Excession is a new low-to-mid powered superhero game using the Year Zero Engine.

Session 1

Excession is a privately owned non profit organisation that seems to have unlimited money and a private army.

Louis and Jana are two hard chargers for the Excession organisation. Louis is a German-American with a real love of animals and an equal love of his well groomed porn-star moustache. Jana is a matronly experienced soldier with no need to prove herself. They like to get in quick, hit hard and leave the nerds to come in and tidy up. They’re both relaxing in the Ready Room when they feel the whole building, all 19 storeys, shudder. A shadow falls over the building and over the comms there’s the sound of gunfire and panic. Both grab their webbing and weapons and bolt up the stairs as the Evac siren sounds and the office workers begin to spill out of the offices and to the stairwell.

Taking the steps 4 at a time, they arrive at the roof and take cover behind an aircon unit to see a tall (3 metres tall!) silvery armoured figure directing energy weapon fire upon a fire team on the roof. They’re pinned down behind a pipe. The energy weapons fire is coming from a suspended black disc, perhaps 3 metres wide. But above it, in a seeming haze, is the ‘impression’ of a much larger vessel, perhaps cloaked.

Louis bolts for the stairs and leaps over the bannister, plummeting two floors to the upper armoury and grabs a LAW (Light Anti-Tank Weaton) and an AMR (Anti-Material Rifle) and then starts climbing up the stairs again, meanwhile Jana unclips a frag grenade from her webbing and lobs it at the silvery figure. The grenade detonates with seemingly no effect. Arriving back up, Louis hands her the LAW and he cocks the AMR. Both take aim and Louis makes an abdomen hit while the LAW round hits the being in the chest. This seems to stagger the being so they signal for the fire team to depart. One of them isn’t so lucky, Hank gets grabbed by the being and thrown off the roof….

Jana reports this over the comms and luckily there are two Enhanced on their way up. One is codenamed Jade Dragon, a superlative martial artist withthe ability to transmute objects and people to jade. The other is Strobe who has limited control over his personal space time – in effect he can stop time for a few seconds. Strobe hears about the falling Hank and detours to a window, grabbing a firehose as he runs. He shoots out the window and dives out, stopping time as he begins to fall, allowing him to catch up to the plummeting soldier. He grabs him roughly and the hose goes taut, slamming them into the side of the building three floors lower.

Meanwhile Jana and Louis pump more AMR rounds into this thing and lob grenades – which seems to stagger it. It raises a hand and there’s a pause ….and then the black disc rains heat death rays upon the rooftop. Hair singed, they barrel into the stairwell and begin to descent the stairs as quick as they can as the plaster cracks and the glass melts. They’re met by Jade Dragon on his way up who can see that the whole top three floors of the building are going up in smoke. He leaps over the balcony and falls five floors before deftly grabbing a railing and throwing himself to safety.

The vessel, slowly moves off….

Fire marshals and first aiders are checking everyone at their assembly points outside the building and the four, Strobe, Jade Dragon, Jana and Louis are approached by an elderly man, one of the trustees. They know him as Arthur Joyce. He mutters that “They’re back….” and instructs the team to go find Zachery Ackermann. When they ask him how, he says the address is with his secretary…

Switch To:

November 1945. The back of an Army truck. Sergeant Roy James and Corporal Curtis Cox have been seconded to Excession. The third man in the truck is wearing a white suit and they know he’s a Brit by the name of Arthur Joyce who made his name in the SOE during the war. They’re driven to an airfield and put onto a transport plane which flies them to the heart of Kansas. Then two more hours of driving and they find themselves in the middle of a cornfield looking at a furrow caused by a fallen meteor. But this meteor seems to be made out of silvery metal. Joyce orders Corporal Cox to jemmy open the thing and he does while Sergeant James covers with his rifle.

The capsule opens and there’s a rush of strange smelling gases. As the mist clears they see a hairless small baby, white in colour with no nose, looking at them. They tell Joyce it’s just a kid and he suggests they’ll have to deal with it. “After all, it’s an invader”. Corporal Curtis picks it up and as his flesh touches it, the baby shifts colour to his skin colour and develops a human nose and a patch of dark hair on its head. Within seconds it’s indistinguishable from a human child. Joyce again uses his horrible euphemisms about killing and the two soldiers take a stand. They ain’t killing a kid and, heck, even Nazi babies aren’t born evil – they reckon they can raise this kid. Joyce concedes and tells them to get married – if they can find a woman who’d stoop so low. Curtis asks what they’ll call the kid. Joyce interrupts, “Call him Zachery”.

End of session 1.