Episode One: Vanishing Act

Pregame Note: About the PCs

Obviously, this module can be run for your own PCs. The pre-gens come out somewhere between 200-250 points, so you may need to upgrade the villains a tad. It also helps if at least one of the PCs either has a Secret ID as a teenager or a DNPC teenager with paranormal potential. It'll be clear why later in the story.

I designed this module to run using the seven pre-generated characters to be found on the Official Heroes of Hellenback section of this site. If you're not running a full roster, DayStar and Dreamer are the two least expendable to the plot. If nobody takes DayStar, or if you are not using pre-gens, you can still use Alys normally, just remove the NightStar subplot. Alternately, if someone has taken Frostbite, you can age Frostbite's kid to 12 or 13 years old instead of eight and use him/her in Alys's place (again without the NightStar plot, of course). If nobody takes Dreamer, or if you are not using pre-gens, he can still be applied as an NPC.

With the exception of Dreamer (m), Deathwish (f), and Butterfly (f), I used gender-neutral names for the PCs and allow my players to decide how they want to play it. However, when you're writing out a long text like this, using s/he and his/her gets rather awkward. So, for the sake of this write-up, I am going to arbitrarily refer to Facet, DayStar and Chris as male and Frostbite as female.

• Pregen PCs

Scene 0: Background

The PC's are at their HQ, doing between-adventure stuff. This can be done as foreshadowing in an ongoing campaign. For convention purposes, this information is part of a character handout. Chris and Deathwish may be present, or you can use the alternate backgrounds for them (listed later in this section). A government rep (or someone who at least seems to be a government rep) calls with a report that there have been a handful of disappearances over the last two weeks. The missing persons are all between the ages of eleven and sixteen. The local police have written off most of the cases as runaways, but then, they don't know that the missing persons are also all latent paranormals. I like the play the government rep as extremely evasive as to (a) how exactly *they* know the kids are latents and (b) how they happened to be keeping close enough track to notice the pattern. It's not vital to the plot, but it's a good hook for future adventures and adds to the ambient paranoia. They're bringing this to the PCs because of the paranormal angle.

There's no apparent connection between the kids themselves - they all attend public school and come from different areas of the city and surrounding suburbs. The one real lead is that each of the kids' schools had been visited by a educational "Science is Fun" program shortly before the disappearances. The program has several lecturers on staff, but in each of these cases the lecturer was a Mr. Johann Kristofic. He has a presentation scheduled for three days from now and does not answer his phone.

Scene 0a: Background for Chris Craven

Ms. Genevieve Fitt has hired Chris to find her missing daughter, Elaine. Elaine has run off twice before for a couple of days at a time and both the police and Mr. Fitt expect her to turn up on her own sometime soon. Ms. Fitt is worried, though. It's been over week, and she's worried that this time is different. She came to him because she doesn't think the police or her husband are taking her fears seriously.

When Chris goes through Elaine's room, he finds some shreds of what looks like plastic sheeting. When he touches it, he gets a flash vision of a teenaged girl anxiously shredding a layer of the stuff off of her skin. It looks like the girl is some kind of developing paranormal.

Scene 0a: Background for Deathwish

One of Deathwish's street contacts quits showing up.

Scene One: The Lights Are On...

...

Marginalia