Seminar paper complete!

I chose to write on Lucretius and his section on death. My question was, "If death is nothing to us, then should we bother to prolong our lives?" 

My answer was, "Yes."

Mitigating factors

Today, I passed on an honest warning to the crew to defend against aerial attacks and divinations.

BUT I made a deal with Graz'zt's buddy to do a couple of chores for him in exchange for money and goods.

BUT I still plan to double-cross Graz'zt in the end.

BUT I destroyed the enchantment protecting a peaceful elven city from a horde of slavering demons under Graz'zt's friend's command.

BUT I used my magic to wipe out over six thousand of said slavering demons while the rest of the party wiped out another nine or ten thousand.

BUT I used particularly vile magic to do so and lied to the party about my spell choices.

BUT I fully resurrected Gerrard after he was decapitated.

BUT I also made a promise to kill Koslov.

BUT I joined the party in attacking Graz'zt's friend when he appeared on the field, and he is now rather miffed at me, apparently withholding the rest of my payment.

BUT I am still the most able entity to clear off the rest of his to-do list and reagin his good graces enough to obtain the rest of my reward.

BUT I may have a method of killing Graz'zt right now.

BUT the party's employer may have discovered the true nature of the magic I wield.

BUT I have never directly hurt the party and can provide benefits no other party member can.

At the end of the session, the DM said that he had rather expected me to show my true colors. Good luck deciphering that: the only colors I wear are my own.

A sticky situation

My second character (the secretly-a-walking-blasphemy one) has entered the airship campaign. So far the others have no idea what I am, and even their guesses as to what I can do are rather off-base. This is good, as there will be much subterfuge and deception in my future.

Long-term goal recap: Thanks to the meddlings of the wizard Sethos, the Material Plane has been cut off from the rest of the cosmos. This in turn, is causing creator deity Vateo to sicken and, if nothing is done, die. I couldn't give a damn about him personally (my Start of Darkness has given me a hatred of all gods and their devout), but if he dies, he will probably take the cosmos with him, and that puts a far more bitter taste in my mouth. Most everyone else is motivated to save Vateo by the goodness of their hearts, but I suppose the means justify the ends. Doing so requires us to retrieve the three orbs Sethos used to create the planar barrier. I have a nasty feeling that killing Sethos himself would also work and be faster; see below for why this feeling is nasty.

In the meantime, before the party picked me up from the tower where I had been asleep/in stasis for the last 500 years (starting just before Great Cataclysm), I had been researching vestiges (Vestiges are enigmatic beings who exist beyond the gods, and yet are near-powerless. they grant abilities to those who bind them in exchange for being able to re-experience existence vicariously. I make pacts with these vestiges and then cheat them out of their experience in order to enhance the spells I steal from the gods.) and had just discovered a new one by the name of Graz'zt. This piqued my curiosity: as far as I knew, Graz'zt was a powerful demon lord and not at all inconvenienced with vestige-dom. Summoning him up for a conversation before making the usual pact, I learned that he was now in this state due to a curse placed on him by Sethos, and he wanted me to join an expedition to find Sethos in order to convince him to lift the curse on him; in return, I would be given dominion over a layer of the Abyss (naturally, I knew better than to take Graz'zt at face value!). If Sethos could not be convinced to lift the curse voluntarily, killing him would also work.

Naturally, I see Graz'zt's potential freedom as detrimental to my well-being, but beyond that, he is rather more potent than most vestiges accessible to me (nearly all of them) due to the fact that I can conjure any one of three agents of his, all of whom are potent magic-users in their own right. Thus I have two reasons, one more selfish than the other, to keep Graz'zt confined. 

Complication #1. If, as I suspect, killing Sethos will lift the planar barrier, the party may well attempt that instead of chasing down three MacGuffins.

Complication #2. If I explain to the party that killing Sethos will free Graz'zt, I risk revealing that I willingly maintain correspondence with a demon lord (as the cherry on the top of my hot fudge sundae of evil and lies).

Complication #3. When I bind Graz'zt, he still gets to experience the world through me, which includes hitching a ride on my senses (though not, most fortunately, my thoughts, which are nigh-impenetrable anyway). Thus, any actions toward ensuring that he never is freed must be undertaken when I do not have an ex-demon lord bound to me, and if I simply neglect him after our first two conversations, I will look very suspicious (sure, he can't do anything about it now, but if my betrayal falls through or is later undone, I will have a very angry Graz'zt coming after me). Fortunately, I have a means of kicking him out in a hurry, should I need to.

In short, while the rest of the party has to save the world, I have to save the world without letting the man responsible die, without alerting one of my greatest sources of power to the fact that I intend to stab it in the back, and without altering the party to the facts that I correspond with a demon lord, steal godly power on a regular basis, and am undead.

I will deceive the party while simultaneously assisting them, betray a demon lord while simultaneously exploiting him, and save a would-be deicide while simultaneously thwarting him, all on top of my daily routine of cheating half the individuals from whom I derive power and stealing my power outright from the other half, or I will die trying.

Mutants & Masterminds is begin!

At last! An actual chance to get to know the system beyond reading the books!

Today was the first meeting of my campaign: The UTOPIA Project. Basically, the PCs are a local branch of super-powered peacekeeping force called the Utopian Defense Organization. Only one member of the party knows that they are the successors to the disgraced and dissolved Systemic Equilbrium Agency. What nobody in the party knows (yet) is that my campaign is based on The Matrix (Hey, come back! I've done plenty to make it my own!); nor do they know that they (and their predecessors) are programs. I'll talk more about the setting as a whole in future updates.

Cast list:

Sok Thorgrimson: A former army member and the only one without any powers.

Equinox: A shadow controller with black ops training and and ex-member of the SEA. He is the only one who knows that such an organization ever existed.

Aizen: A powerful telekinetic with telescopic vision.

Proteus: An extremely versatile mimic.

True Thomas: A warrior of the gods with a magical spear and a portal device.

The PCs' first assignment (Sok was not present initially) was to deal with a powerhouse-type mutant trashing up downtown and ranting like a conspiracy theorist nutjob. Finding him wasn't hard, and despite his prejudices against the party ("You're working for THEM!!!") they managed to talk the mutant, who identified himself as Crazy Train, down. Questioning him, they learned he had been told that everybody in the world was really a brainwashed metahuman, except they could only use their powers if they could wake up, which is what happened to him, and the party wasn't real at all. Party reaction: "Ooookayyyyy. Who told you this?" Crazy Train briefly described the people he had been talking to (grey on grey on grey with grey accessories), but in the middle of the interrogation Aizen spotted the beginnings of a bank robbery a half-mile down the street. Equinox stayed behind to question Crazy Train further while the others ran off to handle the robbery.

Upon seeing the PCs approaching, a lookout promptly alerted those inside, one of whom responded, "You've gotta be kidding! They told me they'd be busy!" At which point it clicked for the players that Crazy Train had been set up as a distraction. A fight quickly broke out, resulting in a higher death toll than I'd anticipated; the party got off without a scratch, but some were more inclined to use lethal force than had been approved by the UDO, and poor handling of a hostage situation led to three civilians dying by shotgun. Sok arrived shortly into the fight, and Thomas used his portals to evacuate the building.

In the meantime, Equinox had convinced Crazy Train to take him to where he had met his informants. Crazy Train led Equinox in the direction of the robbery/fight, pulling up short and observing, "Huh. There they are now." Two extremely grey men stepped out of car and ordered the party to return to base immediately and report a failure or else. Equinox immediately recognized the two men as SEAgents and concealed himself in Crazy Train's shadow before they noticed him.

The ensuing super-brawl...did not go as I anticipated. On the one hand, I learned that I can afford to go much harder on the PCs with the significant fights, as they won decisively (in fact, they caused more harm to themselves that their foes did). On the other hand...it was a fiasco for the Utopian Defense Organization.

Proteus, who had copied Crazy Train's powers and picked up a shotgun from the first bank robber he incapacitated, fired at Agent Sleeper with no effect. Sleeper, in fact, rolled fantastically well on his Toughness saves for most of the fight, although his jets of knockout gas were not so effective. Agent Fritz resisted Aizen's attempts to grab him telekinetically, faked him out, and fired a blast of electricity that sent Aizen flying over the city block. Sok stayed inside the bank and used the last robber he had knocked out as a human shield before finishing him off with a shotgun. Thomas, in the most impressive stunt of the session, used Sok's car to knock Fritz through a portal whose exit was 400 feet up...and finished driving through himself, landing on the Agent. Miraculously, the car was not completely smashed to pieces, and a quick flurry of Hero Point expenditure kept him from breaking half the bones in his body. Proteus charged Sleeper and punched him across the street, making a large wall dent right next to the hole made by a robber previously launched by Aizen. Equinox attempted to snare Sleeper in his own shadow (unsuccessfully), causing the agent to suspect who might be on the scene, while Crazy Train decided, "Screw this! I'm outta here!" and took off. Aizen, deciding he needed a weapon, lifted...the top two stories of an apartment building. Cue screams of, "SOMEBODY SAVE US!" from the abducted and occupied section of building. Equinox tried and failed to use his powers to KO Sleeper, revealing himself in the process to both agents, who failed to hide their recognition of him. Proteus grabbed the totaled car and broke it in half over Sleeper's head to surprisingly little effect...forgetting that True Thomas was STILL INSIDE. He went flying out, and upon recovery, started using his portals to take the barely-conscious Fritz back to base. They did, however, wind up in the path of Crazy Train, who ran over them quite easily in his bid for freedom. Fritz managed to pull himself together just enough to fire another electric blast at Thomas, who dodged and portal-manipulated Crazy Train into trampling Fritz again, knocking the SEAgent unconscious. Sock charged and punched Sleeper to no effect, Proteus clobbered him again with the remaining half of the car (rendering it smithereens), sending Sleeper the rest of the way through the wall (making that side of the building very unstable) to collapse in a pile of rubble. Aizen, who had climbed onto the roof of the bank while still holding the apartment section some 150 feet above him, threw it at the now-distant Crazy Train...forgetting that, due to the two stories' weight, he could only throw it ten feet. Cue massive piece of architecture with civilians inside falling 150 feet onto Aizen's head, crashing through the roof of the bank, falling another 50 feet with him now inside, and then collapsing on top of him under its own weight and damage. Aizen got off luckily in merely being knocked thoroughly unconscious; all the tenants were killed. Equinox asked Sleeper who their assistant was, only to get the response, "Let's think about this logically. Who is the only person present who has displayed the ability to move large objects without touching them?" Equinox then knocked out Sleeper, but not before being threatened, "You should not have gone over." At this point, everyone started heading back to base by different routes (Thomas with Fritz in tow), except for Equinox, who searched through the rubble to find Aizen...and executed him with a knife through the back of the neck for his murders. He then called base directly to give his report. Upon hearing that SEAgents had been involved, their superior's (Douglas Hanson) response was one of shock and, initially, denial. He would not, however, hear a word of Equinox's suggestion that Aizen had been planted to sabotage them, stating that such an occurrence was even more impossible that the SEA's continued existence. Overall, he was very displeased to hear about the collateral damage both in buildings and lives, and as he hung up Equinox caught him muttering, "We can't have another wipe. Not again."

Although the individual SEAgents on the scene have been defeated, taken into custody (Crazy Train escaped and remains at large), and--unbeknownst to the party--completely deleted from UTOPIA, their mission was ultimately to discredit the UDO. And with the party responsible for 3 ruined buildings, 2 criminal deaths, 3 hostage deaths, and 20 bystander deaths, that mission, contrary to what I anticipated, was a resounding success. 

The Nature of Things

Impending two-hour discussion or no, it is very difficult to take Lucretius seriously when he starts talking about the mind and soul being made of tiny, round seeds or things tasting bad because they have sharp atoms.