The heroes of Freedom City will once again take to the skies tonight as my gaming group returns to our Infinity Storm campaign for Mutants & Masterminds.
Player schedules — both mine and the groups — have played havoc with the campaign, and as a result the campaign’s been on something of a hiatus since Issue #6: White Knight, Green Hero back in February. In a perfect world I would have filled that void with some play-by-post sessions, but alas, the world has been less then perfect.
Wandering Plot Points
Fortunately though, the stars have realigned, and the game is on. Tonight’s session will see our heroes dealing with the continued challenge of rounding up supervillains released during the epic prison break back in Issue #2: Reign of Chaos, while still struggling to unravel the longer-term threat posed by cultists of the King in Yellow.
In hindsight, adding this second storyline was probably a mistake. While it’s provided some great moments in the campaign (particularly the Issue #5: The Lost City, with an episodic game like Infinity Storm it would have been better to focus on wrapping up the prison break storyline first, and then launched into the Kings in Yellow. This sort of mix of short and long-term plots isn’t a big deal in an ongoing weekly/biweekly campaign, and hell, only having two ongoing plot threads is a big reduction from what we have in our Dungeons & Dragons game. But in a campaign like this, when you never know when your next session will be, even having only two major plots feel like a drag on the story.
Future Shock?
I figure I’ve got about two sessions left in the current volume of Infinity Storm: tonight’s game, which will hopefully wrap up the prison break, and then one more session to deal with the Kings in Yellow storyline.
I’ve loosely planned out two more volumes, but with our Pulp Weird Savage Worlds campaign and D&D 4th Edition playtest campaign on the horizon, it’s very likely we won’t return to Mutants & Masterminds until the fall at the earliest.
That seems like a damn long time, too long for a campaign we’ve been having so much fun with. I need to give it some more thought, but I’m considering some sort of short play-by-post follow-up that could serve as Volume 2, culminating with a real world game session. Since most of us aren’t going to GenCon this year, I’m assuming we’ll try for another Nuke(m)Con this summer (our home-grown gaming convention), and that would be the perfect time to run another game of M&M.
It’s going to require a fair amount of planning on my part, and commitment from the interested players. Play-by-posts are notoriously difficult to sustain, and I don’t want to start anything we can’t finish.
Freedom City Atlas: Pyramid Plaza
In other Freedom City news, Green Ronin has begun releasing an atlas dedicated to the fictional metropolis in PDF format. The first release is Pyramid Plaza, and it details three of the city’s largest skyscrapers. It’s a little pricy at $4.95 for 11 pages, even with the included map, but I was curious, so I bought it. I haven’t had a chance to do more than quickly glance through the PDF. It seems like a useful enough supplement, but I think I’d rather wait for the full atlas to be release (or for Green Ronin to offer a subscription model that could bring the per-PDF cost down).