Available Now!
The second Astonishing Adventure in the “Chrono Crisis” trilogy for Mutants & Masterminds is now available and it is a real barn-burner, pardners!
“Showdown at Magic Mesa” has a lot of different inspirations, not the least of which are the classic “wild west” comic books and western stories: In the adventure, the heroes find themselves in a “weird west” in the 1800s where herders ride domesticated dinosaurs rather than horses. They’re looking for the missing Dr. Tomorrow, but find there are added complications in the altered timelime, including intervention from the mysterious future foe who set off this chrono crisis in the first place.
It was a particular delight for me to be able to work on an M&M adventure that made use of western tropes and Magic Mesa, an element of the Earth-Prime setting I created for the second edition of Freedom City (although its genesis might have been in my various marginal notes for the first edition). Magic Mesa was one of those “throwaway” bits of setting intended to capture several different genre tropes: the mystic power-site, the “nexus of worlds or realities,” and the character and history of the wild west, with maybe a touch of “the devil’s tower” from my childhood viewing of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
A favorite episode of Justice League Unlimited, featuring Chronos the time-thief and a wild west transformed by stolen future technology, was also a big influence, especially on the scene where the heroes visit the town of Red Rocks, Arizona, under the thumb of the Tallant Gang. Who doesn’t want to play out a “high noon shootout” scenario in the midst of trying to track down a time-lost hero?
Finally, one of the goals of the “Chrono Crisis” series was to breathe more detail into the villain archetypes from the Time Traveler’s Codex, and this adventure does that twice over, particularly with the Lady of Scales. Although she is set up as an alternate-timeline foe strictly for this adventure, “Showdown” does discuss options for bringing her back for another go ‘round, if your players have fun going up against her, with possible variations for the main timeline—assuming the heroes are successful in Part 3!
Even if you don’t want to run the whole “Chrono Crisis” series, “Showdown at Magic Mesa” makes for a great “Doctor Tomorrow is missing and the timeline is messed up!” adventure for catapulting a team of superheroes into the transformed past to figure out what’s happening and to fix things before the powers of Magic Mesa can be subverted for sinister ends.
Chrono Crisis Pt 2: Showdown At Magic Mesa is available now in the Green Ronin Online Store, and on DrivethruRPG
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