"You read funny books? 'Cause in the funny books, they always have a big modern prison to put all the supervillains in. They got force fields, and big robot guards, and bolonium walls that can't be busted. And the criminals go in and out like a sieve. Here, we don't have any o' that.
"What we do have is a hundred year old crumbling territorial prison. We have flesh and stone and our wits... and fear. Mostly, we have fear. The inmates here, they have no hope because we don't give them hope. They don't get any hope of escape, because if they thought they could, they might try, and even stopping them we'd lose a lot of good men. In my 19 years as warden there have been no escapes, and there won't be any escapes today either, because you're going to follow instructions exactly. Understand?" -- Warden George Harvey, Fort Cheer Federal Prison, Nebraska
This is a recording of a Champions game I ran January 25th 1998 set in the World of the 400 on November 24th 1997, the Monday before the US Thanksgiving holiday. This session is episode 26 of about 50, and the only one recorded. The four PCs are a teen superteam, the United Nations Paranormal Education and Cooperation Envoys, UN PEACE for short.
It's modern day earth, with the difference that there are about 400 significant superbeings on Earth; distributed evenly about 1 for every 10 million population except that the U.S. has twice as many as it should have and China appears to have none so far as anybody knows.
One third protect human society and laws (let's call them "superheroes"), two thirds believe their own desires or plans override the rule of law (let's call them "supervillains", but not where they can hear us), and there don't appear to be any sitting on the sidelines.
In the USA, supervillains deemed too dangerous to hold in conventional prisons are sent to Fort Cheer, Nebraska, a decaying hellhole which uses available technology and intense psychological pressure to keep its inmates under control. There has never been a successful escape.
UN PEACE members are:
I recorded the game on microcassette with the intention of transcribing it, but technology marches on so instead you can hear it, thanks to a Griffin iMic audio to USB converter into a Mac running the free Audacity 1.2.6 sound editing program.
There are gaps because at the session I didn't always notice right away when the 30-minute cassette ran out, so all of Orion's interview, much of Zephyr's, and bits of several others are missing. Sorry! I've used Audacity to normalize and do light editing. The voice activated recorder clipped the start of words after long pauses. In the last hour, people were tired and excitedly talked over each other, but I've left that part in.
That was one of my three favorite sessions in the World of the 400, out of the 100 I ran with UN PEACE or Force 10. The other two were UN PEACE against the Antarctic nanotech menace, and Force 10 in the two-part "Blood Harvest", in which they crash landed in an abandoned small town in Nebraska while transporting supervillain prisoners to Fort Cheer. I had lots of fun running the whole campaign, which is a testament to the value of having great players. I'm grateful I had the opportunity to GM for them.
I hope you'll enjoy listening.
The session is broken into eight 30-minute 21 MB MP3's, which you're welcome to download. If you're looking for a particular section there's a list of timestamped notable quotes (with spoilers).
Rush's entrance was cut off, but here's a partial transcript:
Rush is a short thin woman (5'2") with fiery red hair with streaks of ash, green eyes, freckles lightly dusted across pale skin. She's chained at the feet and hands, and wearing a stunbelt.
She looks around quickly and sits in the chair, then carefully draws her knees up between her arms and tips backwards in the chair so that its balancing on the two rear legs. She flashes a quick grin.
Rush: Where's the dog?
....
Emoticon: If you want to, you can say you don't want any part of this and walk out of here right now, that's your option.
R: ...
E: So I can mind control you?
R: Sure!
E: How are you feeling?
R: Very trusting.
E: Really?
R: Sure. Don't you trust me? Can't you use your power on yourself?
E: I could.
R: Shouldn't there be an atmosphere of total trust between us?
E: Mmm, yes, but I'm not... Well, hmmm. No, because, unfortunately, like it or not, whether or not it's the way things should be, you're the one in Fort Cheer and I'm the one conducting the interview. But it could so easily have been the other way around.
R: Sure, except that in fact I'm the supervillain and you're not.