I have been talking about this game for a while. Getting it off the ground was a little bit of a hassle with real life issues getting in the way. In the end though, I was able to get three players together only two months later than the original start date. Here is how it went down.

Inspiration: The game is conceived as being a 'Paragons of Freedom' game as described in Worlds of Freedom. The idea being that the events of September 11th, 2001 hit Freedom City instead of New York and sparked the origin of Superheroes in the world. I changed this slightly by setting my first adventure on September 11th, 2001 rather than leaving it as a background element.

Preperation: In an effort to try to emphasize the chaos of the day, I did what I could to randomize the event as much as possible. In addition to cards for characters in the initiative order, I also created a number of cards for random events. These covered things like when the planes would hit, falling debris, and when different characters would 'break out'.

I was particularly pleased with the breakout mechanic I came up with. Essentially I assigned each of the non-bystander characters a save type. At various intervals based on the initiative cards I put in, one of those save types would be activated. There was a DC 10 save to avoid breaking out. Since all characters were PL 3 or less before breaking out, loosing that save was pretty easy. Breaking out activated their superpowered form and added three status to the character. First they take -10 on Notice checks due to overwhelming sensation. Secondly they were limited to only one half action and finally their powers were all 'uncontrolled'. I tagged it with different colored poker chips and when they saved they were able to take a number of chips off (I didn't tell them what the color means).

Character Creation: I had the player's build their characters as a fictionalized version of themselves back in 2001 at PL 8/120 PP. Power-wise my 3 characters are a Battle Armor Technopath, a Healer/Teleporter, and a Telekinetic/Telepath. I had it in my head that I would take out some characters from the setting as the PCs filled those niches. The Technopath put Dedalus out to pasture right away but the other two turned out to be interesting cases. The core Freedom City setting has two character concepts that exist specially as character that aren't currently active but that need to be filled. The Scarab is a reincarnated Telekinetic/Telepath and the Beacon is a light based healer. Lets just say that it took very little tweaking to get these PCs to fill those roles... actually NO tweaking at all due to the 'not quite Freedom city' nature of the setting.

In part two I'll get into the prologue and the events of the game but right now I'm going to head to bed. It has been a long day.