Rising Tide Issue 4 – Cortex Prime Superheroic Campaign Journal

Rising Tide is an superhero campaign set in Boston, MA. I’m the GM, and this issue marks the first session since we converted from Astonishing Super Heroes to Cortex Prime by-way-of-Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. In this issue, I’m joined by my brother Joel, running two heroes: Minute Man (a not-man-out-of-time version of Captain America, whose legacy is a shield wielded by several past superheroes dating back to WWII) and Weather Woman (think Storm’s powers but Kitty Pride’s more girl-next-door origins).

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. If this is your first visit, consider starting with Issue #1 to get some of the campaign setting and character backstory. You don’t need to read Issue #2 and Issue #3 to understand this one, as it’s a side story. Unless, of course, you want to! If you’re more interested in general superhero campaign advice, take a look at how we built this campaign setting collaboratively as our session zero.

In Issue #4, we cut to nighttime in Los Angeles, California, where two heroes are performing their usual rounds. Suddenly, a call comes in about a prison break that doesn’t quite make sense, followed by a brawl between opposing supervillains. Just when things couldn’t get more inexplicable, the corporate security at Monarch Techtronics calls in for help, their security overwhelmed by mind control!

The Story So Far…

This issue is a side story, in which two Los Angeles area heroes — Minute Man and Weather Woman — are monitoring their normal duties as senior agents of the Sentry Program. In this position, they oversee superhuman relations and events surrounding one of California’s largest Supermax prisons, the state-of-the-art holding places for superpowered criminals.  In addition, they handle any superpowered crimes in progress when they are on duty.

Minute Man is a hero who has been gifted the legacy of Golden and Silver Age heroes: a nigh-indestructible shield that has been a symbol of United States-based supers for nearly 80 years. Working alongside him on this shift is Weather Woman, a young woman who unsurprisingly has the power to control the weather.

System Change

First, a quick aside on changing from the Astonishing Super Heroes to Cortex Prime systems.

As much as I love Astonishing Super Heroes — I wrote the thing, after all — it’s very much a product of the original Marvel Super Heroes “FASERIP” game system it’s based on. Which is to say, it’s got some warts in the system, but most important to the players in the Rising Tide campaign, it’s a bit too “trad” (simulationist and modifier-heavy) for our tastes; we like more narrative, often faster-playing systems. Thus the shift to Cortex Prime.

Our group’s all at least vaguely familiar with Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, the 2012 award-winning take on the Marvel comics universe using the Cortex system of the time. I’m actually a HUGE fan of that game, and absolutely love Cortex Prime, the latest iteration of the system appearing in the Cortex Prime Game Handbook, and also powering Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince Roleplaying Game. So much so that I’m a moderator on the Cortex RPG subreddit! It’s the perfect system for what we want: it’s more “narrative” and “fiction-first,” plus it does a fantastic job of smoothing out the disparities of power levels you see in a Marvel-like superhero universe, which is very much what Rising Tide is. If one player is playing the equivalent of Superman and the other is a Daredevil-type character, we want that to work with a minimum of fuss.

Between a Stone and a Hard Place

June 20, 2023 – Minute Man and Weather Woman are out patrolling, two Los Angeles-based supers working for the Sentry Program. The Sentry Program is a government sponsored organization that both gives superhumans roles specific to their abilities, and oversees the Supermax Program, which builds and maintains prisons capable of holding superpowered criminals. Members of the Sentry Program are required to do stints as either guards or administrators at Supermax prisons, ensuring supervillains can’t easily breakout should only non-powered humans act as guards.

The duo are called to a possible prison-break at a minimum security prison. Arriving only minutes after, they are still too late, but quickly are confronted by quite the odd circumstance of the break. As one of the guards explains it:

Samantha Channing, a teenage superhuman sometimes known as “The Brute,” was serving time here at the minimum security prison because her powers are entirely dependent on being in close proximity to her partner, Maury Baker A.K.A. “Tiny.” Samantha only ever engaged in low-level crimes, and was nearing the end of her sentence, so she wasn’t considered for the Supermax Program.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the gargoyle-like villain known as Stone “Hardwall” Doyle flew onto the grounds and swooped Channing up. Security mics caught her yelling at him, telling him he was going to ruin her chances of doing her time legitimately and getting out, but then he turned her to stone and flew off with her. She didn’t even want to be broken out of jail!

Tracking Hardwall’s flight via police choppers and ground units, Minute Man and Weather Woman ultimately follow them to a shopping mall in one of the poorer areas of Los Angeles. As they arrive on scene, they discover Samantha and Maury together, powered up, fighting Hardwall, the guy who clearly just busted them both out of different prisons! (Later confirmation comes from the prison where Maury was serving time that he had escaped hours ago, but somehow went unnoticed. How he escaped remains a mystery, but we’ll come back to that below.)

Luckily, the late night hour means that there’s relatively few civilians in the mall. But that doesn’t stop those few from needing saving during the knockdown, drag out fight between three heavy-hitting villains and two less physically powerful but highly experienced heroes. It’s that experience, in fact, that serves the two heroes well: strategic use of their abilities keeps the civilians safe, and allows for a short pause in the fight, where they discover that Hardwall appears to be under mental domination from another party.

Just then, a call comes in from across the city.

The Monarch Techtronics corporate building has just had a security breach. One of the employees working late noticed the security guards had abandoned their post, and seemed to be in a trance-like state, under mind control from an unknown source.

Putting their faith in The Brute and Tiny’s claims that they didn’t even want to break out of prison, Minute Man makes a risky decision: he asks that they redouble their efforts to take down Hardwall, allowing Minute Man and Weather Woman to go deal with Monarch Techtronics. They agree, and Minute Man hops on his motorcycle while Weather Woman flies off to the corporate building.

The corporate headquarters of Monarch Techtronics is one of the few high-rise buildings in downtown Los Angeles. A mix of corporate offices and computer-electronics laboratories, Monarch is known for its many defense contracts and international ties. One of their biggest contracts is the Sentry Program, so the likelihood of risk to sensitive data is very high.

Arriving at the building, the duo finds several security guards acting as mind-controlled sentries on the first-floor. Minute Man creates a distraction while Weather Woman flies to the top of the building. Entering from the roof, she discovers that most of the building is quiet in this late hour, but some movement is occurring on floors below her. But soon, another call comes in that Hardwall has slipped away from The Brute and Tiny, and he arrives at Monarch, as well, still very clearly under mind control himself.

After Minute Man makes his way into the building, a cat and mouse game begins. He and Weather Woman race to clear the various floors, looking for the source of the mind control break-in, while Hardwall pursues Weather Woman. Soon, they come face to face with the culprit: the mysterious supervillain The Mentalist, who’s been missing for years since he was pardoned for helping out during the Skry’nex alien invasion. But as they are about to square off, he remains true to his status as the world’s most powerful telepath and invades Minute Man’s mind, turning him on Weather Woman! In the chaos, Hardwall picks up The Mentalist — who is carrying a briefcase of stolen materials from Monarch Techtronics’ labs — and they fly off. By the time Minute Man is released from The Mentalist’s control, the duo are battered, but the sting of so many unanswered questions is almost worse.

Alex Ford, FKA Gladiator

Conclusion

Minute Man is later debriefed on the situation by Gladiator, the leader of Sentry.

You were right to trust The Brute and Tiny. Good move, there.

It appears Tiny was broken out by The Mentalist some time ago. Mind controlled the staff of his minimum security prison, no surprise, Then those two road up to Los Angeles and found Hardwall, who’d been released on probation and had been, by all accounts, doing his due diligence and staying on the straight-and-narrow. Hardwall dropped Tiny off at the mall, then headed to bust out The Brute, then brought them together.

Problem was, The Mentalist was already elsewhere by this point, so The Brute wasn’t subject to his mind control. I don’t know if he thought reuniting her with Tiny would just naturally convince her to go along with whatever their plot was, but it didn’t work, and somehow she even talked Tiny out of The Mentalist’s control. Thus the fight you were embroiled in. Once you and Weather Woman left, Sam and Maury (The Brute and Tiny, respectively) put their all into taking down Hardwall for the authorities, but they weren’t enough; he escaped.

By then you were at Monarch. The Mentalist broke in, using the whole Hardwall-Brute-Tiny-and-You fight as a distraction. He stole some tech, but luckily all stuff that’s both traceable and wasn’t unique, so we’re confident we know where he’s going and what he’s doing with the stuff, and it’s not terribly dangerous. We’ve already dispatched crews in New York, which is where The Mentalist and Hardwall ended up, so it’s only a matter of time before we apprehend him. He’s good, but we’ve known of his powers for a long time — since before the Skry’nex invasion, in fact — and now that we know it’s him involved, we have the appropriate countermeasures in place.

Thank you for your service, Minute Man. And thank Weather Woman for me when you see her next. You two had to make some tough decisions, but you did it successfully, and saved a lot of lives in the process.

Up Next…

Back to Boston, where the fallout from Halo Force’s attack on several heroes, including former Silver Age superhero Jethro Dumont, is about to push a much bigger set of problems onto the world stage…

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