Rising Tide is an Astonishing Super Heroes campaign set in Boston, MA. I’m the GM, and I’m joined by my brother Joel and my cousin Matthew. They each play two characters: Joel’s running DISK GIRL/Naomi Nikita Johnson and THE CAT/Bella Arthur, and Matthew’s running MONOCHROME/Simon Blake and THE SAINT (who is a sentient construct created by Monochrome, and thus has no secret identity).

I will be posting session reports (“campaign journal”) like this one of the campaign periodically. They will include commentary on — or tie into related posts about — campaign building, on-the-fly rulings, and even playtesting new game mechanics. This first campaign journal will mostly be story setup; look for a related post on how I built the entire campaign setting and first scenario in just 6 or 8 total hours of work!

In Issue #1, the heroes are introduced to a fishy murder charge leveled at an inexperienced vigilante, and learn just how byzantine the collision between the metahuman community and the corruption in Boston can get.

The Story So Far…

While you see much more detail in a future post about how the Rising Tide campaign setting was built, the basics of the setting and the player characters are pretty simple.

Setting

The setting is modern Earth, with two key elements of alternative history. The first is that climate change has been slightly more drastic and damaging, leading to nations coming together in a more unified and positive way than in the real world to work on solutions. The second is that metahumans (superpowered humans) have been around throughout history, but seemed to explode in numbers since World War II. There are tons of theories on why this is, but none of them are widely accepted or fit every situation: magic is a bit more common nowadays, superpowered individuals are widely known and (mostly) integrated into society, masked vigilantes are a waning but still common occurrence, and there was a short, small-scale alien invasion that was repelled by superheroes (and freed supervillains) just a decade or so ago. Point is, it’s a unique campaign setting, but not really much different than the modern MCU or Valiant Universe: supers aren’t a dime a dozen, but neither are they some secret conspiracy or solitary, singular group.

The main characters are a group of heroes that have only recently formed after teaming up to squash a few random supervillains in the Boston area. Two are Boston University students, one is a hero with an origin that’s at least partially unknown even to himself, and the last is the previous one’s superpowered creation who took on a sentience of his own, much to everyone’s surprise.

Naomi Nikita Johnson‘s family was murdered by a criminal gang led by the mysterious masked kingpin, Big Shot. As Naomi would discover, her father had discovered a magical disk, and Big Shot wanted it. But he failed to find it after killing what he thought was the entire family, which led Naomi to find the disk herself, which imbued her with supernatural fighting abilities and a nearly unbreakable disk-like throwing weapon. She meted out revenge by killing Big Shot’s gang, all under the mantle of Disk Girl, but ultimately never found him, cooling her hot-headed quest somewhat and leading her to walk the path of a more heroic figure for the future.

Mysterious, seemingly homeless, and possessed of incredible regenerative powers, Bella Arthur is a student at Boston University who has only recently joined the heroic community as the preternaturally graceful acrobatic fighter The Cat.

Although Simon Blake‘s true origin is that he is an interdimensional being, he doesn’t remember all that. Taking the identity of Blake and being able to create highly complex objects simply from the memory of a black and white photograph of something — really just about anything! — Simon took the name Monochrome and has put his growing fortunes (stemming from a highly successful nonprofit venture, as well as the mysterious backing of someone only known as “Mr. Green”) to heroic use. He’s been active in the hero community long enough to have established some connections, particularly to a group of hacktivists and journalists known as The Muckrakers.

The Saint is the six-foot-seven, Eastern-European-accented, monochromatic creation of Blake’s, a construct that somehow gained a sentience of its own, which may be a hint at Blake’s true power, or might be a freak accident that he doesn’t want to repeat! Either way, the muscle-bound, street-smart Saint has proven to be a useful ally and bruiser when the heroes need someone super-strong.

Issue #1: Green and Shadowy

5/7/22 – Simon Blake and Naomi Johnson are called by one of Blake’s contacts among the Muckrakers: Marian Michaels, a superhero during the 70s who retired to become an award-winning journalist. Blake believed she was the one bankrolling the hackers and journalists working as the Muckrakers, but as he’d soon learn, she’s just the “public” face of this semi-secret organization. Either way, she wanted to meet them at The Den, a secret computer cafe beneath a coffee shop just off the Boston University campus.

After walking through the employee-only door in the cafe, down through the three rows of computer terminals used by rogue reporters and (supposedly) white hat hackers, Blake and Johnson stepped into the office of Ms. Michaels, a small affair clearly used for her to follow-up on stories she’s been told by important people to drop, but hasn’t. She informs them of a case she’s working on, and explains how it’s both personal to Disk Girl, and involves supernatural activity that a consultant — and secret power behind the Muckrakers — will have to explain better…and in walks “Mr. Green,” Blake’s long-time mysterious benefactor.

As it turns out, Mr. Green is really Jethro Dumont, formerly known as the spirit-powered superhero The Green Lama. He hasn’t aged well, and one of his eyes is permanently open as if by some supernatural curse. That revelation aside, the case in question is a doozy:

Tom Wood is a brilliant inventor by night. By day, he worked in his brother’s warehouse, and his brother bankrolled Tom’s inventions through the business. Or at least, that was what he told Tom. In fact, he took out a few loans from gangsters, and when he couldn’t pay them back — because Tom’s latest invention failed to sell to the US military — Big Shot ended up calling the loans off, by way of murdering Tom’s brother. Tom used his latest invention on a quest for revenge, but he’s no trained fighter…

Surprisingly, he did get through a few of Big Shot’s men and traced the money to someone connected to Big Shot: the former police commissioner, Thaddeus Kozer. Tom went to confront Kozer, but was attacked by ‘mysterious shadowy assailants’ and in the scuffle he (seemingly) killed Kozer. Now, the District Attorney, Jane Barlowe, is building a murder case against Tom Wood.

Sounds simple enough, except for two details that everyone in this room knows: the first is that DA Barlowe is as crooked as they come, having dropped the ball on Disk Girl’s family’s murder case which also involved Big Shot, and the second being that Dumont thinks the “shadowy assailants” were magically summoned.

It’s up to Disk Girl and Monochrome to get the full story from Tom Wood, find out what they can about the murdered former police commissioner and the shadowy attackers, and if at all possible, put the heat on District Attorney to show that some superpowered individuals are looking into this case.

Tom’s Story

The heroes split up, with Monochrome heading to the retired commissioner’s residence for some investigation, while Disk Girl sets up a meeting with Tom Wood at Boston’s Supermax prison: a prison designed to contain superpowered threats and the worst-of-the-worst criminals, staffed with metahuman consultants to ensure the comic book trope of happens-all-the-time villainous prison breaks doesn’t become a thing.

Under the not-actually-a-lie guise of a BU student looking for an interview — and likely a few subtle strings pulled by Marian Michaels journalistic connections — Naomi heads into the Supermax prison and takes a seat in a room with Tom Wood, an African American man in his early 20s who can’t hide his inventive brilliance, nor the pressure of being in a Supermax prison for a crime with some highly questionable circumstances. Tom confirms much of the story already told, but his details about the shadowy attackers prove telling: they were literally shadow-formed beings with “fiery red eyes” that seemed to come out of nowhere to help former commissioner Kozer get away from Wood, who was there interrogating him about his involvement with Big Shot’s operation. During the fight, Wood did struggle with Kozer and shoot him, killing the retired police commissioner. The shadow monsters fled, and next thing he knew, Wood was in police custody.

Up Next!

In Issue #2, Simon Blake investigates Kozer’s Beacon Hill estate and runs into a mercenary group of supers known as Halo Force.

All art copyright the respective artists; these images are used as inspiration for the characters depicted in our homebrew campaign.