MillennialMen

Millennial Men
Arc 1 Arc 2 Arc 3 Arc 4
Arc 5 Arc 6 Arc 7 Loose Ends
Past Exploits of the Mill Men
STORY ARC 7
GM: KILLER SHRIKE
I was the GM for this arc, but it never got off the ground.
SETUP
As the Chantal arc wound down I felt obligated to step back in and keep the game going. I had gotten my work schedule somewhat manageable, but was still working around 60 hours or more so it was definitely going to be a challenge.
However one session in there was a total melt down with a couple of players throwing the game into a OOC death spiral. I probably could have smoothed it out and kept going, but I was pretty frustrated and stressed out as it was and just did not have the capacity to deal with it, so I ended the campaign.
FOCUS
I had big plans for this arc. The overall theme was focusing on the individual heroes, using the split visibility of the HERO Central board to run several small scale adventures for each of the Mill Men.
I had a VIPER flavored adventure lined up for John Wrath and Turbofist. I could see the crusty old veteran taking the fiesty young Vietnamese-American under his wing and teaching him the ropes John Wrath style. The first part was going to revolve around Asian street gangs with a snake motif that were really fronts for VIPER, and eventually lead into Sharper than a Serpents Tooth plus some loops pulled from the VIPER sourcebook. I also had been setting up a Viper X angle with John Wrath, and I was going to bring Agent X back into the mix as well -- recaptured and reconditioned by VIPER. I was really looking forward to it.
Blackjack and Rook had a lot of banter going back and forth, so of course I was planning to throw them together on a mob-inspired story, playing up on Rook's backstory as a made man and Blackjack's backstory as a high rolling Vegas guy. I also planned to have more ENFORCERS Inc material come into the story via this angle with certain members of the mafia hiring some super thugs for hire to deal with Rook and Blackjack. I was also planning to establish that Rook and Bronto knew each other from back in the day, and I was going to turn Richochet into a reoccuring villain for Rook.
I had a mystic / DEMON oriented adventure lined up for Legend and Alliage, giving them a chance to play on all of their mystic oriented abilities and follow up on the many loose ends left trailing from the Chantal arc.
For War-Man I had a PRIMUS oriented adventure lined up where he was going to become more involved in the HERONet program, which is a national network of PRIMUS Sanctioned heroes callable at need to respond to national threats. Sort of a mission impossible style best asset for the job sort of thing. He would also have time to network the other PC's, urge them to sanction up, meet with other local PC's to encourage them to join HERONet, and generally become a very recognized and well known hero, part of building him up as the leader of the Mill Men and the most respected member of the group by the authorities.
As part of his increasing involvement with PRIMUS I was going to reveal that though most of people in the organization are good, honest, and well meaning there is corruption and political chicanery going on among some of the higher ups. The biggest thing he was going to discover was that a powerful and influential business man is manipulating PRIMUS for his own purposes. This would eventually turn out to be Alex Abraxus, Legend's nemesis, leading to crossover. Ironically it was one of Abraxus' minions that caused a meltdown among the group and the dissolution of the game.
I also had an IHA angle worked out for Rook; we had been working the IHA into his back story when he went off to do "missionary work" and I was going to use him as the gateway to bring the IHA to the fore in the campaign setting. I was going to use this as the big closer to the arc to bring all the heroes back together, perhaps even bringing Holocaust back into mix as the icing.
A key theme behind all of the threads was large national and multinational groups which would naturally lead the heroes to a greater scope of operations.
LEARNING CURVE
I learned two things from this "arc"; the first and most important is to not start something like this when you are already overloaded, and the second is that players can spaz out over the most inconsequential things.
LOG
PRIMUS Meltdown At PRIMUS HQ, the heroes are greeted warmly by their old pal Major Savage, Rook turned Black Paladin and Talisman over to custody, and the group was processed for statements -- particularly the kidnapped girl Ahn.

They also discovered that they had been missing for about a month, and that their duplicates had caused quite a bit of damage in the meantime before being captured by Major Savage and his ICARUS unit, the Millennium City 8, Hype, and some other local heroes such as Nightwind and Professor Primate who all worked together to bring the interlopers to heel. When their counterparts disappeared from their cells a few hours before PRIMUS knew something was up.

In the aftermath WarMan, after consulting with Rook, offered membership in the Millennial Men to Legend, Blackjack, Turbofist, and Alliage.

The next morning as everyone got ready for the inevitable press conference, there was a good deal of friction between some of the heroes and the PR people that had been outsourced to manage PRIMUS PR, and both Blackjack and Legend departed in disgust and it remained unclear if they would accept the invitations to join the MillMen