The Prologue: I started the game with a quick overview of Freedom City and how this world was different from our own. Specifically there was the bloodier American Revolution that culminated in the British surrender at Freedom City and detonation of the first nuclear bomb in Germany rather than Japan. After that I let the player's each describe an only slightly guided prologue for their character. Essentially I had them go over the events of Monday, September 10th, 2001 in an effort to set the scene for how normal that day was and then used their answers as a guide for how they started out on the morning of September 11th.

The Dream: While they were sleeping each of the PCs (and several NPCs) all had the same dream about a Dante-esque Inferno setting with a skull faced Satan trapped at the bottom. Satan's shadow however was reaching out of the pit and across to grasp at a group of three Pyramids. The Technopath is a hard metal rocker so the first thing he did when waking up from that dream was write it out as lyrics.

They then woke up and went about their day all heading to work but somehow ending up at the base of the three towers at Pyramid Plaza despite their intentions. I gave them all a hero point for the railroading. The Freedom City Atlas for Pyramid Plaza came in quite handy although I moved the plaza itself closer to the water because I liked the view that created out over the Wading river and across to the green park of the Promenade. I imagined that visitors to the Pyramid Hotel and the tenants of the upper residential floors would pay quite well for that view.

Roll for Initiative: This was perhaps the hardest part of running this encounter. I had put together a bunch of encounter objects including "Rocks Fall, Everybody Dies", "Low Flying Airplanes", and "PCs experience Breakout" on top of the Initiative Counts for the various groups of NPCs and the PCs themselves. In the end it worked out best that I just shuffle up everything NPC, insert the PCs in in the order they rolled, and toss the Low Flying Plane at the very end. This gave the PCs an entire round to react to the fact they had just woken up in a strange place before the first plane crashed into Tower #1.

Shock and Awe: Pretty much everyone's first reaction on waking up was to go for a phone. Once the plane hit, just about everyone stared in shock with some pretty liberal 'backing up'. Then the Breakouts started to happen. Scarab was the first to go, launching up into the air and flying uncontrolled but managing to telekinetically redirect the first falling rock so it destroyed the nearest fountain. Shards of the fountain flew out but didn't do much damage besides ripping into the arm of a young woman with long straight hair. We unfortunately didn't find out much about her because in the course of breaking out himself Beacon/Samaritan reached out to help her and 'teleported her to safety'. No one has heard from her since.

Understanding Damage: The girl's name was Heather and interestingly she was the only actual injury. I had decided that characters who had broken out defaulted to non-lethal damage while anyone without powers defaulted to lethal. Most of the non-powered characters on the board were minions so one solid hit was enough to take them out. Heather took the only lethal non-minion hit. That's not to say there wasn't more damage. There were minion Bystanders getting crushed by falling rocks and a LOT of damage came out of the two fire controllers (White Knight and HellQueen came up randomly) just ungulfing areas in flame... although not incinerating people completely because those charred corpses need to be around to get animated by Baron Samedi when he stepped into the body of some poor guy. The area was covered in darkness but the PCs could hear his screams.

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: If I were to do it again, I think I'd increase the rate of descent on the rocks. I wanted to give the PCs time to do something about the falling rocks while pushing a sense of dread. I think I put too much time in there however and should have gone for a better barage. Still, the property damage was pretty high from the escalating rocks. Every time a rock fell I pushed the size of the rocks coming down up a bit so little rocks, then big rocks, then large flaming chunks of building.

A day for Heroes: There were as many as 50 paragons who broke out during the Pyramid Plaza attack. Many of them left when their out of control powers teleported or flew their way out of there. Many others selfishly ran away and tried to save their own skin. The heroes of Tower 1 were the PCs and Siren (who minimized the fire with her weather control). Captain Thunder showed up late in the battle as a paragon but was one of the fighter pilots who took one of the planes off course. Among the younger heroes we saw Maximus Atom, Firepower, and Neriad in minor support roles. What happened at the other towers will come out as time goes on but Tower 1 will be what the public remembers.

The Aberrant Homage: The game that got me into superhero RPGs was Aberrant and I wanted to do a little shout out to that game. The first known breakout in that setting was 'The Fireman' who broke out while saving a bunch of school children during the initial breakout event. I made sure there was a bus full of children who needed saving and had an NPC lined up to step in if one of the PCs didn't. As it worked out The Samartin was able to teleport over there and pull all those children out right in front of Amy Feng so that image will be plastered all over the place.

The Anti-Climax: There came a point where you realize the towers are coming down but to be realistic it won't be for another half hour at least and you're running time in rounds. At that point I switched it out of combat time and did a little bit of wrap up. I've been thinking about that and I'm not entirely sure I'm pleased how it ended and may need to revisit next game. I want to a little more time to give the moment the respect it deserves.

About the Real World: Speaking of respect, it would be in bad taste for me to not talk about September 11th. The influence is obvious and there were times during the planning of the game that I worried about offending people. There came a time during the game where the players started sharing stories about where they were during the attacks. I ended up just letting them talk and I think it worked out best in terms of giving respect to the event as well as letting them feel the impact of this similar event to the game world.

Conclusion and Rewards: The first adventure isn't over yet. I got them through the initial attacks and gave them a bit of a breather. Their stated next steps are to go down the big hole that openned up at the base of the tower and to help the couple of people who fell down into that pit. The telepath definitely can sense that someone is still alive down there. I'll be giving PP rewards at the end of each adventure so none of that yet. I am however playing with the idea of in game rewards so for the end of this first session they each recieved the Benefit feat: Status(Fame) to represent the effects of their faces getting plastered all over the news. Even with a telepath who can potentially wipe memories, its going to take a lot of work on their part if they want to maintain secret identities.