The XET Diaries, Part 1
May. 6th, 2006 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6For those on my friends list unfamiliar with XET (X-Men: End Times), it was an online RPG, a MUSH (rather than a message board one… sort of a text based MMORPG without stats), combining characters, plotlines, and themes from Marvel comics (particularly X-Men) starting with a new continuity, with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos and certain Cthulhu-based RPGs.. I was involved with it for several years.
In short, it’s probably nothing you’re interested in, so you can probably skip the rest of the entry unless you’re curious:
Well, XET is gone, and this time I have no expectation it'll ever be back. (Yeah, I might as well admit it - I had the 'April Fools Joke' in mind from almost when XET closed. I didn't expect it to even work a little, but I had a slim hope and figured I owed the game one last Hail Mary Pass. And I don't regret it, I got some good scenes out of the few months we were back, I just wish we could have kept it up longer). So, since I have no hope of it returning, I'm going to post, in a few parts over the next few weeks, my master plot manifesto. One of the things I loved about XET was how we had a number of plots on a slow burn, with foreshadowing sometimes years ahead of schedule, and plenty of plots that were just waiting for the right circumstances to be used. There were also lots of things going on behind the scenes that weren't apparent. I really felt almost like I was participating in a fully-fledged universe, like the Ultimate line of Marvel, inspired by the original but different and vivid, but as textured and with a tight continuity perhaps even rivaling Marvel’s at times.
Anyway, since most of these untouched plots are heavily dependent on the unique history of XET and the combination with Lovecraftian themes, I don't expect to use them again, and so I think it'd be fun to just lay all the cards on the table. I'm mostly only going to be talking about plots that I either came up with or was really heavily involved in. If you want to find out how Ultron would have turned out, for example, you'll have to ask Ubbo, I was just a player of that one and only had a slight idea of where it was going.
Also later in this series will be occasional mini-concepts that were unlikely to ever get used but I want to share them one last time while I'm at it.
Of course, games being as they are, any of these things were subject to drastic change depending on things like what players we had available and of course if players did things that dramatically changed the landscape of the... err, plotscape. But it's all in fun, take this as a glimpse of my vision of what XET might have been, but probably wouldn’t have been even if the game continued.
First up, I’m going to talk about my personal goals for my characters, and the secrets behind the last plot I ran that never finished. In later entries I’ll talk about other plots and long held secrets (well, not so much secret as anyone who really wanted to know could just ask) going right back to the earliest days of XET.
Personal Goals:
Since I’m an egotistical, I’d better start with my personal goals for my characters. Some of these goals are of course tied up with plots, so I’ll discuss them either here or later whichever I feel is best.
Kirk and his merry band of Avatars
Let’s start with my primary character, Kirk. He was mostly plot-related. I liked his powerset and I liked the plots he got involved with and the people he hung around with (Their own Scoobie Gang, Dave, Nat, Solange, and to an extent Paige and a few others, but when they were gone I couldn’t really find a whole lot I wanted to do with him to get involved in other stuff. The main thing I never got to accomplish with Kirk was advancing his powers… both increasing the number of avatars he could have at once, and the amount of control he had over them (so that eventually some of them would act independently with as much intelligence and the same personality as Kirk). Most importantly, I wanted him to be able to wrap his avatars around him as a skin and force Kirk to take a more direct heroic role, perhaps even joining the X-Men. All this stuff was approved, but never appeared in play because circumstances never warranted it.
Well, actually, there were a few other things I didn’t get to accomplish, or I accomplished mostly off-panel but never got to explore on-panel to the degree I liked.
For example, Kirk ‘came out’ to his parents about being a mutant. They were in the ‘well, you’re still our son, and so though it makes us uncomfortable, we’ll be okay with it so long as you never ever bring it up again’ camp of reactions. However, I did want Kirk to eventually move past this and come out publicly as a mutant to everyone at Columbia, etc, and deal with the reactions.
Also, academically Kirk started learning computer science, but he started taking some first aid stuff because his avatars could learn it if he did. I kind of wanted him to decide to give up computers as a full time career choice (though he’d still have the skills and learned things like Danger Room programming). Instead, he’d learn more about medicine and such, probably from Hank, even if it meant being in school for a bunch of extra years, with the goal of eventually becoming a one-man surgical team.
OOCly I did kind of want to break it off with Kitty because things always seemed to stall there on an OOC level and never really doing much in the way of scenes (and it happened again after that first scene back). Of course, my tendency to ‘go with the flow’ of RP made it unlikely that would happen, but ah well.
And, of course, there were a number of really cool specific plots that I wanted Kirk to get involved with, but they’ll be discussed later.
Scuzz
Moving on, Scuzz. The opposite problem, there wasn’t a whole lot I wanted to do with his powers (although I did want to get him into Scorcher mode at some point), but I had a bunch of things I wanted to do with him. Most of them didn’t pan out in game, like starting his own team of street thugs, but there were ones dangling. For example, I was actually digging the idea of Scuzz growing up a little and joining the Brotherhood, and finding a leader he felt he could respect in Scott… still being a jerk, but being a tolerable one. Though he did join the Brotherhood in the One Year Gap, it never really got explored and he was still hanging around the fringes. But that’s the major thing I had left dangling that I wanted to get done.
One of the things I wanted to explore with him was his past with the MLF… since he started out as an NPC member of it before I took him on as a player. I sort of had an idea of doing a plot eventually where either a) the MLF started rounding up previous members and blackmail them into doing operations again, or b) someone started killing ex MLF members, meaning Scuzz would be one of the targets. It also would have been a great way to bring Friction back into the game for a plot… always wanted her to eventually join the X-Men but that was a pipe-dream since nobody would ever play her. Anyway, Caliban would of course have a role in that plot too. It also would have given him the chance to discover that he was, in part, mentally pushed into his early MLF actions and so wasn’t really responsible (even though he didn’t do much).
Oh, and I wanted him to beat the crap out of Jono just once! ;) Well, okay, that wasn’t likely, but I would have liked to one up him on some level, because as okay as I am having my character being shown up repeatedly, it did get a little tired and I would have liked him to win at least a couple times. Maybe an eventual reconciliation and friendship. I don’t think I ever did (though my memory could be playing tricks), but I always kind of wanted Scuzz to make what he felt was a important point. In horror movies (of which Scuzz is a big fan), the monsters are the heroes. Indeed, even though IIRC it all started in part because he made jokes about it, Scuzz’s problem with Jono was never about how he looked. It was just that they were in a fight, and also it annoyed him that Jono felt sorry for himself (one of the first times they met) because he’s got it way better than Scuzz, for all his ‘not having a face’. I kind of wanted his ties with the MLF to be thrown in Scuzz’s face at one point so Scuzz could say something like ‘Yes, well, I know you’ve never been knowingly associated with killers... oh, wait, didn’t I read something in the Brotherhood files about a girl named Kelly?’ (Yes, Scuzz can read, try not to look shocked)
Of course I wanted him to eventually make up with Frankie. In particular I kind of wanted him to be sullen and not friendly with her, but then the first time she was in danger, swinging in and doing his best to try and rescue her.
Maybe at some point a trip (on Brotherhood business) back to his native Wisconsin could have been a lot of fun on an OOC level.
Finally, there was always the whole Scuzz – Monster Hunter idea I played with, where he would actively hunt the supernatural because, watching movies all the time, he actually believes in them, and he thinks it’d be badass to beat up on a vampire. Not that it’s the most realistic reason to do so, but it would have been a lot of fun to play with.
Although this is less an ‘overall plot’ and more of a ‘single scene’, I did want to do a scene where Scuzz gave Rwylann a Christmas gift… "Exotic Dancing For Dummies". With a scuzzed up cover, and when she asked about it, he’d explain that it happened when he put it under his shirt to sneak it out of the store. But we never managed to get the scene scheduled.
Patchwork and the U-Men
I officially retired Patchwork since I have trouble playing evil, but I always wanted to bring him back for a plot device… specifically, a reworking of the U-Men plot. One of the little plot backdoors I included into his powerset was that he was the perfect donor for transplants. His cells would use their last bit of healing factor adapting to the body into which they were placed. This could be as simple as traditionally transplanted internal organs like livers or hearts, or be much more dramatic, like a whole arm. And, considering when Patchwork has to grow back a body part is grows back randomly, sometimes these parts might have powers attached.
Enter the U-Men. To them, Patchwork is a walking parts bank, and any member of the Third Species who wants to make themselves a mutant has to look no further. They’d still go after organs of mutants who don’t heal, of course, but this would provide them with a starting point.
I also kind of wanted to somehow connect him to Shub-Niggurath, although I’m not sure how… either have him exposed to Mother’s Milk (and so his mutations become even more bizarre) or have him have some secret connection.
There was also the Mutant Gladiators plot that he might have been involved in but it was never huge on my list of priorities, more like a ‘he’s a warm body who might fit in’ type idea.
I’m deliberately leaving out Peter Parker/Spider-Man, because really all the plots I had for him are tied up with the Ultimates, which I’ll put in another post. I never really got enough of a feel for him outside of as someone I run because it’s a good character to have on the game – in truth, if somebody decent expressed an interest (and got through app), I would have willingly turned the character over.
I’m leaving out most of my NPCs since plans for them were also usually plot-related more than anything else. Antlerman as a Horseman of the Apocalypse, for example. (No, I just made that up on the spot, it wasn’t actually a plan). But when we tried the last ditch (and ultimately meaningless) idea of Fill-In Characters (canon characters anybody could use at will), I had considered playing Beast from time to time, since I liked my time with him when we were doing the Rutland plot, I just didn’t have the energy or will to do him full time.
The Drug Plot
As XET drifted down to death for the second time we had an ongoing plot involving a new drug that was highly addictive to humans and made mutants go into a rage. Since I still have the initial proposals on file (normally I just keep them on file locally until they're done and then get rid of them, so future plot outlines in the XET Diaries will be more off the cuff than this), I’ll just cut and paste, and add the occasional editorial comment:
Here was my initial pitch of the idea to the staff lists:
A new drug is hitting New York club scene... informally dubbed 'Nextacy', it's an ecstacy derivitive mixed with a nearly unique plant. The highs are higher, it's more addictive, and the negative side-effects are fewer... except for one. For some reason, in every mutant it's used in (except for those who can't be affected by drugs at all) it makes them temporarily violently psychotic - but from the perspective of a mutant taking the drug, they feel incredible, and experience a powerful vision of a creature who comes to be dubbed 'the mutant mother'.
Word on the street about this new side effect, and the fact that it only affects mutants, is growing. Excelsior is worried about the effects of the drug on the mutant community. The Brotherhood is worried that the raw materials will be found by authorities and used to create an instant 'mutant test'. Xavier is worried because descriptions of 'The Mutant Mother' resembles some descriptions of Shub-Niggurath. The Ultimates... well, they're not involved, drugs aren't their forte. Later, a side effect is uncovered from the dealers themselves... habitual use of the drug actually _causes_ mutations. Luckily it's only a small gang who's got the rare plant (actually quite a normal, though hallucinogenic, plant exposed to Milk of Shubby and then liberated), because this drug needs to be stopped.
Sceneage-type outline:
1) Excelsior treat a mutant
2) Eve's bar is targetted
3) Tracking down the people who brought the drugs to Eve.
4) (hopefully) Members of Xavier's team are alerted to the reports of the drugs.
5) Brotherhood and Xers and Excelsior members team up combing the streets for the primary source of the drugs. A few different scenes, some leading to dead ends, some leading towards the truth. As they get closer, they find violently insane 'new mutants' - actually members of the gang that introduced the drug, now thoroughly addicted to the drugs and 'changed'. Luckily it takes many many doses.
6) Finding the rest of the drug sources and perhaps one gang member who's more powerful than the others, and/or is an actual Shubby cultist.
Other PC and NPC involvement: Adam W can be called in to locate the trail of missing drug dealers. While tracking both the source of the drug and the outlets, they can stumble into Mojo's strip-club-full-of-mutant-strippers. He won't actually be there, but it introduces the idea 'officially' into the game world. Any PC who might take drugs can conceivably take the drug (or be 'dosed' without their knowledge at a party or something). Corvid's already got a history with drug dealers - this could perhaps give her an intro to the Brotherhood if she still wants to go that way.
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This was later followed up with the following more detailed tinyplot outline:
Some more detailed ideas/fleshing out... here's what I'm thinking for now:
I'm making some changes after doing some research - instead of making it an actual ecstasy derivative, since ecstasy isn't made of any plant products and it's hard to come up with an excuse for what's essentially a bit-player operation in the drug scene to decide to mix ecstasy and a plant-based drug. Instead, it's just a plant that has properties remarkably like ecstacy, except all natural, and of course, the special side effect.
The Main Players of the Gang:
Neon (Nathan Wilkerson): Mohawk-wearing professional 2nd banana. May have started as the leader but isn't really a leader type and got displaced as Turk seemed to know more and more about what to do. Powers yet to be determined.
Richie Wilkerson: The youngest of the group, Neon's brother, his mutation is uncontrolled growth of new body parts. He has over 20 functional eyes spread out over his body. An arm has grown out behind his back.
Darla Benz: She's one of the ones with the least involvement in the manufacturing and distribution, but became the most addicted to it and has changed the most... and, even worse, she got pregnant under the influence. Now she is very pregnant, and mother to monsters that, when they reach a certain maturity level, will eat her from the inside out. By an astonishing coincidence, this will happen whenever the PCs encounter her. They'll start tiny but grow remarkably quickly, even without food.
Turk (Kostya Petrov): The group's current leader... he's smart enough at least that he took longer to get addicted, and so is showing the least effects. He goes by a nickname, owing to his ethnic origins... Turk's family is from Russia and has some strong Turkish roots. Somehow in that childhood, this came up during a 'family history' section in school, and it lead to a nickname, the Turk (eventually just shortened to 'Turk'). He is the source of the mutagenic that changed the plant, or rather his uncle is. His uncle is a member of The Skoptsi, a cult worshipping Shub-Niggurath while seeming to be an extreme Christian cult that practices self-castration as a sign of devotion. Turk's father and uncle were orphans, but adopted separately and barely knew each other. The uncle was adopted by the Skoptsi and raised in their ways, while the father was raised by a more traditional family. Turk never knew his uncle until his father died, while he was still a minor - social workers tracked down his uncle being the nearest relative and he came to New York to take custody and also handle a few Skoptsi matters in NY.
Gregori Fedorov: Turk's uncle and Skoptsi member. In the past few years, through using sources in the Russian mafia among others, the Skoptsi have managed to accumulate a few of the 'Black Icons' detailing the way to summon Shub-Niggurath. The ritual has only been used once - it has not worked since, and this perplexes and infuriates them - they feel that finding the rest of the Black Icons will illuminate why. (In truth, they left out some of the conditions - as it so happened they were fulfilled when they first attempted the summoning, but they had no idea they were responsible). The ritual did succeed that one time, though, and in the process, Gregori and a few other Skoptsi faithful were ingested by Shub and then 'reborn', now immortal. Well, not technically.. they can be killed, but while alive they regenerate rapidly and are immune to age after a certain point (although they start to mutate instead). They also were gifted with samples of 'mothers milk', the mutagenic secretions of Shubby. They didn't know what to do with it, but each there kept their 'milk' as holy sacrements, in vials like holy water. Gregori is also looking for Turk, because Turk stole the vial containing his milk, and so he may encounter PCs who learn Turk's identity but not his whereabouts. He's good at playing sane and kindly uncle in public. He also might be encountered after they catch up with Turk, if they convince him to tell the story of how they got the plant, and therefor the mutagenic. - Whether PCs would be interested in following this up depends on them.
There are also all sorts of unsavory types in the drug scene the PCs could run into who buy the base materials and then do the work of selling the drug. Probably not too many, but a few, so anyone who wants to @emit some are free to go wild on them (maybe include a group of whichever gang Corvid had a particular hate-on with in Chinatown as one of the big distributors). I'd also like some suggestions for mutations for Turk (who should have a relatively minor one), Neon (should be unrelated to his name, which is due to the bright colors he paints his mohawk), and any ideas for anyone else we should add to the core group there, but as Ubbo suggested some of them should be tailored on the fly to whoever's involved. I'd recommend that even when they have powers that have some use, they're still more Jokers than Aces, to use the Wild Cards term - strange deformities are par for the course, powers are just a bonus, so some ideas for cool/gross visuals always welcome.
How did the drug come about? Gregori and Turk did not get along... Gregori abused the teen and tried to mold him into worship of 'The Mater', but he was too old and didn't care. In particular, once Turk happened to see Gregori naked, and was sickened at the mutilations the man had inflicted on himself. He made a decision, and ran away the next time he could... in doing so, he stole a bunch of the man's possessions to sell. Gregori was a jeweler and had a lot of stuff on hand. As it turns out, the vial containing Mother's Milk was swept along and taken too.
He crashed with some friends and a girlfriend who were renting a home in Long Island and using it as a mini-marijuana grow-op for sale on the streets. While Turk was going through the things, he found the vial of mother's milk. He went into the grow room to ask Neon's opinion on what the stuff might be. Neon was listening to some music and didn't hear him, so was startled and accidentally knocked the vial into one of the plants. It spilled on the plant and into the soil.
The next day, that pot plant had changed.. it now sported strange, delicate flowers, that crumbled at a touch into a powder. Darla was the first to taste the powder and was sent on a hugely pleasurable drug trip. It was, according to her, the best thing ever. The plant also grew like wildfire with only minimal water and light requirements, creeping along the walls of the building like an ivy, and overtaking all of the other plants. Soon a plan was hatched... sell the powdered flowers, mixed liberally with non-reactive chemicals (it still remained remarkably potent), in clubs as an all natural version of ecstasy that they imaginatively named 'Nextacy'. After the first batch hit and was a success, Neon hooked him them up with some people who would sell the powder to various gangs for resale on the streets. Turk was smart enough to suggest not to sell the plant, just the powder from the flowers, so they can't be priced out of the market, and to have a close group of friends who make deliveries of the product to other interested parties so no one knows exactly where it comes from. They sell concentrated powder and whoever buys it tends to dilute it, saving Turk's group from all the work except collecting the powder-flowers. The constant exposure at high doses has made them all addicts to some extent or another, and the mutations are starting in on them already, as is the insanity. Also, once they started seriously mutating, they've begun to experience the same visions as 'mutants', only worse and more detailed. Only Turk knows that the 'mother' they see is the being his Uncle worships.
More thoughts on possible ends/PC tie-ins: PCs destroy the plant, obviously - there's still a lot of drug on the street for other plots, but it's a limited supply now, so it's only a matter of time before it completely runs out.
Gregori may either finally track down Turk after the PCs have, or the PCs might be lead to him. Turk and his cronies could be arrested or die, or of course a mixture of both. I imagine Darla will die from her kids, and some of the other gang members may get killed by them too. Gang members who are neither arrested nor killed might become Morlocks or otherwise join normal mutant society, and perhaps start their own little cult worshipping the Mutant Mother.
Some samples of the drug would survive, which would lead into ‘Drug Plot 2 (With Added Time Travel)' and some elements of Mojo Madness.
Delta Green agent Leanh Trinh (who appeared in a scene following up on a suicide at Columbia) might become involved since she works for the DEA.
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So, where we left off, people were still looking for the source. From here I’d planned scenes where Jono and Rwy ask Eve about the ‘dosing’ incident, and get what they know. Then, after a lot of work, some people (I imagined Scuzz and Rwy, so Scuzz could be involved, but it wasn’t strictly necessary) would locate the one who spiked the drinks, a catlike mutant, now working at Mojo’s strip club for mutants. There they’d also see Skittles again, incidentally. Anyway, she’d tell them that she was paid a thousand dollars to do it while the person who paid her watched everything on a hidden camera. From there they’d get that gang member, and with a little persuasion they’d get Turk’s name, but not his location. Follow up by talking to his uncle, and then over a couple of scenes learn where Turk might be hiding, and voila.
One of those trivia bits that will only be of interest to me and maybe 3 other people in the world, none of whom I expect to read this, the names of the three main members of the gang were taken from the NPC rivals of my character and his PC friends in one incarnation of Children of the Atom MUSH. They were humans who all lived in the same 'halfway house for troubled/runaway teens' as our characters. See, I recycle everything!
That’s it for this post. Next XET Diaries post (probably in a week or so) will deal with Part 2 of the Drug Plot (with the Ultimate Road Trip), and Ultimate Plots.
In short, it’s probably nothing you’re interested in, so you can probably skip the rest of the entry unless you’re curious:
Well, XET is gone, and this time I have no expectation it'll ever be back. (Yeah, I might as well admit it - I had the 'April Fools Joke' in mind from almost when XET closed. I didn't expect it to even work a little, but I had a slim hope and figured I owed the game one last Hail Mary Pass. And I don't regret it, I got some good scenes out of the few months we were back, I just wish we could have kept it up longer). So, since I have no hope of it returning, I'm going to post, in a few parts over the next few weeks, my master plot manifesto. One of the things I loved about XET was how we had a number of plots on a slow burn, with foreshadowing sometimes years ahead of schedule, and plenty of plots that were just waiting for the right circumstances to be used. There were also lots of things going on behind the scenes that weren't apparent. I really felt almost like I was participating in a fully-fledged universe, like the Ultimate line of Marvel, inspired by the original but different and vivid, but as textured and with a tight continuity perhaps even rivaling Marvel’s at times.
Anyway, since most of these untouched plots are heavily dependent on the unique history of XET and the combination with Lovecraftian themes, I don't expect to use them again, and so I think it'd be fun to just lay all the cards on the table. I'm mostly only going to be talking about plots that I either came up with or was really heavily involved in. If you want to find out how Ultron would have turned out, for example, you'll have to ask Ubbo, I was just a player of that one and only had a slight idea of where it was going.
Also later in this series will be occasional mini-concepts that were unlikely to ever get used but I want to share them one last time while I'm at it.
Of course, games being as they are, any of these things were subject to drastic change depending on things like what players we had available and of course if players did things that dramatically changed the landscape of the... err, plotscape. But it's all in fun, take this as a glimpse of my vision of what XET might have been, but probably wouldn’t have been even if the game continued.
First up, I’m going to talk about my personal goals for my characters, and the secrets behind the last plot I ran that never finished. In later entries I’ll talk about other plots and long held secrets (well, not so much secret as anyone who really wanted to know could just ask) going right back to the earliest days of XET.
Personal Goals:
Since I’m an egotistical, I’d better start with my personal goals for my characters. Some of these goals are of course tied up with plots, so I’ll discuss them either here or later whichever I feel is best.
Kirk and his merry band of Avatars
Let’s start with my primary character, Kirk. He was mostly plot-related. I liked his powerset and I liked the plots he got involved with and the people he hung around with (Their own Scoobie Gang, Dave, Nat, Solange, and to an extent Paige and a few others, but when they were gone I couldn’t really find a whole lot I wanted to do with him to get involved in other stuff. The main thing I never got to accomplish with Kirk was advancing his powers… both increasing the number of avatars he could have at once, and the amount of control he had over them (so that eventually some of them would act independently with as much intelligence and the same personality as Kirk). Most importantly, I wanted him to be able to wrap his avatars around him as a skin and force Kirk to take a more direct heroic role, perhaps even joining the X-Men. All this stuff was approved, but never appeared in play because circumstances never warranted it.
Well, actually, there were a few other things I didn’t get to accomplish, or I accomplished mostly off-panel but never got to explore on-panel to the degree I liked.
For example, Kirk ‘came out’ to his parents about being a mutant. They were in the ‘well, you’re still our son, and so though it makes us uncomfortable, we’ll be okay with it so long as you never ever bring it up again’ camp of reactions. However, I did want Kirk to eventually move past this and come out publicly as a mutant to everyone at Columbia, etc, and deal with the reactions.
Also, academically Kirk started learning computer science, but he started taking some first aid stuff because his avatars could learn it if he did. I kind of wanted him to decide to give up computers as a full time career choice (though he’d still have the skills and learned things like Danger Room programming). Instead, he’d learn more about medicine and such, probably from Hank, even if it meant being in school for a bunch of extra years, with the goal of eventually becoming a one-man surgical team.
OOCly I did kind of want to break it off with Kitty because things always seemed to stall there on an OOC level and never really doing much in the way of scenes (and it happened again after that first scene back). Of course, my tendency to ‘go with the flow’ of RP made it unlikely that would happen, but ah well.
And, of course, there were a number of really cool specific plots that I wanted Kirk to get involved with, but they’ll be discussed later.
Scuzz
Moving on, Scuzz. The opposite problem, there wasn’t a whole lot I wanted to do with his powers (although I did want to get him into Scorcher mode at some point), but I had a bunch of things I wanted to do with him. Most of them didn’t pan out in game, like starting his own team of street thugs, but there were ones dangling. For example, I was actually digging the idea of Scuzz growing up a little and joining the Brotherhood, and finding a leader he felt he could respect in Scott… still being a jerk, but being a tolerable one. Though he did join the Brotherhood in the One Year Gap, it never really got explored and he was still hanging around the fringes. But that’s the major thing I had left dangling that I wanted to get done.
One of the things I wanted to explore with him was his past with the MLF… since he started out as an NPC member of it before I took him on as a player. I sort of had an idea of doing a plot eventually where either a) the MLF started rounding up previous members and blackmail them into doing operations again, or b) someone started killing ex MLF members, meaning Scuzz would be one of the targets. It also would have been a great way to bring Friction back into the game for a plot… always wanted her to eventually join the X-Men but that was a pipe-dream since nobody would ever play her. Anyway, Caliban would of course have a role in that plot too. It also would have given him the chance to discover that he was, in part, mentally pushed into his early MLF actions and so wasn’t really responsible (even though he didn’t do much).
Oh, and I wanted him to beat the crap out of Jono just once! ;) Well, okay, that wasn’t likely, but I would have liked to one up him on some level, because as okay as I am having my character being shown up repeatedly, it did get a little tired and I would have liked him to win at least a couple times. Maybe an eventual reconciliation and friendship. I don’t think I ever did (though my memory could be playing tricks), but I always kind of wanted Scuzz to make what he felt was a important point. In horror movies (of which Scuzz is a big fan), the monsters are the heroes. Indeed, even though IIRC it all started in part because he made jokes about it, Scuzz’s problem with Jono was never about how he looked. It was just that they were in a fight, and also it annoyed him that Jono felt sorry for himself (one of the first times they met) because he’s got it way better than Scuzz, for all his ‘not having a face’. I kind of wanted his ties with the MLF to be thrown in Scuzz’s face at one point so Scuzz could say something like ‘Yes, well, I know you’ve never been knowingly associated with killers... oh, wait, didn’t I read something in the Brotherhood files about a girl named Kelly?’ (Yes, Scuzz can read, try not to look shocked)
Of course I wanted him to eventually make up with Frankie. In particular I kind of wanted him to be sullen and not friendly with her, but then the first time she was in danger, swinging in and doing his best to try and rescue her.
Maybe at some point a trip (on Brotherhood business) back to his native Wisconsin could have been a lot of fun on an OOC level.
Finally, there was always the whole Scuzz – Monster Hunter idea I played with, where he would actively hunt the supernatural because, watching movies all the time, he actually believes in them, and he thinks it’d be badass to beat up on a vampire. Not that it’s the most realistic reason to do so, but it would have been a lot of fun to play with.
Although this is less an ‘overall plot’ and more of a ‘single scene’, I did want to do a scene where Scuzz gave Rwylann a Christmas gift… "Exotic Dancing For Dummies". With a scuzzed up cover, and when she asked about it, he’d explain that it happened when he put it under his shirt to sneak it out of the store. But we never managed to get the scene scheduled.
Patchwork and the U-Men
I officially retired Patchwork since I have trouble playing evil, but I always wanted to bring him back for a plot device… specifically, a reworking of the U-Men plot. One of the little plot backdoors I included into his powerset was that he was the perfect donor for transplants. His cells would use their last bit of healing factor adapting to the body into which they were placed. This could be as simple as traditionally transplanted internal organs like livers or hearts, or be much more dramatic, like a whole arm. And, considering when Patchwork has to grow back a body part is grows back randomly, sometimes these parts might have powers attached.
Enter the U-Men. To them, Patchwork is a walking parts bank, and any member of the Third Species who wants to make themselves a mutant has to look no further. They’d still go after organs of mutants who don’t heal, of course, but this would provide them with a starting point.
I also kind of wanted to somehow connect him to Shub-Niggurath, although I’m not sure how… either have him exposed to Mother’s Milk (and so his mutations become even more bizarre) or have him have some secret connection.
There was also the Mutant Gladiators plot that he might have been involved in but it was never huge on my list of priorities, more like a ‘he’s a warm body who might fit in’ type idea.
I’m deliberately leaving out Peter Parker/Spider-Man, because really all the plots I had for him are tied up with the Ultimates, which I’ll put in another post. I never really got enough of a feel for him outside of as someone I run because it’s a good character to have on the game – in truth, if somebody decent expressed an interest (and got through app), I would have willingly turned the character over.
I’m leaving out most of my NPCs since plans for them were also usually plot-related more than anything else. Antlerman as a Horseman of the Apocalypse, for example. (No, I just made that up on the spot, it wasn’t actually a plan). But when we tried the last ditch (and ultimately meaningless) idea of Fill-In Characters (canon characters anybody could use at will), I had considered playing Beast from time to time, since I liked my time with him when we were doing the Rutland plot, I just didn’t have the energy or will to do him full time.
The Drug Plot
As XET drifted down to death for the second time we had an ongoing plot involving a new drug that was highly addictive to humans and made mutants go into a rage. Since I still have the initial proposals on file (normally I just keep them on file locally until they're done and then get rid of them, so future plot outlines in the XET Diaries will be more off the cuff than this), I’ll just cut and paste, and add the occasional editorial comment:
Here was my initial pitch of the idea to the staff lists:
A new drug is hitting New York club scene... informally dubbed 'Nextacy', it's an ecstacy derivitive mixed with a nearly unique plant. The highs are higher, it's more addictive, and the negative side-effects are fewer... except for one. For some reason, in every mutant it's used in (except for those who can't be affected by drugs at all) it makes them temporarily violently psychotic - but from the perspective of a mutant taking the drug, they feel incredible, and experience a powerful vision of a creature who comes to be dubbed 'the mutant mother'.
Word on the street about this new side effect, and the fact that it only affects mutants, is growing. Excelsior is worried about the effects of the drug on the mutant community. The Brotherhood is worried that the raw materials will be found by authorities and used to create an instant 'mutant test'. Xavier is worried because descriptions of 'The Mutant Mother' resembles some descriptions of Shub-Niggurath. The Ultimates... well, they're not involved, drugs aren't their forte. Later, a side effect is uncovered from the dealers themselves... habitual use of the drug actually _causes_ mutations. Luckily it's only a small gang who's got the rare plant (actually quite a normal, though hallucinogenic, plant exposed to Milk of Shubby and then liberated), because this drug needs to be stopped.
Sceneage-type outline:
1) Excelsior treat a mutant
2) Eve's bar is targetted
3) Tracking down the people who brought the drugs to Eve.
4) (hopefully) Members of Xavier's team are alerted to the reports of the drugs.
5) Brotherhood and Xers and Excelsior members team up combing the streets for the primary source of the drugs. A few different scenes, some leading to dead ends, some leading towards the truth. As they get closer, they find violently insane 'new mutants' - actually members of the gang that introduced the drug, now thoroughly addicted to the drugs and 'changed'. Luckily it takes many many doses.
6) Finding the rest of the drug sources and perhaps one gang member who's more powerful than the others, and/or is an actual Shubby cultist.
Other PC and NPC involvement: Adam W can be called in to locate the trail of missing drug dealers. While tracking both the source of the drug and the outlets, they can stumble into Mojo's strip-club-full-of-mutant-strippers. He won't actually be there, but it introduces the idea 'officially' into the game world. Any PC who might take drugs can conceivably take the drug (or be 'dosed' without their knowledge at a party or something). Corvid's already got a history with drug dealers - this could perhaps give her an intro to the Brotherhood if she still wants to go that way.
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This was later followed up with the following more detailed tinyplot outline:
Some more detailed ideas/fleshing out... here's what I'm thinking for now:
I'm making some changes after doing some research - instead of making it an actual ecstasy derivative, since ecstasy isn't made of any plant products and it's hard to come up with an excuse for what's essentially a bit-player operation in the drug scene to decide to mix ecstasy and a plant-based drug. Instead, it's just a plant that has properties remarkably like ecstacy, except all natural, and of course, the special side effect.
The Main Players of the Gang:
Neon (Nathan Wilkerson): Mohawk-wearing professional 2nd banana. May have started as the leader but isn't really a leader type and got displaced as Turk seemed to know more and more about what to do. Powers yet to be determined.
Richie Wilkerson: The youngest of the group, Neon's brother, his mutation is uncontrolled growth of new body parts. He has over 20 functional eyes spread out over his body. An arm has grown out behind his back.
Darla Benz: She's one of the ones with the least involvement in the manufacturing and distribution, but became the most addicted to it and has changed the most... and, even worse, she got pregnant under the influence. Now she is very pregnant, and mother to monsters that, when they reach a certain maturity level, will eat her from the inside out. By an astonishing coincidence, this will happen whenever the PCs encounter her. They'll start tiny but grow remarkably quickly, even without food.
Turk (Kostya Petrov): The group's current leader... he's smart enough at least that he took longer to get addicted, and so is showing the least effects. He goes by a nickname, owing to his ethnic origins... Turk's family is from Russia and has some strong Turkish roots. Somehow in that childhood, this came up during a 'family history' section in school, and it lead to a nickname, the Turk (eventually just shortened to 'Turk'). He is the source of the mutagenic that changed the plant, or rather his uncle is. His uncle is a member of The Skoptsi, a cult worshipping Shub-Niggurath while seeming to be an extreme Christian cult that practices self-castration as a sign of devotion. Turk's father and uncle were orphans, but adopted separately and barely knew each other. The uncle was adopted by the Skoptsi and raised in their ways, while the father was raised by a more traditional family. Turk never knew his uncle until his father died, while he was still a minor - social workers tracked down his uncle being the nearest relative and he came to New York to take custody and also handle a few Skoptsi matters in NY.
Gregori Fedorov: Turk's uncle and Skoptsi member. In the past few years, through using sources in the Russian mafia among others, the Skoptsi have managed to accumulate a few of the 'Black Icons' detailing the way to summon Shub-Niggurath. The ritual has only been used once - it has not worked since, and this perplexes and infuriates them - they feel that finding the rest of the Black Icons will illuminate why. (In truth, they left out some of the conditions - as it so happened they were fulfilled when they first attempted the summoning, but they had no idea they were responsible). The ritual did succeed that one time, though, and in the process, Gregori and a few other Skoptsi faithful were ingested by Shub and then 'reborn', now immortal. Well, not technically.. they can be killed, but while alive they regenerate rapidly and are immune to age after a certain point (although they start to mutate instead). They also were gifted with samples of 'mothers milk', the mutagenic secretions of Shubby. They didn't know what to do with it, but each there kept their 'milk' as holy sacrements, in vials like holy water. Gregori is also looking for Turk, because Turk stole the vial containing his milk, and so he may encounter PCs who learn Turk's identity but not his whereabouts. He's good at playing sane and kindly uncle in public. He also might be encountered after they catch up with Turk, if they convince him to tell the story of how they got the plant, and therefor the mutagenic. - Whether PCs would be interested in following this up depends on them.
There are also all sorts of unsavory types in the drug scene the PCs could run into who buy the base materials and then do the work of selling the drug. Probably not too many, but a few, so anyone who wants to @emit some are free to go wild on them (maybe include a group of whichever gang Corvid had a particular hate-on with in Chinatown as one of the big distributors). I'd also like some suggestions for mutations for Turk (who should have a relatively minor one), Neon (should be unrelated to his name, which is due to the bright colors he paints his mohawk), and any ideas for anyone else we should add to the core group there, but as Ubbo suggested some of them should be tailored on the fly to whoever's involved. I'd recommend that even when they have powers that have some use, they're still more Jokers than Aces, to use the Wild Cards term - strange deformities are par for the course, powers are just a bonus, so some ideas for cool/gross visuals always welcome.
How did the drug come about? Gregori and Turk did not get along... Gregori abused the teen and tried to mold him into worship of 'The Mater', but he was too old and didn't care. In particular, once Turk happened to see Gregori naked, and was sickened at the mutilations the man had inflicted on himself. He made a decision, and ran away the next time he could... in doing so, he stole a bunch of the man's possessions to sell. Gregori was a jeweler and had a lot of stuff on hand. As it turns out, the vial containing Mother's Milk was swept along and taken too.
He crashed with some friends and a girlfriend who were renting a home in Long Island and using it as a mini-marijuana grow-op for sale on the streets. While Turk was going through the things, he found the vial of mother's milk. He went into the grow room to ask Neon's opinion on what the stuff might be. Neon was listening to some music and didn't hear him, so was startled and accidentally knocked the vial into one of the plants. It spilled on the plant and into the soil.
The next day, that pot plant had changed.. it now sported strange, delicate flowers, that crumbled at a touch into a powder. Darla was the first to taste the powder and was sent on a hugely pleasurable drug trip. It was, according to her, the best thing ever. The plant also grew like wildfire with only minimal water and light requirements, creeping along the walls of the building like an ivy, and overtaking all of the other plants. Soon a plan was hatched... sell the powdered flowers, mixed liberally with non-reactive chemicals (it still remained remarkably potent), in clubs as an all natural version of ecstasy that they imaginatively named 'Nextacy'. After the first batch hit and was a success, Neon hooked him them up with some people who would sell the powder to various gangs for resale on the streets. Turk was smart enough to suggest not to sell the plant, just the powder from the flowers, so they can't be priced out of the market, and to have a close group of friends who make deliveries of the product to other interested parties so no one knows exactly where it comes from. They sell concentrated powder and whoever buys it tends to dilute it, saving Turk's group from all the work except collecting the powder-flowers. The constant exposure at high doses has made them all addicts to some extent or another, and the mutations are starting in on them already, as is the insanity. Also, once they started seriously mutating, they've begun to experience the same visions as 'mutants', only worse and more detailed. Only Turk knows that the 'mother' they see is the being his Uncle worships.
More thoughts on possible ends/PC tie-ins: PCs destroy the plant, obviously - there's still a lot of drug on the street for other plots, but it's a limited supply now, so it's only a matter of time before it completely runs out.
Gregori may either finally track down Turk after the PCs have, or the PCs might be lead to him. Turk and his cronies could be arrested or die, or of course a mixture of both. I imagine Darla will die from her kids, and some of the other gang members may get killed by them too. Gang members who are neither arrested nor killed might become Morlocks or otherwise join normal mutant society, and perhaps start their own little cult worshipping the Mutant Mother.
Some samples of the drug would survive, which would lead into ‘Drug Plot 2 (With Added Time Travel)' and some elements of Mojo Madness.
Delta Green agent Leanh Trinh (who appeared in a scene following up on a suicide at Columbia) might become involved since she works for the DEA.
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So, where we left off, people were still looking for the source. From here I’d planned scenes where Jono and Rwy ask Eve about the ‘dosing’ incident, and get what they know. Then, after a lot of work, some people (I imagined Scuzz and Rwy, so Scuzz could be involved, but it wasn’t strictly necessary) would locate the one who spiked the drinks, a catlike mutant, now working at Mojo’s strip club for mutants. There they’d also see Skittles again, incidentally. Anyway, she’d tell them that she was paid a thousand dollars to do it while the person who paid her watched everything on a hidden camera. From there they’d get that gang member, and with a little persuasion they’d get Turk’s name, but not his location. Follow up by talking to his uncle, and then over a couple of scenes learn where Turk might be hiding, and voila.
One of those trivia bits that will only be of interest to me and maybe 3 other people in the world, none of whom I expect to read this, the names of the three main members of the gang were taken from the NPC rivals of my character and his PC friends in one incarnation of Children of the Atom MUSH. They were humans who all lived in the same 'halfway house for troubled/runaway teens' as our characters. See, I recycle everything!
That’s it for this post. Next XET Diaries post (probably in a week or so) will deal with Part 2 of the Drug Plot (with the Ultimate Road Trip), and Ultimate Plots.
