A home for the Untold Stories Project streaming network. Show information, cast bios, and blogs!
Portal, Professor Cephalopod and Bulwark come to the aid of Khione and Crucible as they are dealing with the aftermath of meeting Mongrel and Magehunter. With a little more time devoted to research and life events, they arrange a meeting with Maximillian Mars. However, the heroes are interrupted before they can question the magnate about his involvement with the Silver Storm…
Split into two groups our heroes investigate the Silver Storm and patrol the city. Khione and Crucible encounter a werewolf, while Bulwark, Professor Cephalopod and Portal try to understand the nature of the substance found at the site of the Silver Storm…
Having made the individual decisions to embrace their new roles as heroes, Portal, Crucible, Khione, Professor Cephalopod and Bullwark start to reconnect and to forge a relationship with the Emerald City Police Department. They return to the scene of the disaster and begin to investigate the nature of the Silver Storm, Redshift Energy, and the strange metallic dust that is both at the site of the explosion and within the bodies of Bullwark and Crucible. Surely it’s harmless…
Having successfully defended Yellow Brick Row from the crazed Stormers, our heroes go their separate ways to discover their new abilities, to come to terms with their new popularity, and to try to determine if this ragtag group of misfits can become the heroes that Emerald City needs. Surely they’re up for the challenge…
After meeting each other and more than a few misunderstandings, our heroes put their issues aside as they face off against their first supervillains. The new group of heroes must deal with Octaman, the Mongoose, Lightshow, Lord Etheric and Death Magnetic. Surely they’re up for the challenge…
In this episode, we first meet our heroes – some of whom are not yet heroes when we meet them. A quiet day on Yellow Brick Row becomes a disaster in progress when a truck explodes releasing a cloud of silver particles over the city. We meet Marshall Carstairs, Ethan Blackwell, Cindy O’Hare, Peter Washington and Professor Cephalopod as they each react to the pending disaster….
Bulwark is played by Howard. His real name is Marshall Carstairs and, at the moment, he doesn’t have a superhero name or costume picked out, but Howard is already paving the way for that.
Bulwark is a tank, but he’s not a typical brick. He isn’t designed to dish out a lot of damage, but he is designed to take it. As a result, he is seriously Toughness-shifted, with a total of 16 Impervious Toughness. There is, however, a catch. Bulwark has the Interpose advantage, and he loses 8 points of that Toughness unless he is using it to protect someone else.
In other words, he’s strong and incredibly tough by most standards. But he’s almost impossible to harm when he’s standing in front of someone else.
Bulwark is a Stormer – meaning he got his powers from the Silver Storm – the incident which happened in our first episode. That will likely have repercussions for the character down the line. He’s inexperienced with his powers, and also happens to be over 80 years old. So, being a grandfather surrounded by superhumans who are mostly the age of his grandkids is going to be an interesting experience.
Crucible is played by Alex, and is the other Stormer among the PCs. In his case, he’s a much more typical new hero. He’s in his early twenties, and his power set is a fairly conventional power for the comics, being the control of magnetism.
What is setting Crucible apart is Alex’s ability to write detailed backstories that really work into the heart of the campaign. Ethan has a family and ties to several of the universities and businesses around Emerald City – all of which gives me great material to exploit as a GM.
Khione is played by Aunt Puppy. She’s the newest player at the table both to tabletop role-playing in general and Mutants & Masterminds in specific. But she’s creative and fun to have as a part of our team.
Her character is based on a character she played in the DC Universe Online MMO, but that made it easy to import her into M&M. Cindy doesn’t know why she has these ice powers (jokes about being Elsa’s long-lost cousin aside), and she’s adopted. She has traced her roots to Emerald City and hopes to find out more about her origins here. Of course, she happened to be here during the largest single outbreak of new metahumans ever, and if it wasn’t for the fact that she already had a costume, no doubt people would believe that Khione is a Stormer herself.
Portal is played by Brandon, and as someone who has gamed with Brandon for nearly two decades, he is very much the kind of character I’ve come to expect (and love) from him.
Peter Washington was a teenager who was kicked out of his house when his parents discovered his sexuality. Shortly after going on the streets, he discovered his metahuman powers – the ability to create portals from pretty much any two areas he could see (or precisely describe, such as “twenty feet that way”) to another. As a teen, he used his powers for petty theft, moving up to bank robbery before being stopped by The Raven. Raven realized that this kid was no hardened super-criminal, and while he did go to Juvie, he was then sent to Claremont Academy.
Peter is now out of Claremont and has decided to try to go to a new city to make a name for himself and redeem himself, with Raven’s blessing. Emerald City had been quiet for decades, with no superheroes who made the city their home, so it was the perfect place for him to make his stake.
Or it would have been, had it not been for the Silver Storm…
Professor Cephalapod is played by Wiccy, and in truth, the concept started as a joke. When we did Something… Something… Mutants, and were having our Session Zero, someone commented on the intelligence of octopi. Wiccy had been considering several concepts (finally settling on Flashdrive) but commented about wanting to ditch the concept to play an Octopus in a Mech Suit.
When it came time to have the Session Zero for City of Destiny? She again came with a slate of possibilities, and the joking concept of the Octopus in a Mech Suit, at which point everyone else said “Dude, no, play that.”
We had some fun banter about the idea, including how to make it more of a character and less of just a joke. There was also a lot of jokes about what the name should be for said Octopus, especially since a learned individual with an advanced degree and the abilities of an octopus is already heavily trademarked by the House of the Mouse, and so the name Professor Cephalapod was born.
There’s a lot going on with the good Professor, and I really look forward to revealing it to our audience and players in the coming weeks and months. And that includes revealing some things to Wiccy that she may not be expecting. Because that’s what GMs do.
So, there you have it. A behind-the-scenes peak at the PCs for our newest streaming game. We hope you enjoyed it!
City of Destiny is our campaign based around the Emerald City Knights Heroes Journey series for Mutants & Masterminds Third Edition (with some customization based around our players). It introduces the new Emerald City setting, a Pacific Northwest city in the World of Freedom (home to the Freedom City setting) and an event that changes the course of history in Emerald City, with far-reaching implications for the entire world. The series is designed to take a group of new heroes, forge them into a team, and give them the opportunity to become Emerald City’s de facto protectors. Ultimately, the new heroes will be faced with a tremendous challenge and an opportunity to save, not only their city, but the entire world!
City of Destiny is a part of our unified Earth-Prime universe setting for Mutants & Masterminds. The games included in that up through now include Something in the Dark, Netherwar, City of Destiny, Guardians of Haven, GemStars, Freedom League Dark, Heroes of Tomorrow, and our Freedom City and Emerald City Pride events that were done as a part of our Trevor Project fundraiser.
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