This week we played Power & Grace the super heroic Lasers & Feelings hack by an unknown author (let us know if you know the creator). We are the Silver Guardians, a well-financed group of superheroes operating from our hidden island base who are always dealing with our overlarge rogues gallery. One of our number—Moonwind the alien acrobat—is missing for this adventure, but our newest member, Bolt the eager speedster, is available for her first adventure with the team. The series regulars who appear this time are: the Electric Shepherd, the arrogant controller of technology who believes the chips in his brain make him better than humanity; Heavy Metal the wisecracking cybernetic brawler from the future; and Glacier, a 7-foot tall ice spirit sent to protect the Earth bonded to a human being.
Our story begins with Electric Shepherd luring Glacier to a public park and convincing him to create multiple ice sculptures of her when a portal opens near a group of playing children, a portal showing a winged demon with a scorpion tail in another dimension. Shepherd tosses a phone into the demons mouth, which causes an explosion that starts a fire that endangers the children, but Glacier quells the flame with sheets of ice. Later, back at our base, Glacier and Shepherd reveal that they discovered magical cards from a game the kids were playing that must have opened the portal, and teenage Bolt explains that the cards are from a collectible card game called Demon Wars that kids all over are playing. The group decides to approach the creator of the game Dustin Kamil, so Bolt poses as a young fan to lure him into a park where we can question him without alarming the public. Before we can begin, however, he unfurls additional cards which summon a large creature that is the combination of a dragon, a squid, and a parrot. As we’re fighting the creature, Dustin attempts running away but is easily caught by Bolt, and the rest of the crew take out the creature through a combination of electrical overloads delivered through Glacier’s ice by Shepherd and a haymaker from Heavy Metal.
During questioning, Dustin mentions Dr. Arcane, which leads to the group investigating their old mystical foe and uncovering his plot to use this CCG to weaken the wall separating our world from a demonic realm to summon the dreaded beast, Ghraiodrih, which saps the will to enable him to enslave the whole country. Our research makes it clear that to summon the beast, he’ll need to cast a specific spell at Stonehenge, so we race there to stop him. Upon arrival, we learn he’s brought much of our rogues gallery with him, including the gelatinous Ooze, the unpredictable Wacky Arsonist, the megalomaniacal cat-man Leonine, and the Poison Child who drips with venom. But having fought these so many times before, we go to work taking each one out: Heavy Metal slams Leonine with a massive stone, Glacier freezes Ooze in place (although a small portion melts away into a nearby drain), the Arsonist is put to sleep by the gas from Shepherd’s drones, and Bolt brings down Dr. Arcane and the Child as they attempt to fly away using a mini-cyclone. Their scheme thwarted, we hand the villains over to the authorities and set about to clean up the Demon Wars game first by buying the company and replacing all the existing cursed cards with mundane facsimiles.
Story Games Club 