game with some enhancements but I was really hoping we would have "Paragon City: The Next Generation" by now. None of the successors have launched with an actual game nine years later and none of them have anything more than an alpha/beta/early adopter type option. I was pretty optimistic about them in 2012 ... I am far less so these days. 

Some of the in-the-moment posts:

• 30 days before shutdown
•  The End
• Thoughts a few days afterwards and looking at other implications
• One year later
• Two years later 

City of Heroes - Analyzing my Character Choices

 

Golden Griffon (Brute) over Talos Island

A bit of introspection today - what kinds of characters have I made in this new incarnation of Paragon City?

Melee Types:

• Tankers: 10
• Brutes: 11
• Scrappers: 10
• Stalkers: 1

Well that's weirdly even. I was more of a Scrapper Guy than a Tanker in the old days, then once Brutes became a hero side option I dove into those pretty hard. For those not as into the game Tanks are the strongest defensively, Scrappers are the strongest offensively, but Brutes are almost as good as both of them in both categories. The "fury" mechanic for Brutes makes them probably the easiest class to play as they are almost a s tough as a Tank, and they gain damage output every time they hit someone -or- get hit by someone. They are quite a bit of fun because they feed directly off of doing what they are supposed to do. I like all of the melee types though. 

Stalker is a bit of a specialist, more about sneaking through enemies than a straight up fight but they are enjoyable for a change of pace. My one in play is a Crow homage so he's very much a theme character. I never played them in the old days so this is an area I ought to explore more.

Amazing Aluminum Man (Blaster) over Steel Canyon

Ranged Types:

• Blasters: 11
• Corrupters: 6
• Defenders: 3
• Sentinels: 4

Not a big surprise - my main is a Blaster and I tend to create a version of him on each server which pumps that number up a bit. Corrupters are a better fit for some concepts and I have explored a few different directions there. Defenders are great on a team, less so solo so while I do have a few and have some ideas for more they will always take a back seat to the first two. 

Sentinels are the new archetype on Homecoming. They were a concept in development on live and then completed between then and now. It's a ranged combatant primary power - like a blaster - but the secondary is a defense set which is something entirely new. It's an "armored shooter" type which actually fits my original concept for Aluminum Man better than Blaster, but I've been playing him as a blaster so long I can't change now. I did recreate American Ironhead as this type and he's been a lot of fun. I have a fire blast/fire armor character that's been pretty amazing too. 

Utinni Utinni (Robot Mastermind) wishing he could see over the counter... 

The Specials:

• Mastermind: 5
• Controller: 3
• Dominator: 2

I did not play a ton of these in live and that seems to have continued. Masterminds are a lot of fun so there will be more at some point but I don't really want to duplicate the primaries right now. Theming matters so I would rather run one of them up to max level before I try running the same thing again. 

Controllers are cool but I am not a huge fan of running them solo - they are way more fun on a team, even a two-man team, so I tend to only run them with friends which keeps the numbers down. 

Dominators... their powersets are the trickiest for me to reconcile as a character. I get an occasional idea for them, and they are fine for solo play, but they just don't speak to me like a lot of the other options do. 

Conclusion

Well I'm sure all that says something about me but I'm not sure exactly what. I will say one of the reasons to have a large slate of character options is that whatever mood I'm in I probably have something that fits it perfectly. Charge in and bash heads, fly around and snipe, team up ... there are lots of ways to go - and I'll be going for a while longer. 

Finding Some Fun - Back to City of Heroes

Aluminum Man vs. the Giant Donut

So when it came back last year I played it damn near daily for about 4 months ... then I just burned out on it ... to the point I barely touched it until last month. having more time at home though, and having run through some other options to the point of near burnout - namely World of Warships and Command & Conquer Remastered - I kinda fell back in love with it again.

Hammer O Justice and Blue Aluminum Man team up for ... justice!

While many of my friends are still out on it, a few have come back with me so that we are getting in some decent team time again. Yes I do have a ridiculous number of characters but this round I am not making new ones, just levelling up the ones I made last year.

Son of MacGruff dispenses some Street Justice

I've also discovered the oddly comforting feeling of running into some of the same NPC's and running the same missions we were running ten years ago. There are multiple levelling paths in City of Heroes so you usually have choices as you climb the ladder but there are some favorites along the way. Since everyone had to recreate their characters there have been some moments of deja vu here and there as we find ourselves having flashbacks to live with the same characters running the same missions. There's some nostalgia, sure, but it's also fun to re-acquaint yourself with something that is unchanged after a minimum 7 year gap. A lot of other things may have changed but Paragon City is just as you remember it.

Ten years later Fusionette still needs rescuing over in Faultline

There have been some updates - there are new powers and power sets, tweaks to some existing powers and archetypes - even a new archetype: the Sentinel -  costume updates, and lots of quality of life stuff. Vidiot maps is still an extremely useful add-on (and has been updated), MIDS is still there for power-building (also updated), and the forums are new but still an incredibly helpful resource for learning the game, or re-learning when memory fails.

"Hey Hammer! I bet we can take that Rikti ship!"

So if you're bored at home or in a superhero kind of mood come check it out!

• Downloading
• Setting up an account
• FAQs on getting started

If you get on and get interested message me here and maybe we can team up!

Ack! Maybe we can just wait 'em out!

Updates for Early August

Activity continues even if the blog has not been keeping up - here's an attempt to improve that situation:

• PLAYING: I've started a new M&M campaign for the 50 Fathoms group. It's a "limited" campaign and will only run probably ten sessions or less but I'm hoping it will set up interest and momentum for a regular ongoing campaign.
• NOT PLAYING: The ongoing old-school 5E Isle of Dread Campaign is in a holding pattern while the Con Crew handles their business
• READING: Pathfinder Second Edition - i like what I see so far and I am of course considering what I might run for an initial tryout of the new system
• MINIATURES: Working on some new army lists for 40K and I will probably try one of them out with Blaster this weekend.
• ONLINE: City of Heroes Homecoming - maybe not every day but multiple days each week sees the Amazing Aluminum Man and friends adventuring in Paragon City once again!

The Supersonic Man investigates a disturbance beneath the city streets!

Obsession of the Moment: Paragon City Returns

So many heroes reborn ...

Adamantium Man returns!

Phurious Pharoah returns!

Draco Rex returns!

Not all of my time has been sent with old friends - some new ones have turned up too - more on that later.

Just getting to use that "City of heroes" post tag again has made me smile so it's been an amazing few weeks.

Not-40K Friday - Resurgence! - Aluminum Man Flies Again

I was going to start posting about 40K again but the big thing this week is definitely not 40K here.

For current details look here - it's a few posts down on this page.

Some fun information here.

The Amazing Aluminum Man RETURNS!

It's true ... all of it ...

Go here for details.

Member City of Heroes?

Member 2012 when they shut it down for no great reason? Aluminum Man remembers ...

Four years ago today it all came to an end.

Still haven't found anything quite like it.

Someday ...

11-30-2015

Gundalf the Grey welcomes you ...

Today is the 3rd anniversary of the shutdown of City of Heroes. That's not a good thing - well, other than that I am here to remember it.

THE PHURIOUS PHAROAH BOWS TO NO MAN! NO BEAST! NO THING FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION!

Since the shutdown I've spent a fair amount of time in Federation Space with Star Trek Online and some in The Old Republic as well.

Captain Shamrock after a particularly exotic night out.

They are both fine, good-looking games and can be a lot of fun to play but there's still nothing out right now quite like the ridiculous versatility of City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Blue Aluminum Man - prepare to put it back in deep freeze!

One of these days something very close to it will come along I don't expect anything to perfectly capture the combination of fun, quality, atmosphere, and general good-natured-ness and awesome that was this game.

All good things ...

Combining City of Heroes and Necessary Evil - Why Not the Rogue Isles?

Z3-R0 at the beginning of his career in crime

One obvious question that might occur to some people is this: If you're running a Necessary Evil game and want to set it in the City of Heroes world, why not use the City of Villains home area? Why not use the Rogue Isles? That's a good question.

For one, the campaign is all about juxtaposition and if I have villains running around the "villain homeland" it loses some of that feel. I need them to be reminded that they are "fighting the good fight" whether they like it or not.

Second, the Rogue Isles are a dump and no one cares about them compared to the attention given to Paragon City. What are the big landmarks in the Isles? There's not much. The interesting, memorable stuff is over in the big city where people actually want to live.

Thirdly, Paragon is where the money and the power is. If you're interested in taking control of things, then you need to go to the center of things, and that is not the Rogue Isles.

Boss Thunder out for a stroll

Also, my players and I spent a lot more time hero-side than villain-side so it is far more familiar. That matters. For a group that played more villainous characters when the game was active I can see it becoming the focus of a campaign but for us it just does not make sense.

In-game I intend to justify it by saying the Isles were blasted by the V'Sori early and often. Much like before, it's a somewhat anarchic zone that is monitored but not occupied. We may take a trip there during one of our missions, but it's never going to be the focus of the whole campaign.

No, there's really very little mercy here

"But what about Arachnos and Lord Recluse?" I hear you saying. To which I reply "yes - what about them?" Perhaps that's something that needs to be investigated. Perhaps our villains protagonists will investigate that. We will just have to see.

Astro-Ranger suspects this might be an old Arachnos base ...

Combining City of Heroes and Necessary Evil - the Content

Well, that's certainly still relevant

So now that I have a framework for how I think I can run this, I need to decide on the meat of each session. Since it's still "Necessary Evil", regardless of setting, I'm going to start with that.

The core plot unfolds in 11 adventures. Originally it was 10, but the explorers edition added an 11th which is good because the original finale was not good and I was planning on changing it anyway. With the reset to Paragon City I plan on changing it even more. For those familiar with the adventure, Star City has a sort of plot of its own tied to its history, and it ties in to the original finale. I'm planning to drop that whole element anyway, rendering that particular plot point meaningless. My players also finished the first 3 plot points back in 2010 when we started this and we're keeping those adventures with a little bit of a retcon to reset them in Paragon City. So I have 7 core plotline adventures. These are pretty much usable as-is with simple changes to names, locations, and some NPC's to reflect the new setting. There's only one other major setting discrepancy and I'll talk about that below.

Iconic characters like ... Fusionette!

Fleshing out the main plot are a bunch of other adventures that form the meat of the campaign. Given my plan I need to build out 5 of these into "main" adventures, and pick out 12 of the remainders as "B plots" for the campaign. That will use most of what is provided but it does leave me some room to skip the entries that don't fit as well.

Finally I have to think about working in the flavor of City of Heroes. I think there should be some kind of touch point to Paragon City in each session. CoH had a lot of landmarks, like statues and islands and buildings and those could play a part. There are a lot of good and evil organizations and those should have a role. There are also specific heroes and villains that show up in the game and those make it feel like home too. My initial thinking is that each session should involve a group, a location, and an individual character in addition to whatever A & B plots are happening. Frostfire was a big adventure run at the lower levels in the game. One session will probably deal with Frostfire, the Outcasts, and the Hollows. If I can find a plot point that would tie into them nicely, so much the better. The Hollows zone was also tied into the Trolls and the Circle of Thorns and might lead into something with those groups in either the prior session or the next session. Officer Wincott was a normal cop in the zone and he might show up too. Laying out a web of these kinds of connections is the real challenge here in my eyes.

Faultline ... err "Overbrook" Dam - infested with Vahzilok

Another example: There is a non-core plot point involving a dam. I like it, so I plan to use it. In the original adventure it's Hoover Dam, so it involves a trip to Vegas and while that's very comic-bookish involving the landmark and all, it felt a little odd in a campaign that is so heavily focused on a single city. Fortunately, Paragon City has its own dam which was the location of a popular task force. Revisiting it during an alien occupation invokes both a familiar location and allows for some ties back to that original task force. The primary enemy there was the Vazhilok, a sort of zombie group. The primary allies were Longbow, a Shield-like organization. It involved a running fight into, through, and on top of the dam itself. This gives me some nice ties back into Paragon City lore and some ideas on how to expand it into the focus of an entire session. There were also some ties to the Clockwork and the Circle of Thorns in those missions so now I have some potential links to other sessions if I want to focus on any of those groups.

Battle atop the dam!

So flavoring and tweaking the preset adventures, then adding in some additional material for additional flavor is he plan. There are also some plot complications to resolve as well. The biggest one is that Atlantis plays a large role in Necessary Evil but there is no Atlantis in City of Heroes. This was a conscious design choice from what I have read and there were no plans to develop Atlantis or an underwater city of any kind. Solutions:

• Just add in the NE version of Atlantis. I'm still toying with this but it really seems like the easy way out. I'm of two minds on the concept too:
• Adding in something new that significant to the setting detracts from the effort to make it feel like Paragon City and shouldn't be done. 
• Think of it as an "expansion" for the original game - new zone, new race, new other character options - all of these things are pretty common elements in an MMO expansion, so why not take advantage of it?
• Find one entity to replace Atlantis - maybe the lost magical city of Oranbega can serve as a less-watery stand-in? How about the Shadowshard? Maybe Cimerora? Croatoa? I really just need a lost city that's difficult to access and has magical elements to fill in.   
• Part-out the Atlantean story elements to other areas instead of trying to go for a one-to-one replacement. 

Honestly my initial reaction was the second bullet, but after taking a break for a few days and coming back to it, I'm leaning more towards the first one. Most comic book settings have some kind of Atlantis, so it's not like it's a genre violation. Also, characterizing it as an MMORPG expansion is really starting to appeal to me, especially since I'm using a no-longer-active MMORPG as the setting. I need to make some more notes but it has a lot of potential and requires a lot less ret-conning effort to the adventure.

Combining City of Heroes and Necessary Evil - the Framework

Once I decided to combine these two things, I took a look at what I had to work with and how I wanted to integrate them:

• Necessary Evil has 11 adventures that form the main plot, plus 20-odd more written adventures, plus a random adventure generator which is pretty solid. There is plenty of material here for a year-long campaign - it's more a question of what I'm going to leave out than what I need to add in. I'd be doing that even if I ran it in the original setting.
• NE has its own setting and its own lore and some of the reveals in the adventure are very much tied to that setting. Changing the setting means changing those elements in some way or leaving them out entirely.
• Paragon City has extensive lore, numerous characters, and a lot of enemy and friendly groups that players interact with during the game. On a basic level there is some reassignment that needs to be done but my players may want to know what happened to certain groups or teams or characters during and after the invasion, so I have to think beyond just renaming NE's NPC 's with City of Heroes names and re-write how the whole invasion went at a high level. This will give me some guidance when stuff like this comes up on the fly. I've been working on this the most over the past couple of weeks and I'm pretty happy with where it's going.

Speaking of Faultline Dam ...

I was originally thinking it would be a simple "repaint" (e.g. there's a mission involving a dam, well I'll just recast it at the Faultline Dam and we're good!) but there's so much more background available with COH that I want to do a lot more. Attempting to run this on a fixed schedule though means that adding anything in might require eliminating something to make room. With roughly 30 NE adventures and planning to run 12 sessions for the whole campaign (once a month for 2015) I'm looking at 2-3 of those per session before I make any changes. Now these are not lengthy dungeon-crawl type adventures, and Savage Worlds plays pretty fast anyway, so for now I'm going to schedule it out like this:

• I'm keeping 10 of the original 11 core plot adventures. There's one I didn't like. Now my players have already done the first 3 back when we started this game years ago. So really I have 7 original core plotline items left. 
• I like about 18 of the "other" NE adventures and think I can adapt them to Paragon City fairly easily.
• Assuming I can fit in roughly 3 "plots" per session then this leaves me about 11 slots to work in something specifically tied to City of Heroes - about one per session. 

If I can pace this out correctly, that means I run a core plot item once every other session, an "other" plot item every session, sometimes more than one, and one Paragon-specific item per session too.  Now that's all fine as a mathematical exercise, but things rarely flow that neatly in play. Players get interested in a particular character/group/plotline, somebody misses a session, we have to cancel one somewhere, distractions mean we get less done than hoped for - there are a lot of variables. Heck, I don't have a great feel for how much we can get done in a "normal" session just yet so this is all just estimating for now. 

Atlas Park - head-on!

The other main consideration in planing is to make sure each session is self-contained - an episodic campaign rather than a normal serial-type campaign. By the end of session A, we should have completed X,Y, & Z. Playing only once a month I don't want to have to track combat states with a 3-4 week gap in between. This also helps deal with player schedule hiccups, among other things, and it feels more like a comic book anyway. 

Note: Thankfully in a supers game or any mission-based campaign it is possible to do this kind of planning as they tend to be more closely directed and/or more reactive so the GM has a lot of control over when and how things show up. If I was running a sandbox game or a mega dungeon I wouldn't be trying to manage it this way, namely a fixed-time type of campaign.

Now, with a framework for the campaign sketched out, I can start planning what goes into each session. More on that next time!

The New Campaign for 2015: Necessary Evil - with a twist

Things finally came together and I had a chance to fire up a new campaign alongside our continuing Pathinfinder adventures. I've been wanting to play more Savage Worlds, I've been wanting to play some kind of super-RPG, and I've been thinking a lot about City of Heroes, so ...

I know NE already has a twist - you play Supervillians pressed into saving the world - but the city setting in the book is a gimmick that while I was OK with it, I always felt like it could be better, less "generic modern city" on the surface. I felt that as far as the players were concerned it had an unusual shape but the background behind it kind of washed over them or was never fully discovered. I never had a good feel for the street-level view of the place. Given that my group were all fans of City of Heroes and played it quite a bit, why not use that familiarity to amp up a tabletop game? Why strain to make "Northpoint" interesting when I can say "Steel Canyon" instead and they instantly have a picture of the skyline, the layout, and where it is in relation to the rest of the city - and so do I.

The Heart of Steel Canyon 

I did consider taking another tack. I did think about using the DC or Marvel universe but those are so detailed and so vast I think a "devastated and conquered earth" campaign is tougher to pull off. I lingered for a while on using M&M's Freedom City setting but a) my players are not that familiar with the city as I've never used it for a sustained run and b) I don't want their introduction to the setting to be post-alien invasion Freedom City as I'd like to use un-invaded FC for a future campaign.  Then I realized the answer was Paragon City, the setting for City of Heroes:

• Familiar to everyone? Check.
• Easy to visualize iconic locations? Check. (plus I have lots of screenshots to refresh memories)
• Well-known heroes and villains and organizations to play various roles in the campaign? Check.
• Conflict with canon? Nope, since the game closed two years ago I can pretty much blow up whoever and whatever I want after a certain year.  
• Online resource with tons of information? Check.

I'll cover more of the details in future posts and how I'm substituting parts of the adventure with my own and stitching together some other elements to make it more tied to Paragon specifically. They are still villains, they are still working for a major supervillain who has formed the resistance movement (some more willingly than others). In the original adventure this is "Dr. Destruction", a Doom-esque villain. In my version it is Nemesis.Yes, it is literally a "Nemesis plot."

He's sort of a steampunk Dr. Doom who's always plotting something

Why not Lord Recluse as the resistance leader? In fact where is Lord Recluse? Well that's an interesting story. My players may uncover it during the campaign - or they may not. That's one of the keys to my approach. There are a ton of threads one could pursue in post-invasion Paragon City. We could spend years on "Whatever happened to hero group/villain group/giant monster/villain/hero etc." and while I have plenty of ideas I'm going to let the players drive the focus on where things go.

Also, we are picking up the game where we left off in 2010. We're assuming that all of those events happened, even if we are retconning the location and some of the names into Paragon City from Star City. The players brought back all of their old characters (everyone managed to hold on to their character sheets in paper or digital form for 5 years!). I'm working on a "retcon recap" to update the events of those old sessions to fit them in.

Atlas Park lives again!

While this is not quite as zero-prep as running it straight out of the book, it should be quite a bit more rewarding. plus, knowing the setting so well makes it easier to run on the fly anyway. If you are familiar at all with both games then you will know there are certain elements of NE that do not have an easy counterpoint in CoH. I have thought about them and I already have some possible replacements and re-works. Some elements I'm just going to de-emphasize, others will be ignored entirely. As far as the core concept and general plot, it's still Necessary Evil - but it's MY Necessary Evil, and when we're done it will be mine and my players' take on it, by way of Paragon City.

Finally,  this is not just planning - we played the first session over the weekend. Three of my four players were available so it is officially kicked off! Right now the plan is to play once a month though if schedules line up we may work in an extra session or two. I'm going to sketch it out as 12 "Issues" with this kick-off session as an "Issue Zero". If we play more, well, there's no lack of material in my head. More to come.