Sideways Through Subspace

First, let's talk a bit about Subspace. I came up with this by grooving on a bit of Fantastic Four trivia. When it was first introduced (FF #51), the Negative Zone was called Subspace. Consistent with conventional sci-fi usage, Lee & Kirby's Subspace was a between dimensions kinda place, a means of getting somewhere, or at least that's what Reed was hoping. Somewhat less conventionally, although entirely sensible, was the fact that it was a weird and terrifying place.

Marvel never really developed Subspace as a means of getting anywhere else, though. Before long, it was the Negative Zone, more a cosmic ghetto for psychotic aliens than the funky hyperspace it started out as. That being the case, I thought it would be fun to take some of the elements of Subspace as it was originally presented, give it my own spin (more of that below), and feed the Scrap Pile to it.

A bit of a rewind from last session: Our heroes weren't hurled directly into Dimension Q. Instead, they found themselves floating in the void. Torpedo, who had gone back to Earth to deliver Deathbird to the authorities, wasn't with them. There was no sign of the space station or any of the ships or supervillains that had been around it. The Earth glowed with searingly bright blues and greens, casting weird colors on the surrounding objects. The sun was a black sphere surrounded by a corona of dark tendrils.

Not far away, they saw Professor Hemm (or, as Disco said, "that guy with the bad hair"), who they had previously consulted on extra-dimensional issues, poking around without a space suit. The Professor flew over to them and explained that they were in Subspace. Any object with a large gravity well, like the Earth or even the Moon, would tear them apart because of the way gravity from the material universe interacts with Subspace and because their bodies here were adapted to occupy hyperspatial dimensions.

Subspace was peppered with asteroids, though, many of which were occupied by strange and deadly life forms that had found their way here from material space and somehow managed to survive. Orbiting closer to the deadly echo of Earth (and, presumably, other bodies with a gravity field strong enough to reach into Subspace) was a belt of xenoliths, transdimensional stone extrusions of other realities. The Professor had made his way into Subspace through one of these, and, with Magi's help, could probably locate one that could take them to Dimension Q.

Deciding to spread out to avoid missing anything, they got out a long rope and split into two teams. Disco and Land Shark took one end of the rope while Magi and Hemm took the other. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? As they floated carefully toward the Xenolith Belt, Disco and Land Shark saw a cool-looking asteroid off to the side, with domes and tubes connecting it to smaller asteroids, and something flying around it. Disco flashed a rainbow strobe at their teammates and the two of them let go of the rope to check it out.

A little closer, and they saw spotlights waving around in the dark, one of which found its way to them. Shortly after, a group of winged figures (and one with a rocket pack of some kind) started to head for them. Calling Magi and the Professor to help, they got ready to fight. Their enemies were four reptilian creatures with cybernetic enhancements (reptovors) and one borged-up guy bristling with weapons (a devastator). The Scrap Pile's opening move was for Disco to try a "fastball special" using his flight to accelerate Land Shark at their opponents. That didn't work out as well as it might have. Still, Disco was the only one who got knocked out in the fight, and they did eventually defeat the aliens. Or natives, I guess. Whatever.

Down at the Xenolith Belt, they found their portal rock, snagged it, and hopped on. Once there, they found a group of three hooded figures chanting over a cluster of crystals growing out of the rock. Professor Hemm recognized the chant as ancient black magic used by a half-forgotten cult known only as Dire Sorcerers.

Disco, already back in action, flew around and cranked up his light show to eleven, mesmerizing the sorcerers into a dazed reverence. The only information they provided was that they were trying to wear down the dimensional barriers. Then Disco introduced them to his friends and fellow deities, the rest of the Scrap Pile. Overcome with terror at the presence of so many gods, the sorcerers cringed and vanished.

That left our heroes free to move on to Dimension Q, which they did.

Groove is in the Heart

In space, no one can hear your soundtrack.

After taking some time to hone their skills and, in Magi's case, work on deciphering some of the dimension-jumping technology he had been gathering over several previous adventures, they talked to some contacts about Dimension Q and found out that there was a space station where technologically enhanced psychics were peering into other worlds, one of which appeared to be what they were looking for.

While they waited for their custom Scrap Pile space suits to be modified by the parent company (operations services had recently been bought out by Interlocking Technologies) the Angry Beet attacked with two strange ant-like henchmen. Apparently, he had been tipped off that the Scrap Pile was here and, confusing them with the Tripod City branch, come to settle old scores. Before long, Beet and his beet buddies were shipped off to Gladstone.

Out in space, as they neared the dimensional interface, Magi's mind shield power grew into a kind of telepathy. And their shuttle blew up. Torpedo and Disco were unconscious, but, miraculously, no one was otherwise hurt. Well, except the pilots. They probably died. The team was rescued by Freefall Brawler and Starbryte of the space-based branch of the team, Orbital Scrap. That's another two characters I need to put in the "supporting cast" thing, isn't it? Anyway, Disco was jealous of Starbryte's sparkly solid light powers and perfect hair.

Oh yeah, and stuff happened. They found out that it had been Azrak cultists (we talked about them, right?) who blew up their ship, and the same cultists were flying around stopping anyone from getting to the space station. FFB and Starbryte pointed out that the Azrak ship was coming back and they could take it over and use it to get to the space station. In the course of taking over the ship, they fought a bunch of the Gauntlet dudes and Gamma, a woman in glowing green armor who radiated deadly... uh... radioactivity.

In the cockpit, they found their old enemy Deathbird. This fight was considerably less humiliating than the last one, partly because Deathbird was confined to close quarters and couldn't maneuver as well. In the end, they took her down and the only casualty was the Gauntlet soldier Disco had brainwashed, skewered by one of Deathbird's spears.

Torpedo went with the Orbital Scrap team to take Deathbird to jail while the others moved on to the space station. By the way, it had at some earlier point become apparent that the Azrak cult had been maneuvering Qth-Raq and the human super-heroes into fighting each other because they wanted an inter-dimensional war to weaken the walls between universes and open the way to the Bright Cosmos.

The station was flooded with psychic screams coming from the ESP stations. The team was only able to proceed because of Magi's newly expanded shielding ability. Inside, they found some zonked-out telepaths ranting about stuff.

Then Baron Karza, who seemed to know Magi (even though Magi only had a vague memory of a bald guy who used to teach science) popped up and drained all the extra power that Magi had been collecting. Everybody got hurled into Dimension Q for reasons that weren't entirely clear. But that was where they were originally headed anyway, so I guess it's all good.

Worst write-up ever. Sorry.

House Rules

We added a couple of house rules this time (session write-up coming soon) that seem to be working well.

Multiple Dodges: The first one is that you can keep dodging attacks, but you get progressively worse as the page goes on. Your first dodge is a normal roll, but after that penalties start stacking up. Minus one on the next dodge, minus two on the one after that, minus three on the one after that, and so on.

Free Activations: The other one is that everybody gets a free activation of each of their three qualities once per session. This was mainly because nobody in this group (including the GM) is used to the whole playing for determination points thing where you penalize your own character to get the bonus later. Also, I tend to forget to hand out the points for doing cool stuff, which, unfortunately, encouraged hoarding.

Mayhem on Mount Galahad

Following up on the lead from their seance, the team took the Scrap Van south and arrived at Mount Galahad State Park early in the afternoon. In the parking lot, they noticed a family of four (two adults, two kids), all apparently blind, each with their own doberman to lead them. Instead of taking the trail, the family wandered off into the woods. After a quick aerial reconnaissance by Disco, revealing only the bald stone mountain and the thick canopy of trees around it, the Scrap Pile decided to be thorough and take the trail.

Along the way, Magi sensed something otherworldly and, eccentric recluse that he is, just wandered off without telling anyone. By the time the rest of the team noticed, he was long gone, so they split up to look for him, leaving Land Shark on the trail as a reference point.

Magi followed his nose (metaphorically speaking) towards the dimensional interface he had sensed. Before he got there, he spotted the blind family picking their way through the trees, still guided by their doberman companions. When they stopped moving, he froze and tried to stay quiet, but it soon became clear that they had detected him. Turning their eyeless faces his way, the form of each hiker blurred and merged into that of its canine counterpart, finally settling on the image of the wraith hounds the Scrap Pile fought in Ontario.

Magi fought the hounds, aided soon by Disco and then the rest of the team. Of the newly deforested battlefield, Land Shark said, "They needed picnic grounds."

As they moved on to the mountain, it became apparent that the entire area was sparkling with windows to other worlds, no doubt accounting for many of the UFO sightings and other legends surrounding Mount Galahad. At the mountain, they found two armored super-humans blasting a wraith hound to ash. Each wore a glowing crystal. After some conversation, it came out that one of them, now called Bludgeon, used be Grasshopper. He and his compatriot, Scalpel, had been rescued and saved from their impending dissolution by "a great man" known as Covenant.

Image borrowed from The Great Game - Click to Check it Out

Hiding their skepticism, Magi and Land Shark joined the two Covenant fans in opening and exploring one of the mountain's many portals to search a crashed space ship for equipment that was supposed to help them become fully human. Magi quickly determined that the equipment they were looking for was actually more portal-access equipment. Magi surveyed the bizarre crash site and then asked Land Shark to trash it.

Meanwhile, Disco and Torpedo watched two winged men in black armor swoop onto the scene and demand that they vacate the area because they had claimed this mountain in the name of Warmaster Qth-raq.

The fight at the crash site moved outside as well, and, in the free-for-all, Bludgeon and Scalpel escaped while the two winged legionnaires both went down, partly because of Magi's berserk assault.

Magi, not much cheered by the victory, gathered up a number of components and went to work on some secret project.

Purple Rain

Featuring: Disco, Land Shark, Magi, Torpedo
(This was actually two sessions, but I never got around to writing up the first one.)

While deciding on what to do next about the ever more complex web of villainy sprawling out all around them, the team got word that some sort of monster had escaped from the Gladstone Superhuman Detention Center (aka the Gladstone Pits) in Tripod City and was trashing Wentworth outlets (the one the Scrap Pile destroyed in their battle with the Unbeholden was only one of many).

Heading out to deal with this unexpected disturbance, the team found a man-shaped being of crackling purple energy (radiating small amounts of deadly-to-Magi Qalnor waves at that) ranting about how they had stolen his humanity. Magi managed to get him talking and discovered that he had once been the supervillain known as the Grasshopper, one of Deathbird's former henchmen. Previously, the Grasshopper had not had any powers beyond those that his equipment gave him. Grasshopper believed that, somehow, the equipment he had been given had been deliberately designed to slowly change him into an energy creature.

It was unclear why he blamed Wentworth's for all this, except that the parts for his costume might have come from there. The conversation was punctuated with brief outbursts of violence after which it was necessary to calm the Grasshopper down again before the discussion could continue. Eventually, Magi talked him into turning himself in by promising that this was the best way to get a team of experts working on changing him back.

The equipment that Grasshopper was talking about was among the items taken from the supervillain equipment warehouse during the team's first mission, so there was no way to examine it. Torpedo had some friends at Beta City Community College, so the Scrap Pile went there in search of answers. There, they were introduced to a somewhat eccentric professor who called himself Doctor Concord. He believed that the effect was a result of exposure to a kind of between-space energy often found around dimensional gateways.

He then went on at some length about star-gods from the smaller, brighter universe of the past, and nebular corpses and other stuff, but nobody was listening.

Then the prison blew up. Well, they got a phone call saying it blew up, or a text message or something. Anyway, there was a big riot and they needed some super-heroes, so off they went. As they approached the prison, they saw another energy-form fly away, but, feeling that the riot took priority, they decided to keep going and just call the other escape in.

At the Gladstone Pits, they found that the prisoners had surged into the outer yard and were trying to storm the gates. They were held back by snipers and guards in high-tech armor. Magi was detecting more Qalnor radiation, but again at low levels. Disco put on a big light show while Land Shark and Torpedo worked on corralling the rioters in the yard. Magi jumped over to the main building to find the warden.

The warden reported that the prisoners claimed to be fleeing from some kind of weird purple lightning in the inner courtyard (which was actually a large indoor space, not a real courtyard). Despite Magi's invitation, he declined to leave his office. Disco's light show was, for once, not terribly effective, but Land Shark and Torpedo were still able to herd the prisoners into a corner with the help of some swarming stone shark fins. Magi, adapting his mind shield technology, was able to construct a device that helped contain the spreading dimensional instability.

Fighting their way into the core of the prison, they found the aforementioned open space lined with swirling purple portals. Not sure what to do about this, they paged Doctor Concord (after first attempting to call him at his office) and sent Disco to retrieve him. Concord was fascinated by the phenomenon, and proceeded to draw the energy of the portals into several large crystals he had brought with him. The portals disappeared and Concord muttered some thanks and started to wander off.

Torpedo, already suspicious because of the phone-hopping, slugged Concord just hard enough to knock him out. Strangely, although Torpedo got a good solid hit in, Concord didn't seem injured at all, just annoyed. Disco tried to brainwash Concord with a lightshow, but somehow the effect reflected back on him, convincing Disco that Concord was exactly what he appeared to be - an eccentric professor who had just helped them out. A much more successful light show against Land Shark left only Torpedo and the still-ambivalent Magi in the fight.

Torpedo, however, made a speech with the full authority of his Atlantean princitude, and was able to bring them to their senses. Magi was still not really all in, though, because his hesitation was based entirely on legitimate skepticism about their reasons for attacking the professor. After they encased Concord in rock and attempted to snatch his crystals away from him, the professor paused to concentrate for a moment and then vanished.

Back at the University, their friend reported that Doctor Concord had never actually worked there. There was just something about the way he asked that made her think it was a good idea to cover for him this once. He had, apparently, known the heroes were coming all along. The only thing they found that might have come from him was an odd diagram on a scrap of paper.

Torpedo gathered some mystic friends together and they held a seance to try and find out more about Doctor Concord. This led them to some trippy scenes of alien star fleets and black stars and civil wars and finally to Doctor Concord and a place south of Beta City called Mount Galahad. A final image showed Concord overlapped with a ruby-masked figure and the name, "Covenant."

Giant Size Scrap Pile #1

I wasn't quite prepared for what I wanted to come next in the campaign, so I whipped up this goofy one-shot instead and figured it would be like an Annual sort of thing. Annuals are usually in the summer, though, so I reached even farther back for the "Giant Size" tradition.

Lounging around the Scrap Pile base, the team was surprised to see an inter-dimensional portal open up before them. Out stepped a young man with heavily styled blond hair. "People of 1983, my name is Jonathan Chance. I come to you from 2015 to bring you a grim warning of days to come. Help me change the future!"

Upon being informed that this wasn't 1983, Chance expressed confusion and asked where the household Roboto guards were and if this was a rebel stronghold. Eventually, thanks in part to Magi's interest in dimensional travel, they worked out that Chance had in fact traveled across time to an alternate reality, instead of back in time as he intended.

Chance explained that, in his reality, a politician called Doctor Righteous had seized control of virtually everything by stirring up a panic about rock and roll. Using the death of one of his followers in a concert riot, he had gotten a performer named Kilroy prosecuted for manslaughter. For some reason, he used imported Japanese robots as his enforcers. Soon, people were burning albums and guitars in the street. Chance was a member of an underground movement that was trying to stop Dr. Righteous and bring back rock 'n roll.

They were trying to help Chance return to his overwrought concept album reality when the device went off on its own, transporting them all to a crater with some other well-coiffed rebels. They were in the midst of fighting robots led by a man in a black uniform. The robots had faces that were sculpted to resemble a grotesque parody of stereotypical Japanese features. In short order, all of the rebels but Chance had been disintegrated by ray guns. The robots had some kind of telepathic attack in addition to their guns, but this proved ineffective against the heroes.

The unformed man turned out to be a skilled teleporter, able to blink away from attacks and respond with several of his own, but they eventually took him down as well. Chance recognized him as Lt. Vanish, one of Dr. Righteous's lead enforcers.

Chance mentioned that he had made contact with Kilroy, who had recently escaped and wanted to meet at the old Paradise Theater, so they piled into Vanish's van and headed over there while a giant holographic Righteous head lectured the public about purging the poison of rock 'n roll from society. In the abandoned theater, they found a "museum of rock 'n roll depravity" complete with cheesy automatons. Among other things, it depicted an enraged Kilroy beating a clean-cut Majority for Musical Morality protester to death with his guitar.

Anyway, Kilroy showed up disguised as a Roboto and they discussed strategy. It was decided that Kilroy and Chance would hold a concert to rile people up and to create a distraction while the others broke in to Righteous Towers to take down the Doctor himself. Except Disco. Disco was helping with the concert.

All of that worked out pretty well. The concert was a hit, thanks in no small part to a spectacular Disco lightshow. Righteous and his attendant, Colonel Hyde, were taken down relatively quickly once the team reached the top of the tower. Magi was able to fix up the cross-time gadget and talk the rockin' rebels into letting him keep it, so they all went home to their own version of reality.

Disco Inferno

Having read through the Clown's research notes, the team realized that they needed to get Magi to take off the gauntlet he had taken from the alien raiders. He had been showing signs of heavy dependence on it, and had even been sleeping with the device still on his hand. He was, at first, unwilling, and even managed to fend off a tough-love punch from Torpedo. After they convinced him to test his own mental defenses, however, he was able to shut out the gauntlet's impulses and realize what was happening. Taking the glove off sapped so much energy that he immediately lost consciousness. After a day in the hospital, however, he was almost himself.

The team still had a lot of Clown pages to discuss. To do that, they needed a meeting hall. After getting some financial support from the parent group, they proceeded to tunnel under an old garage and have a base built underground. While several of the chairs were still those awful foldy things, they were still able to put together a relatively high tech base complete with big round meeting table.

Going over the notes, they discussed several possible concerns, one of which was that Nightmare Pixie sounded really scary. Magi noted several possible connections to his enemy, Warmaster Qth-raq of Dimension Q. Also, one of the entries was just a bunch of song lyrics. What they settled on, though, was something that looked like a realistic short term goal that might actually help some people. The Clown had mentioned a massacre committed by Sarana. They had a date for this event, and the likelihood that it would have happened close to the Ocelot Bay facility.

While records of events in the lawless wastes of Ontario were hard to find, they did discover that a group of young hikers had gone that way and never returned. The report gave them a good idea where to look, so they piled into their captured boat, despite Land Shark's suggestion that they just drive around the lake, and headed out to follow their trail.

Eventually, they found the exterminated town described in the Clown's notes. The massacre had happened almost ten years ago, so the corpses were mostly skeletons and the place was collapsing into ruin. Exploring the town, they discovered that the skulls had all been marked with a star, reminiscent of the star tattoo around Sarana's left eye. The only life was a pack of dobermans that watched them for a few minutes and then wandered off.

North of the town, they found the camp grounds where the corpses of the hikers from Beta City were. Suspecting that some occult connection had been made, they set up a bonfire to cleanse the skeletons. On their way back, as it was getting dark, the five dobermans met them on the road and refused to let them pass.

When the team attempted to go on anyway, they transformed into shadowy humanoids with odd circuit patterns glowing on their flesh. The fight was tricky, because the hounds had the ability to become intangible at will. One of them stunned Magi early on, overwhelming him with an otherworldly chill and taking him out of the fight.

Once defeated, the hounds melted into a black ichor and faded away. Free of obstructions, the Scrap Pile proceeded to gather the bodies and burn that mutha down. While the bonfires burned, they took some time to try and figure out what kind of poison gas Sarana used to kill everyone. Eventually, they thought to review the security cameras from the various places that used them. They discovered that, in fact, it had only appeared to be a sudden affliction because of Sarana's combination of stealth and super-speed. In fact, she had killed them all with her sword.

Coming home with a case solved, the team was rewarded with comfy chairs all around. They settled in and discussed their next move. Eager to discover what sort of invasion from Dimension Q the Nightmare Pixie was covering up, Magi wanted to investigate her background. The others, more than a little concerned about going anywhere near that particular villain, were in favor of pursing Deathbird and the Cult of Azrak in Beta City.  No final decision was reached.