OSR Commentary & Ascendant Rpg Session Report One - Capital City Casefiles #2: Served Cold By Karl Gustav

" The heroes are sent to investigate a mysterious and brutal murder in a trendy apartment building by a Cartel enforcer, which leaves them racing to unravel the series of events that led to it, and trying to stop the rampage before it leaves any more corpses.."

"Capital City Casefiles is a series of scenarios for Ascendant, the superpowered role-playing game of infinite possibilities. Each Casefile offers a single Issue of exciting play for a group of metropolitan metahumans with Power Levels ranging from 18 to 22 and a collective challenge rating of between 100 and 150 points.

These scenarios can be played in any order and are designed to be easy to run with any type of heroes, be they super-powered police, costumed crimefighters, or underground antiheroes. The Casefiles are set in Capital City, Delaware, a fictional city first introduced in the Ascendant rulebook and detailed in the Capital City Gazetteer and Map Set (available separately from Autarch). But don’t worry – if you’re not interested in playing in Capital City, you can easily adapt the scenarios to your city of choice. Capital City can be Chicago, Detroit, or New York. It can be your hometown with a fresh coat of graffiti and a layer of rust and grime. Whether you use the scenarios in Capital City or another metropolis, you’ll find the Capital City Casefiles to be something special. These aren’t just beat-em-ups or thinly-disguised dungeon crawls. Strip away the superpowers and the Casefiles could be police procedurals or detective mysteries. These are scenarios that challenge your problem-solving and role-playing as much as your tactical prowess; and they do so by taking advantage of the robust rules for Fighting Crime and Saving the Day found in the Ascendant rules."

In this Casefile you get:

• An amazing covery by Joe Bennett of "Immortal Hulk" fame
• 36-page ready-to-run scenario suitable for introductory play
• 4 new NPC antagonists and 2 NPC allies
• 4 full-color maps (wrecked apartment, wrecked townhouse, wrecked warehouse, and coffee shop)
• 1 printable player handout
  
  

Well once again I'm stepping beyond the screen to enter the dark and grimy world of DM Steve's Capital City Ascendant Rpg campaign. We settled into Capital City which has a has a decidely unsavory reputation; "Located on the west shore of the Delaware Bay, approximately 22 miles southeast of Dover, Capital City is the largest and most populous city in Delaware. The city’s founders, real estate developer Arthur Richville and financier Chase Livery, hoped it would be “a testament to the power of American capitalism.” From the art deco skyscrapers, with their dirigible docking stations and decorated cornices, to the streamlined trains that streak across the city’s elevated monorail, to the mighty Statue of Fortune that overlooks the Bay, Capital City was built to be the city of tomorrow – but tomorrow never came. True, more than 60% of the country’s Fortune 500 companies maintain an office here, and the city’s elite Richville neighborhood hosts some of America’s most luxurious mansions. But Capital City is also a city of poverty, crime, and decay, where endless rows of rusted factories and abandoned buildings are the legacy of lost hope, broken promises, and shattered American dreams. From “Fortune Favors the Old: The History of Capital City” by Eddie Exswiss and Mason Cortez" 
Our party is a group of independant contractors and Ascendants in the  heroes of Power Limit 18 to 22. The Ascendants have only recently emerged from the pages of history. And Capital city is the dark reflection of DC Comics Metropolis. And yes Superman has emerged from his phone booth but this is the street level of Capital City out in the MidWest. And there's been an explosive murder that we believe an Ascendant might be a part of this sorted affair. We're subletting our contracts from Dreadnaught Security. The PC's are naturally not trusting of the security firm but that's another blog post. 
Capital City Casefiles #2: Served Cold By Karl Gustav as a PDF is top notch with excellent handouts, well thought out layout, and really solid easy to read fonts. The whole affair clocks in on around thirty six pages. In tonight's game we got intoduced to our party via Dreadnaught Security's debriefing and police meeting about the incident. We then came to ruins of the apartment complex to bring Ascendant's senses to the site of the murder to look for clues. The clues within Capital City Casefiles #2: Served Cold are made with colour coated bullet points. Again very well done. And the module is very well organized so that it's easy for the DM to pull the adventure elements within Capital City Casefiles #2: Served Cold right into play. 

We didn't get too deeply into Capital City Casefiles #2: Served Cold By Karl Gustav  however there was more then enough there to hook the players into the murder scene. And DM Steve kept leaking clues here and there as Hawkmoor our vigilante with the enhanced senses. And Rifter our Esper has been working together played by Halley and Jeff (one of our married couples that play) to shift through one half of the apartement. And the rest of us began working the second half. We ended here. There were however some interesting developments with us running into Mark Shaw aka Manhunter from the late Eighties DC comicbook series.