The last episode of the Heroes of New Arcadia is finally upon us! After defeating the Status Quo and the stopping the coup, there is only one obstacle between the Heroes and a transhuman utopia: the Ideal itself. Some members, like Avalon, are not on board with a radically new society that grants equal rights to non-humans and empowers all of its citizens. The Heroes find themselves facing a foe they never knew of before and the stakes could not be higher! What will happen to the Heroes in their final adventure? There’s only one way to find out! Thanks for listening and the next episode of RPPR will feature a post mortem of the campaign.
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Guess we’re on a six day schedule, with both these campaigns out the door. Looking forward to the post mortem as well. 🙂
And I’m done. My short thoughts, for those who’ll indulge them:
The street level start, with all characters basically being average dudes with some powers, is what I like in superhero games. It’s so much more about the characters and role-playing than blowing shit up (though a lot of the early combat was very fun). Awesome role-playing, very funny episodes and a good story.
Most of what I remember from the second tier was Jamal and Adam going head to head and Norm becoming Space Jesus. Some fun role-playing still and Norm struggling to be a bad-ass superhuman was a great touch and nice storyline. I was kind of put-off by the Remnant mega-boss fight for all of existence, but it was fun and I could take it for the power escalation than usually comes with comics.
(I guess it’s fairly obvious I don’t read many comics. I used to be more of a manga guy, myself, but rarely read much of that anymore either.)
I had a tough time with the third tier. As soon as your characters can fly at the speed of light and can know basically all there is, I start to lose interest. It’s not really an enjoyable story any longer at that point, and with the exception of three great episodes (the meeting with the government, Skyrim and Jason’s game) I sort of switched off. Not to say it wasn’t enjoyable, just not at the level I thought the earlier stuff was. Also, the combat becomes kind of weird at 500 points, but maybe that’s just me as I’ve never tried going above ~300 with my group.
All in all, I thought it was a really good campaign and thanks all for providing hours of entertainment for free. It was close, but to me Caleb takes campaign MVP for the brilliant performance as Norm. *Slow clap for all the great moments from everyone around the table*
So, what’s next? Did you record some alt-history episodes with side-stuff or is one of the ongoing campaigns (Tribes of Tokyo/ Tom’s Pathfinder game) coming up?
Well, we did discuss doing an alt. end episode where we chose a different outcome. Instead of transhumanism that is. It would basically deal with Jamal rescuing his dad and becoming a real magic user under the tutelage of Cerulean. Finn realizing the extent of his deal with the bat god. I’m sure there was more, but with Pericles, Adam, and Torchbearer biting it, I can’t remember the specifics.
bit of a Gynax ending there. entirely new god-threat in the eleventh hour? only real foreshadowing being Avalon’s name?
So Caleb’s plan to deal with a threat was to turn the entire human race into energy beings? Well, I didn’t see that coming.
I don’t think you could really get the whole human race to agree to be gods; there’s always going to be a few that choose mortality imo, so if you needed everyone, the plan wouldn’t work. But, since it was the end of a campaign, it was a good way to finish with a bang.
Ok this campaign seemed to spiral out of control after first arc. Street lvl was amazing and if it had ended there it would be on par with new world campaign and know evil. The arcs that came after were all over the place and I just couldn’t keep following it.
in contrast to the wave of negativity, I enjoyed pretty much all of the Wild Talents campaign.
I loved the first tier with it’s street level but second and third tier really grew on me as it went along, I dug the concepts you guys tackled. It was a very enjoyable ride to the stars. Thank you fine folks.
That was an awesome end to an awesome campaign!
Incredible, all the way through. An audacious campaign with a brilliant ending.
Just a FYI: Tribes of Tokyo will take New Arcadia’s slot in rotation at RPPR Actual Play.
I’m quite sad to see my time as an RPPR regular come to a close. Granted, this was about a year ago… but now I’m being forced to live through it again. (Curse you, Ross!)
Anyway, this campaign was an absolute blast. Not only did I go from a ghost-possessed robot, to a clone of a supervillain, to a wad of bio-tech goo, but I also went from not knowing anybody in the group to proudly having you guys there at my Not Quite But Almost Entirely Unlike a Wedding ceremony.
I look forward to seeing y’all soon, if briefly, upon my return stateside.
A little voice in the back of my head was wishing for rppr metaverse combo and the end of this campaign would start up as ‘The Fall’ Ross eclipse phase game.
I really liked the ending, and the entire campaign as a whole. I tend to enjoy a trail of changing circumstances above a patterned narrative.
I’ve already put my two cents in about how difficult it is to run high powered supers (as confused as it might have been). I think the important question is this: was it fun to play?
I think the answer was yes. And if so, this must be counted as an extremely successful campaign, which also happened to be a pretty great listen most of the time, too.
Well that was weird.
Heroes of New Arcadia is basically what hooked me on RPPR. I’m going to go ahead and agree with the few other people here and say that the game really sort of fell down around cosmic tier, but the first two were amazing. Thanks to the RPPR crew for playing such awesome characters and being such awesome people.
I’m looking forward to the post-mortem podcast. Ross, would you do this again the same way, knowing the problems with the system and high level play?
High level play is hard, but this is a good example of how ‘epic level’ stuff can be fun. I dug it the whole way through.
Rock on! Although, again, I’m a little sad that another longtime week-in-week-out campaign is over. :*(
We’ll miss you too, Thad! Go back to the States and play some more (and then have it listened to in, what, 2020?
I can’t be the only one that thinks that “suicide by cop” is a coward’s way out, and not a final act of defiance. Was that guard the embodiment of Merlin, or just another random individual that died because the player couldn’t take matters into their own hands? Either way, it fits the player’s overall M.O. of misguided self-righteousness.
Overall, great story throughout. I loved the familial character that Jason tried to bring into the story with his sister and overt signs of affection towards other players. Thad did a great job with that as well in his sacrifice against the Status Quo. Tom was a badass throughout, and I wish there was more payoff on his deal with an evil god. And Caleb served as the reliable plot point throughout the entire campaign.
Thanks again guys for an awesome campaign, and for Ross for hours of entertainment.
Honestly, I tend not to enjoy low power levels in any RPG very much so I preferred later New Arcadia sessions where things had bulked up some, though part of that was narrative investment. But yes, by the time folks hit 500+ points it did seem to be straining at the seams mechanically and while I enjoyed the last few episodes well enough, the extensive contortions Ross had to go to to make things actually challenging were a little too contrived for my tastes.
I’d love to see RPPR tackle a game where the PCs are meant to be incredibly powerful godlike beings from the start, like Nobilis, or (apparently) Weapons of the Gods or Mythender or something along those lines.
PS: Touchy subject, I know, but can I just congratulate Aaron on really having done a great job on toning down that verbal tic over the years?
Loved the entire campaign and everything about it. Gonna have to break the majority trend here and say i liked the mid and later tier stuff the most since i was getting really invested with the characters.
The last episode threw me off a bit with Avalon pulling a “oh yeah btw there’s this really powerful omnipotent guy coming to make you all slaves and have a horrible time, but im going to wait until the very last possible second to tell you about it. he’ll be here in like a few hours so have fun!”
The epicness of the tasks and sacrifices everyone was making made this episode still really great, but there were really only 2 complaints other than the avalon thing.
One had to be the ring that Kairop and Pericules ended up in that basically guaranteed their deaths. Sure Pericules death was actually pretty cool in that, but for a character we watched since the first episode like Kairop, I was hoping for something a little more awesome like a majority of the other players had.
But probably the biggest complaint was the ascension ending. while the idea is a good one, probably giving the best ending and a good way to close the campaign, going to have to agree with Citadel that there would be no possible way that 100% of people would agree to that. I’m sure that there would actually be groups of people that would be enticed about going back to the middle ages, and would gladly welcome Merlin.
It seemed Caleb definitely blind sided you with the question of having everyone ascend, so understandable you’d want to set a high monkey bar in order to have that idea work, but still setting it at 100% and having it succeed kind of shatters the immersion.
All in all though, seriously loved the campaign and really sad to see it end. We will definitely miss you in the following campaigns Thad
it was a great campaign, indeed the game was hard to play at higher point values but it was a lot of fun to listen to. It was during this game that I developed and got over Aaron’s verbal tic (it IS something I ignore now, so don’t worry) and I think I learned a bit about how to GM at least on the street level side of things.
Thanks for the fun and the laughs. To Chirop, to Norm, Steel Centurion, James, The Martyr, Zeroshift and others, the game had a great end if a bit whimsically defined.
A lot of fun
While I liked the earlier tiers better as once things got a little overpowered there was a lot less of the character conflict among the team but overall a great campaign with some memorable moments & NPCs. Definitely hooked me into getting Wild Talents as it seems to be one of the better superhero genre RPGs out there. Everyone did a great job on this & looking forward to whatever comes after it.
Just finished listening to this now. It’s been a fun ride! I know it’s been a while since you ran these games, but I thought I’d add something.
I, as the regular human being I am, would never have agreed to the Starchild’s offer. Any offer of “infinitely more” makes me suspicious, but the clincher is immortality. There’s not much I wouldn’t give up to avoid immortality. Sure, maybe in this case it’s blissful immortality forever, but there would be no way to know ahead of time. Even the most miserable life as a serf under Merlin would end eventually, while immortality opens the door to infinite suffering. And, hey, strange aeons – even Merlin could eventually be defeated by some other cosmic power. There’s always a bigger fish.
I guess if Merlin applied the reincarnation thing to the entire planet, that would be equally bad, but nobody would know about that until after it was too late. There’s also the interesting question of who actually had to vote yes for “all of humanity” to be counted – what about kids who might be too young to understand or lunatics – but I guess the Starchild would be god-ish enough to find a perfect answer in every case.
what were all the powers of the characters by the end of this campaign sorry for asking?
Everyone was a 500 point character by the end, I think.
I’m guessing they all had way too many powers
By the end of this campaign how many things were had more points then the group