Team-Updates #2: Mooglians and Patty Melts
Hey pals! It’s Fiona again.
Thanks for subscribing to our newsletter! It’s nice to take a moment out of editing and prepping and planning to write and reflect a little bit.
Run #6: Sentinel Comics: the Roleplaying Game
It’s our first 3-part AP! Friends of the show Ian Gregory and Ceci Mancuso came back to play Sentinel Comics: the Roleplaying Game with us. Along with Stephanie, they assembled a literally random group of heroes who came to the rescue when a volcano erupted in the middle of New Arcadia. Then, following a lead from their future selves, stopped robotic cat people aliens who were determined to erase the very important Miller Compound from the timestream.
As your special behind-the-scenes treat, this is the villain sheet of Cap’n B’lep, the commander of those robotic cat people aliens. (I love how you get to make up your own move names in Sentinel Comics RPG.)
Yes, in my notes they’re called Mooglians. Look, it’s not adorable in their language.
Run #7: A City of Shining Stars
Oh pals check this out. We got to play the superhero world building game A City of Shining Stars by Aaron Lim with noted world building and superhero expert Jeff Stormer. If you don’t know him from Party of One or All My Fantasy Children, you know him as the game designer of Anyone Can Wear the Mask, the very first game we played on Team-Up Moves.
In this run we explore an alternate reality version of New Arcadia and find out what was going on in New Olympia (still called Olympia back then) as the arrival of vertical trains combines with a centuries-old fae grudge. There will be patty melts.
I have not laughed so much in an episode of this show as I did during this recording. Make sure you’re subscribed because you do not want to miss this.
New Arcadia Spotlight!
New Arcadia grows with each run, thanks to the influence of the games we play and the contributions of our guests. So, we’ve written a short intro to the setting that we’re sharing with our new players, so they can get a sense of the city even if they haven’t listened to a dozen hours of actual play.
We wrote quick summaries of the neighborhoods, a bit about the New Arcadia Superhero Dispatch Organization, and also the following fun facts:
- New Arcadia has an all-genders AAA baseball team, The Warehousemen.
- The works of Shakespeare are all canonical in this universe. Thanks, Ian Gregory and Weird Sister!
- The New Arcadia Aquarium is ludicrously opulent. It’s the New England Aquarium times 10. The explanation “they got a grant” may not hold up under scrutiny.
- New Arcadia boasts being home to the first supervillain evil scheme in the United States. (Currently unspecified in canon.) This has given it a bit of caché among America’s villains.
- New Arcadia’s subway lines are named after virtues. The Empathy Line has at least one stop on the Grandsmeddow.
- There is a parallel universe version of New Arcadia called New Olympia. Sometimes people, concepts, or vowels cross back and forth.
By the way, my unrevealed headcannon of the month is: Benjamina “Jams” Williams, who has a day job doing maintenance on New Arcadia subways, is by night a closer for the Warehousemen.
What We’ve Been Playing and Reading
Fiona: I had very high hopes for Charlie Jane Anders’ run on New Mutants, featuring Escapade, and I have not been disappointed. I love this character and I love these issues.
Other than that I have been playing a ton of Midnight Suns, though I’ve been going slowly and so am only a mission or two into the 3rd part. This game is real dang good. You play cards, you knock enemies around the battlefield, and you get to spend quality time with a pretty eclectic group of Marvel heroes.
It is unfortunately very slow to get going. The early dialog is long, the conversation cutscenes are barely animated, and the story it drops you into is not very compelling. But it definitely hits its stride later, and I love the way it handles the tension and infighting between the established, well-known Avengers and the “weird kids” of the Midnight Suns (Nico Minoru, Magik, Ghost Rider Robbie Reyes, and Blade). I’ve enjoyed getting to know Nico as a character, as I have tragically not yet read Runaways.
Steph: My Xmas season got upended, transformed, inverted, and blown apart by Bob Proehl’s novel The Nobody People and its sequel The Somebody People. Together they’re a many-character, large-canvas, sensitive, and (if the word still means anything) literary look at what would happen if X-Men style mutation were real. There’s a non-mutant reporter who gets in way over his head, a secret New York school with a telepathic founder who seeks peaceful coexistence, and a lot of queer relationship drama over three generations; there's also a slow buildup to a civil war.
Proehl knows how to weave together a massive, symphonic plot. He also knows how to sustain introspection, showing us how it feels to be, for example, eager, conflicted, door-opening interdimensional teleporting mutant Kimani Moore, or anti-social, easily-manipulated space-nullifier Owen Curry, or — and of course she’s my favorite — Carrie Norris, who grew up super-smart but easily ignored in suburban Deerfield, can infiltrate anything and escape anybody thanks to her mutant powers, and has to figure out whether she’s built for combat, whether she’s really bisexual, and whether she’s really a leader, or a teacher, as she saves kids, lives through heartbreak, tries not to discorporate entirely, and — look, if you read novels and you like the X-Men you need this book and you’ll probably buy it for friends. If not, please give it a try nonetheless. I know no novel that captures the spirit of Team-Up Moves half so well. (And now there are two of them.)
That’s it for today! If you like what we’re doing, leave an iTunes review or tell a friend. You could even forward them this e-mail!
Do you know of a game that you think we should play? Email show@teamupmoves.com or mention us on Twitter (@teamupmoves) or Mastodon (@teamupmoves@dice.camp). We love all superhero stuff, but especially games that convey a particular point-of-view. Self-promotion is encouraged!
Do you want to be on the show, or know someone who does? If you love a particular superhero game or a particular type of superhero story, let us know at show@teamupmoves.com or those aforementioned socials. If you have links to places you’ve been recorded either playing games or talking about things, send those, too, though they’re not required. We especially encourage folks who have different social or cultural backgrounds from the two of us.
Do you want one or both of us to be on your show or stream? We probably want to be on it, too! Get in touch. Let’s talk.
– Fiona & Stephanie