Pulp City Revisited

Pulp City has an alternate game mode where one or more teams of Supremes battle a single monster. We played through our first one, shown over the coming posts. The chapter in the book on this mode is fairly light with a page or two of additional rules and stats for 3 types of monsters – Beasts, Elders, or Robots – each with 3 power levels and all with different stats and abilities.

We played this as being before the current timeline in the Pulp City lore. The Fall occurred 1 year past when the Green Emperor’s sorceries unleashed monsters on the city. The Supreme Alliance, a team from a generation gone, mysteriously returned and helped turn the tide. This was a scenario based on one of those battles…

A trick with this game mode is finding a suitably imposing monster model. Luckily we could dust off our old Balrog from the LoTR Combat Hex TMG by Sabertooth. It made a great stand-in for a rank 1 Elder Fire Demon. The ranks are given an equivalent Supreme team level for balancing  – Rank 1 – 12 levels, 2 – 24 levels, 3 – 36 levels. This foe was paired against a Supreme Alliance team of Spybreaker (lvl 3 leader), Battlesuit 7 (lvl 2 tank/blaster), Sabotage (lvl 2 support), Perun (lvl 2 brawler), ECTO (lvl 2 support), Arquero (lvl 1 blaster), plus a minion – June Summers (reporter).

Setup changes in this mode with the monster starting in the middle of the board and Supremes deployed within 12″ of any board edge. We used a 3′ x 3′ table. We considered a larger table, but this worked out well. Citizens are deployed per normal rules – number of citizens equal to encounter level (12) – and they try to move off the closest board edge every turn unless it would put them closer to danger.

In this scenario, we assumed the demon rose from a construction site … as they do. Under the monster rules, they have their own Agendas (objectives) and for this one we chose the simple Rampage – Destroy Pulp City. The monster has to destroy 4 or more structures for full points and we decided we would play it as targeting buildings first before focusing on Supremes.

A Rank 1 Elder starts at 48 HP with 30 Action Points to use. They move with an Overrun attack (Fiery Walk) of 5″, with an AP point cost that can do damage to everything along the path. While normal Supremes can only do 2 moves per turn (controlled by fatigue tokens), monsters can do 6 (!). Generally 2 or 3 solid hits were knocking down buildings and the demon could cover the board at will each turn – very stompy. As the monster takes damage, its available action points drop which starts to slow down how much damage it can deal out, but is always formidable.

The Supremes have special goals focused more on containment. The only way to ensure victory is to achieve all 4 objectives – knocking monster down to half HP, have more than half your team survive (by level value), get all citizens off of board (either by own movement or by tagging), and KO-ing the monster.

With everything sorted, the battle began with a plan (that didn’t survive first contact…)