These Dreams

Here are the dreams from Giant Size Scrap Pile #3, unedited from the messages I sent to the players. I used their super-hero names in the text instead of the fake history names because they had these descriptions before they knew they were going to be brainwashed.

Everybody but Disco got these instructions: Here's some stuff for the next Scrap Pile session.‭ ‬This is a dream your character will have at some point in the game.‭ ‬I'm sending‭ ‬it to you now so you can relay it in conversation to the others in character rather than having me take over to cram it into the narrative.‭ ‬I'll tell you when it's okay to share it.‭ ‬Before that,‭ ‬don't mention anything about it to the others.

Coach Dorian Chalice (Torpedo)
The four of you are all there,‭ ‬but you don't have super-powers.‭ ‬You do‭ ‬have funky high-tech suits like in the old Steranko Agents of Shield comics.‭ ‬Your current mission is underwater,‭ ‬so you have bubble helmets with big air hoses and propeller-jet backpacks.‭ ‬There's a gigantic cyber-turtle waking up in the depths,‭ ‬and you're‭ ‬trying to prevent it from rising,‭ ‬somehow.‭ ‬Partway down,‭ ‬you realize that all the others are‭ ‬synthezoid‭ ‬infiltrators and suddenly you're afraid that maybe you are too.‭ ‬Then‭ ‬all the water disappears.‭ ‬With nothing to support you,‭ ‬the whole team falls to its death.

Quint Brody (Land Shark)
The four of you are on a ship that sails on a sea of sand.‭ ‬You're the first mate,‭ ‬with Disco up in the crow's nest and Torpedo in charge of something below-decks.‭ ‬Magi is an Ahab-like captain,‭ ‬totally obsessed with his prey,‭ ‬a giant sand-swimming shark that bit his leg off in a previous encounter.‭ ‬Disco has just caught sight of it when the dream starts.‭ ‬The pursuit ends in disaster when it turns and wrecks the ship.‭ ‬You fall into the sand,‭ ‬which sucks you under and smothers you,‭ ‬and then you wake up.

Algernon Touchshriek (Magi)
The four of you are scientists who do more exploring than villain-punching.‭ ‬This time,‭ ‬though,‭ ‬you find yourselves fighting your way through a horde of cybernetic ape-men.‭ ‬Then you're in a world of giant insect-like creatures.‭ ‬They're intelligent,‭ ‬living in a huge,‭ ‬weird-looking city.‭ ‬They're not too fond of tiny visitors,‭ ‬though.‭ ‬One of them sees you and sprays you with something like bug spray‭ (‬mammal spray‭?)‬.‭ ‬Disco gets hit dead on and is tossed up into the air like a leaf.‭ ‬Land Shark tries to run into some kind of mouse-hole,‭ ‬but doesn't make it.‭ ‬The spray reacts with your equipment and you catch fire.‭ ‬Then you wake up.

And of course Disco's dream was played out by the whole team to open the adventure.

Coming Soon!

After a long hiatus, Giant Size Scrap Pile #3 is on the release schedule! (Pleasedontfallthrough-pleasedontfallthrough-pleasedontfallthrough!)

The bad news is that there's likely to be another hiatus afterwards, so that's all the more reason to make it awesome. I'm looking to resolve one long-running plot thread, at least.

That's pretty much all I can say, because almost everything about the story is supposed to be a surprise and, like, 99% of my audience is going to be playing in it.

Citrus Shocker Scandal

The New Scrap Pile is still in reprints, so we're going back even farther this time for a story from the original Scrap Pile:

Citrus Shocker Scandal Deepens

Apparently, cozying up to Arbiter Sands wasn't enough for the Scrap Pile. Now team leader Citrus Shocker has been accused of serious dereliction of duty by some of her fellow guardians of Paragon City.

Early in the evening of May 2nd, 2007, Citrus Shocker responded to a call for heroes to roust some Circle of Thorns cultists from a hidden temple in the Hollows. As one would expect of a hero, she joined the ad hoc team assembled by Police Drone 774 and joined them at the site. That's where the trouble began.

"I kept radioing her to ask if she could teleport me," said team member Iceman_X_123, "but she never answered. Later, I found out that she never even mentioned it to the other team members. She just stood there, reading her newspaper, while I jogged all the way across the Hollows. My cape was still on fire from Outcast Torch attacks, and she just stood there reading!"

Once in the temple, Shocker's behavior became even more... well... shocking. "She got in some good hits," says MedicHeelrDude. "I'll give her that, but then we all did. It was just an overwhelming horde of mages, guards, and some kind of screaming ghost things."

Police Drone 774 adds, "I took most of the aggro [sic] because I attacked first, but almost all of us went down. Poor TankerBelle will never be the same. As I collapsed on the stone tiles, gasping for help, I saw Citrus Shocker. She was badly hurt, but not down, and she was running for the door. And I'll tell you exactly what she said, because those words are burned into my memory. She looked over her shoulder with this annoyed expression, like she was really put out by our cries for help and said in a weird voice which I can only assume was a bad Eric Cartman impression, 'screw you guys; I'm going home.' That's what she said. And then she was gone."

"I saw her flying past as I came out of the hospital," says scrapper TrinityCatwoman. "I caught up to her and asked her to come back and help us finish the job and all she said was, 'You guys are morons. I don't have time for this.' Like it was all just a game to her. She's so mean."

Citrus Shocker could not be reached for comment, but she was photographed later the same evening, frightening civilians by kicking gang members below the belt in King's Row.

In Reprints

We won't be producing original material for a bit. Gotta wait for some Scrap Pile members to find their way back to Beta City.

We'll be back, though, bigger and weirder than ever!

For now, I guess we're in reprints, so check out the classic Scrap Pile adventure, "Oh, What a Night."

We Got the Beet

Part Two of the Anniversary Special

They went down the elevator in two groups. They found a whole bunch of antrons, and an entirely robotic version which they nicknamed Max (after Maximilian, even though it didn't look much like him). Sideshow was also there, working at a console by the hibernation couches, only two of which were occupied. Violence ensued. Max turned out to be able to duplicate powers. Sideshow was taken out early. At some point, the capsules opened and The Angry Beet emerged to help the Scrap Pile.

Ruby popped in, flanked by dude in red and gold armor with a red visor (Crimson Wrath) and a dude made entirely of red crystal (Blood Diamond). She announced that the Hand of Covenant was here to claim the Smoking Mirror hive brain. More fighting. Disco was knocked out and replaced by Theta. Torpedo was knocked out and replaced by Psyclone. Ghost Lad continued to try stunts that horrified even the villains.

Eventually they noticed that Sideshow had awakened and was doing something to the machines. Cackling triumphantly, he announced that the Smoking Mirror had finally consumed enough minds and was ready to merge with him. He turned into a big scary alien dude called Bedlam and the world went blooey.

They found themselves in a void resembling subspace with Bedlam and a bunch of floating tentacled space brains. Bedlam could warp space and the brains could stun them with trippy Daliesque visions. And he summoned Deathwing. It all worked out for the best, though.

We'll deal with the aftermath next session.

Assault on IT

We played this session on October 2nd, which happens to be one day before the anniversary of our first session, so this issue was part one of the guest-star-filled anniversary special.

Besides doing everything I could to make it a blockbuster from the story side, I told everyone that any character they've played in this campaign or any of Tom's sessions was fair game and, just for this one, they could play two characters at once if they want. Also, any time one of their characters was damaged, they had the option to swap out for a surprise guest-star who pops in for vague comic-booky reasons to help out. It's turning out to be a two-parter because we couldn't get through everything I had planned, so the same rules will be in effect next time.

We started off with Doctor Zodiac on a rampage downtown, blasting things randomly and demanding that The Scrap Pile come out and face him. Eventually, they did, and he exploded, revealing that he was only a hollow Doctor-Zodiac-shaped bomb. After that, they were attacked from all sides by psybots. Whenever one of the androids zapped them with a mind blast, they had visions of webs spreading across the world from the antron hive, a black sphere floating in lava, or jaguar people manipulating or eating humans.

Deathbird showed up as the fight was ending, but she wasn't here to fight. Her team had been similarly ambushed and she was here to team up. (See? Guest stars!)

After some deliberation, they scooped up the robot parts and (with Deathbird) went back to their hideout. Magi and Torpedo built a super-hero android, Psyclone. They called in The B Team and found that Pork Chop's girlfriend, Bad Service, had been kidnapped by the psybots and taken to the Smoking Mirror. They sent Grave Bear and Psyclone to guard Morgana in case something similar was in the works for her. Then, abandoning their original plan to wait and see how their Angry Beet arrangements worked out, they went to rescue Bad Service and stop Interlocking Technologies.

The plan was for Ghost Lad to do some scouting first, but that fell apart right away. Land Shark followed Ghost Lad, while Pork Chop climbed up a fire escape into a back window. Magi, Torpedo, Disco, and Comet held back a bit.

Pork Chop found himself in a laboratory manned by Prince, Lemmy, and Muhammad Ali. Flavia (Doctor Gold) was also there. The three dead celebrities had been re-animated using hydraulic pumps and shoddy-locking electronic devices.

Ghost Lad found Blue Shift, Scarab, Scorpion, and Jellyfish guarding the restricted-access elevator to the hive. He attempted a gruesome plan to merge them into the floor by making it intangible, but failed, after which Scorpion was somehow able to determine and mark his location.

Pork Chop, tearing through zombies, found that he also had a super-human foe in Doctor Gold, as, cursing him for his meddling ("I will flay you and make a coat for Wesley Willis out of your skin!"), she raised her arms and morphed into a shiny Nebulon-like form. Magi leaped to the window to join him. When Prince's head was knocked off and landed at Disco's feet, someone quipped, "De-elevator brought him down."

The battle with the North Coast Guardians (minus Sideshow) was joined from various angles. Pork Chop and Magi took out the zombies and Doctor Gold, even after she changed into a giant acid-spitting worm thing. Scarab turned out to have darkness powers in addition to his agility. Nobody knew what Scorpion's powers were because Ghost Lad took her out with one shot early in the fight. Jellyfish turned out to be very difficult to hurt in her amorphous form, and covered with deadly poison spines.

There were lots of cool heroics and stunts and fights in multiple locations that nearly melted the Game Master's brain. Torpedo, thanks to an Atlantean prince retcon, was immune to this one particular type of jellyfish poison. Magi conjured a fire rune that was able to do psychic as well as physical damage. Land Shark endangered everyone by using the concrete floor as a weapon, but he did manage to slow the elusive Jellyfish down a bit. Deathbird was wounded and slipped away while no one was looking. Hey, she's still a villain.

Finally, the Scrap Pile triumphed. Pork Chop got them past the electronic lock and they prepared to move on to the sub-basement, where they expected to find Angry Beet, Bad Service, a bunch of antrons, and maybe more.

To be continued in the pages of The B Team -- on sale in two weeks!

Let's Go Crazy

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word, life. It means forever, and that's a mighty long time! But I'm here to tell you there's something else...

Back to the main Scrap Pile (minus Magi, who was off doing something else), the team had a chat with that hacker they borrowed from the Lizard Moll. The Angry Beet, by the way, had passed his first interview and was scheduled to go in for processing in a couple of days.

First off, the hacker reported that there was a whole section referred to as the "Bionet" which wasn't connected to anything outside the building and so out of her reach. She did have information on the people who worked there and much of the process. Subjects were given dimethyltryptamine and placed in special sensory deprivation tanks referred to as "hibernation couches." These were then plugged in to the Bionet, which somehow completed the process. From the description, it sounded like they were talking about the weird sub-basement Ghost Lad had found on his scouting mission.

They decided that they needed some more information, so they found the lab manager, Flavia Golden, and sent Disco out to "take one for the team." According to her credit card statements, Dr. Golden spent a lot of money at Evil Gnome Games, so Disco bleached his hair and started hanging out. Eventually, he did run into her and, after somewhat awkwardly convincing her that he was interested in both women and role-playing games, scored a date.

This led  to drinks and eventually back to her place, where Disco was able to distract Flavia by telling her he was really into "sciency stuff" and would love to hear more about her work. So she took him down to her basement, where, beyond a second locked door, a chamber of nightmares awaited.

First, there was a hideous walking corpse with vinyl-like skin which Flavia introduced as Wesley Willis. Wesley was supported by a framework of hydraulic pumps which hissed and spurted fluids as he moved. The rest of the room was filled with gurneys, tanks, and an assortment of medical and other electronic equipment. Two of the gurneys had bodies covered with sheets on them.

Flavia took Disco to the closest of these and asked him if he was into rock & roll. Without waiting for an answer, she pulled back the sheet, revealing that she had the corpse formerly known as Prince, dressed in full purple regalia, in her basement. She said she was just waiting for something called "Kilmer fluid" to soak in and toughen up his skin like Wesley's, before she started working on him.

Doing his best to disguise his horror, Disco got Flavia to come back upstairs and have a few more drinks. Finally, he got her talking about her job. The Bionet was actually a cybernetic hive mind generated by the antrons. By manipulating this network, they had been able to bring the whole hive under control. The conversion process simply plugged subjects into the hive, not so much controlling them as imprinting its priorities on them.

Having gathered the information he came for, Disco risked a lightshow to make Flavia sleepy. It worked and, while she muttered something about him being sparkly, she didn't seem to notice anything amiss. Disco left a fake phone number and made his escape.