Emerald City Makeover

[Ari]

Poll for EC's location is up here, so please vote and sound off there on that.

 

One additional topic I'd like to raise is the timeline. I'd like to know if anyone else is interested in moving it back just a little, so that initial play will be in the time of the Chamber before its dissolution by old!Dragoneye's death and Max Mars' betrayal. Though of course that might be a little weird with having the Sentinels, likely including young"Dragoneye, at the same time as the organization vigorously suppressing super-activity in Emerald.

[Ari]

To explain: I think more of those events should be impacted by PCs. The whole theme of Emerald City Knights, after all, was the collapse of the old order and the chaos of a new one. I feel it would be much more interesting to run and play that kind of transition from a placid city ruled from the shadows by a sinister cabal to one shaken by superheroic action. The presented setup, while obvious much simpler and easier to use in the same way Freedom City is, isn't nearly as interesting since it's pretty much the same as every other superhero town.

[N/A]

http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=67858

 

If you keep it in the Pacific NW, then you need to include some kind of homage to Pheonix Jones.

[N/A]

http://www.everywhereist.com/15-things-you-should-know-about-seattle/

 

Most of this applies to Portland as well.

[Ari]

Well there's Rook of the Sentinels, who going by his stats is also a very determined but not terribly effective crime-fighter. (Obviously for different reasons. In our world, it's the systemic flaws and corporate reasons for criminality that lone vigilantes can't do much about. In Rook's, it's because a Batclone at PL10 is not going to hurt much of anything at or above its own weight class)

 

Regarding 17, those are floating houses, those are not houseboats. I don't care that Americans don't know any better I refuse to be a part of this scam against the innocent. A houseboat is a boat that you live in like a house, partially modified at most for comfort but still capable of getting under way.

 

Re. 25, I guess there's a member of the Cryptid Stone Clans who hides under bridges and eats cars. Turns to stone during the day so people think they're just some weird statue.

[Raveled]

2 hours ago, ShaenTheBrain said:

http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=67858

 

If you keep it in the Pacific NW, then you need to include some kind of homage to Pheonix Jones.

 

The real question is, do we play him as a hero or a vigilante with good press?

[Heritage]

Okay, I now have the EC pdfs courtesy of Drive-Thru RPG; Steel Shogun looks like a good character to spin mine off of, so I will probably do that.

[The Sailor]

Sorry I've been quiet more than I should... family drama's been eating up time.

I should have something on Superball in the next couple of days. The weekend seems to be my "surge" time in terms of posting.

[Raveled]

Is there a "West Coast Claremont" in Emerald City? I foresee lots of threads with Easties going west or Westies coming east.

[N/A]

On 6/24/2016 at 2:05 PM, Avenger Assembled said:

More places to play is always good - 

 

I would want some of our speculations here turned into a Guidebook page. 

 

Down the line, I personally would like to see Bedlam brought in somewhere in the Rust Belt. 

 

This comment prompted me to get my hands on Bedlam City, and I'm loving it.

 

From the introduction:

 

Welcome to Bedlam—the meaner, poorer, smaller, town next door to your main campaign city. The Gary, Indiana to its Chicago, the Newark to its New York, the Compton to its Los Angeles. The town where your PCs can go to have grim urban adventures for a change of pace.

 

It’s the kind of town where a visit to the Department of Transportation won’t get a pothole fixed, but a visit to the local Mafiosi probably will.

 

The tallest building in the city, the skyline-defining landmark, was abandoned halfway through construction.  No one can afford to buy it or to tear it down, so it sits half-finished, slowly falling apart, empty save for rats and squatters, "like an amputated stump."  I can't think of a better symbol.

 

My favorite part about it is that it's explicitly designed to be an add-on to a campaign setting, not a campaign setting unto itself (though it can be used for that too).  They stay away from worldwide metaplot stuff, so they won't contradict the existing worldwide metaplot of any given setting.  And they avoided including any information that would identify its location.  The city timeline even has a sliding scale, depending on the geography you choose.

 

My second favorite part is that, by design, it doesn't suffer from the Freedom City style glut of existing NPC superheroes.  There aren't really any superheroes who make the city their home, and even most of the supervillains are just doing work-for-hire as they visit or pass through.  There's actually room for the PCs for once.

 

By default, it's a smaller big city (half a million people at most), mostly likely on the East Coast or in the Midwest Rust Belt.  Personally, I'd vote for it being relatively close to Freedom City, so we could get the Gotham / Hub City, Gotham / Bludhaven, Chicago / Gary dynamic, and to allow for easy commuting between the two, since it's supposed to be more of a secondary setting (though it doesn't have to be).  But if the overall aim is to open up the setting more, then I guess the Midwest would work better to that end.

 

The one major change I think we'd need to make is that there is a lot of rape and child molestation in there we'd probably want to change or ignore.

There's also a lot of semi-institutionalized racism.  The local Mafia syndicates consciously and specifically keep their neighborhoods all-white by any means necessary, leaving everyone else to occupy the worst parts of the city.  We may or may not want to change that.  On one hand, the city is supposed to be a bad place.  On the other hand, players who have to deal with racism in their real lives may not want to have to deal with it in the game too.

 

[April]

I'm fairly certain AA expressed interest in locating Bedlam City along the rust belt.  I don't have much of a preference (and also would like to see San Angelo imported, and also definite location for Bruckner Ridge/Lockdown, but that is beyond the scope of this thread)

[Avenger Assembled]

Hee hee - I had a feeling you'd like Bedlam, Shaen. Plain Brown Wrapper has a great sense of black comedy in their writing - and Bedlam is a fine, wretched place. 

 

I personally would put Bedlam somewhere in the Upper Midwest, the better to explain why no one from Freedom has ever rolled in there and cleaned it up - and because that gives us an iconic fictional city for the region. (I tend to think of it as an evil Green Bay - the snow is high, the racism is vicious, and why are we bothering to save these people again? Because we're heroes.)

[Heritage]

1 hour ago, Raveled said:

Is there a "West Coast Claremont" in Emerald City? I foresee lots of threads with Easties going west or Westies coming east.

 

Elysian Academy hints at this, at least in the Player's Guide.

Edited June 29, 2016 by Heritage

[Ari]

One of the suggested alternatives to "rich industrialist Maximillian Mars bankrolls a superhero team" is "rich industrialist Maximillian Mars bankrolls a West Coast version of Charles Ex-Xavier's House of Pain for Gifted Youngsters". The Elysian Academy is so those PCs have a source of baddies, and adult PCs have a potential source for conflict and probably going after the what-might-have-beens of their life.

[N/A]

I started a new spinoff thread for Bedlam City discussion here.

.

[The Sailor]

I've got an idea to make The Aviatrix work where her "power" isn't her plane. Although she has one so she can go to far away places around the world super quick. But she does have a slower flight power for in-city on her own. I'm thinking of whipping her up as a PL 7 Costumed Detective, with a PL 12 budget (Yay for Bronze!)

 

[KnightDisciple]

One thing to keep in mind is that there is at least one super-team on the West Coast; I can't remember their name off the top of my head, but Ultiwoman is a member. However, if Emerald City is in the Pacific NW, that might work well, as that team seems more "based in the big Cali cities" sort. 

[Ari]

I had not forgotten the Champions, don't worry Knight. If the votes had gone the other way we'd have needed a way to fold the Sentinels and they together(two big teams that close together is just gauche) But luckily that was unnecessary.

 

So now that the issue of place is out of the way, what about time? I still think shifting just a little back, just before the Silver Storm and the breakup of the Chamber, might be a better moment to start since it means PCs can be more involved there and get to know the place before it goes very very weird.

[The Sailor]

Having things a good bit before the storm will definitely help the characters starting there to get established before any new Silver Storm heroes show up.

[Ari]

Speaking of which, on top of the if/when side, its origin is a subject I've been thinking about for a while. 

 

I feel either a modified version of the stormer!Commander or Scion the Ultronesque  would "mesh" better with this version of the city than Tellax the Redeemer, if only because they can have plots that last and change rather than being one-shot campaigns.

 

Maybe Tellax is out in space instead, if existent at all. Or a creation of a Stormers' mind and powers.

Edited July 2, 2016 by Ari

[Ari]

I do declare, it is suprising how quickly you miss Freedom City's up-front statistics. Emerald City's setting book is maddeningly vague and disorganized in that respect. Oh sure the religion block has its numbers, but that's not much when figuring on how describe the makeup of who lives there.

[Ari]

I think replacing the fictional Hekawi people from the book with the actual Clatsop Chinookian folk who live around/along the Columbia River is a good idea. Especially since Freedom's local American presence, the Lenape, are real themselves.

[Raveled]

The religion block is the only part that gives you hard numbers? That's troubling.

[Avenger Assembled]

All right, what else needs to be done here? 

[Raveled]

I want clarification on something here. Will it be allowed for PCs to be primarily connected to Emerald City or Bedlam? I understand that these are areas that any PC can visit, but should new PCs be primarily tied to Freedom City? Or are we going to transition to Freedom City and Emerald City and Bedlam City PbP?