Okay, fair warning. If you don’t play or know about Aberrant this won’t make sense. If you DO play Abberant and haven’t read Adventure or some of the Storyteller supplements, this will contain potential unboxed spoilers.
So, I’m in a high-power Aberrant game (White Wolf publishing, basically a superhero game, albiet a more serious one (like Miller or Gaiman-style)), and we had a pretty wild session last night. Betrayals by trusted assistants, portents and omens of doom, etc.
And, well, to make a very long story very, very short, we killed Divis Mal.
Killed. Divis Mal.
Which is kinda like someone finally killing Lex Luthor and Braniac combined, in the Aberrant universe.
To be fair to us and the system, he doesn’t start being a total mastermind until 2005 in the game system, and we started our characters in 1998 (which is when game’s timeline diverges from reality). Due to a long string of coincidences and some really interesting roleplaying, my character sort of hijacked the fledgeling Terragen (the nominal “bad guys”) and turned it into something wholly different (The University of Transhuman Thought! W00t!), in the process doing some things that seriously ground Mal’s gears, like pulling pieces of the Galatea from the ocean floor and studying them to determine the true causes of the mutations.
In the process, our storyteller pulled every villain he could think of out of Adventure! (the League-of-Extraordinary-Gentlemen-only-with-less-suck-style prequel to Aberrant) and threw them all at us, leading to a series of sessions where we dealt with a anarchist sniper/assassin from the Civil War era, a long-range hypnotist named Baron Saturday, and the NovaTech engineer Dr. Dixon (who sabatoged my island, having been recruited to help build the defenses–the jerk), as well as a few others.
Anyway, wholly satisfying, even if Divis Mal apparently has the ability to rain plasma bolts in large quantities more or less at will, we killed him with a rather wicked combination of magnetic, meterological, and optical superpowers that more or less turned a two hundred diameter section of the earth’s upper atmosphere into a giant solar lens. Yes, we were maxing powers. A lot. Using the Player’s Guide optional rules to allow a permanant will/quantum loss to push maxing even further.
Phooey for not knowing any gamers to brag to in real life.