Apogee: Harbinger

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Superhero name: Tomorrow’s Hope
Civilian Name: Kelly Chan
Playbook: Harbinger
Age: 16
Appearance and Demeanor: Kelly is a young woman of East Asian appearance, although like most people from her time, she is of extensively mixed heritage. She has a thin, graceful build that belies her wiry strength. She typically dresses in the elegant but practical clothes typical of her time—in her case, tailored for athletics and combat. Her weapon of choice is a telescoping bo staff. She takes her mission very seriously and is deeply worried about her ability to successfully accomplish, but outwardly tries to project good cheer and hopefulness, seeing maintaining the hope of a better tomorrow as being as much part of her mission as superheroics proper.

Tomorrow's Hope.jpg


Labels

Danger: +1
Freak: 0
Savior: +2
Superior: +1
Mundane: -1


Abilities

  • Future knowledge
  • Optimized biology: Before being sent on her mission, Kelly was extensively trained in biofeedback techniques that gives her the ability to operate at or slightly over peak human ability both physically and mentally. As a result, she is a master athlete, martial artist, scholar and sleuth.


Basic Moves

Assess the Situation (Superior): +2
Comfort or Support Someone (Mundane): -1
Defend Someone (Savior): +2
Directly Engage a Threat (Danger): +1
Pierce the Mask (Mundane): -1
Provoke Someone (Superior): +1
Take a Powerful Blow (Conditions)
Unleash Your Powers (Freak): 0


Conditions

[ ] Afraid: -2 to Directly Engage a Threat
[ ] Angry: -2 Comfort or Support Someone
[ ] Guilty: -2 to Comfort or Support Someone & Assess the Situation
[ ] Hopeless: -2 to Unleash Your Powers
[ ] Insecure: -2 to Defend Someone & Reject Others’ Influence


Playbook Moves

  • Connecting the Dots, Investigation: At the start of each session, roll + Savior to find out how your investigations on the timeline are going.
  • Connecting the Dots, Memories (-1): When you push yourself to remember the version of someone who exists in your future, mark a condition and roll + Memories. On a hit, you connect who they are in now with who they are in the future. Choose their future role from below and the GM will tell you about their future self. On a 10+, ask a follow-up question. On a miss, the GM will choose their role or tell you they don’t exist in the future. Your Memories start at -1 and go up by 1 (to a maximum of +3) for each role filled in. When you fill in a role, they gain Influence over you.
    • Builder:
    • Corrupter:
    • Leader:
    • Martyr:
    • Monster:
    • Traitor:
  • I Learned the Solution in Grade School: When you Unleash Your Powers to extend your senses or overcome an intellectual obstacle, role + Superior instead of + Freak.
  • Tomorrow’s Golden Promise: When you Comfort or Support Someone with tales of what you think their future will be, roll + Savior instead of + Mundane. Mark a condition unless you are confident the stories are true.


Playbook Team Moves

  • When you Confess to a Teammate the difference between what you thought they would be and what they really are, add a Team to the pool. Ask them if you represent a future they’d want. If they say yes, mark Potential. If they say no, mark a Condition.
  • When you Share a Tale of Future Loss with someone, ask them if they think you have the ability to avert that loss. If they believe you do, mark Potential and give them Influence over you. If they don’t, mark Guilty and shift one Label up and one Label down.


Moment of Truth

[ ]: Everything you do could affect the future, but you’re not sure if you’ve helped our hurt—until now. You can see the course of events laid out before you and you know exactly what you have to do her and now to ensure the future outcome you want. You can reshape the future with perfect certainty. After this, you’ve changed enough of the timeline to invalidate your prior research. Reset all the names in your Connecting the Dots move.

When Our Team First Came Together

We averted a disaster from the future’s history books. We stopped terrorists from destroying a research center where ground breaking research on green energy was taking place. We hope that his will accelerate the transition to an environmentally sustainable society and slow down or stop the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystems.


Relationships

  • Lady Ombra turns away from the hero’s path, according to your history books. You have to prevent that from happening.
  • You’ve always looked up to Alvin B. Apex, but it’s too awkward to admit to them now that you’ve met them in real life.


Influence

Over Others

  • Alvin B. Apex (the Doomed): I may be able to help Al change his future: +1
  • Ari the Dreamer (the Outsider): She’s so happy to be here that everyone has Influence over her: +1
  • Asaru (the Newborn) is receptive to how people think and behave around her: +1
  • Impedor (the Scion): I may be essential to stop his supervillain parent: +1
  • Lady Ombra (the Janus): She looks up to me because I seem to have the superhero thing figured out: +1
  • Omega Avatar (the Legacy): She cares what everyone on the team thinks of her: +1

Over Me
All: They can affect the future I’m trying to change: +1


Potential

[ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]


Backstory

Kelly Chan comes from a utopian future society, the Global Commonwealth, one that has achieved equality and social justice for all. Unfortunately, that society is under threat--the Earth's ecosystems are collapsing and the violent, authoritarian force of Python is aiming to destroy that society. The turning point at which they reached the Global Commonwealth came too late. So the Commonwealth used some of their last resources to send someone back in time to undo the damage and try to turn society to better course earlier, in time to save things.

However, early tests in short-term time travel showed that it has a corrosive effect on the human body—and the older the person, the more harmful the effects were. So they decided to send a teen-ager, trying to strike a compromise between someone youthful enough to make the trip without significant harm and someone old enough to carry out the mission. After extensive interviews and tests, they chose Kelly as the best candidate, giving her extensive training in biofeedback techniques, athletics, combat skills, detective work, and the knowledge base of the future before sending her back. Kelly made it back into the past mostly unharmed—but with some of her memories missing and jumbled, including crucial ones necessary to complete her mission.

This did not stop Kelly from swinging into action to help people almost as soon as she arrived. When journalists discovered she was a time traveler and asked her why she had come, she said, “I am tomorrow’s hope,” thus resulting in her superhero moniker.

The time travel process is a one way trip. Kelly has no way to get home--and, if she succeeds in her mission, she will have changed the timeline sufficiently that she won't have a home to go back to. But she's determined to do her best and tries to keep herself focused on the positive. However, she is still suffering from some degree of culture shock in the contemporary era, finding the society of the present to be both technologically and socially backward.


When Tomorrow's Hope first arrived in the current era, she tried working with established superhero teams and the existing authorities, but found that most of them didn't really take her seriously because she was a teenager. It's not that they didn't believe her per se, but they thought they could handle the threats Kelly was warning of them better than she could and tried sidelining her.

After some frustration with this sort of run around, Kelly decided she might have more luck in working with people her own age. So she applied to Pinnacle, hoping to form connections there she could use to complete her mission. Doing well on the entrance exams was not a problem of her--with her ability to use biofeedback to enhance her mental abilities, she aced them. And the interviews went well--the admissions office decided Kelly would provide an unusual perspective, even by the standards of Pinnacle.

The Future Threat

Python is the organization—now a conquering empire—that threatens Kelly’s utopian society and the Earth’s ecosystems. Once it was an elitist but mostly harmless organization. Kelly’s mission is to keep this transformation from happening. The problem is that among the memories wiped from her mind by time travel are those related to exactly when and how this transformation took place.

Python was named after the dragon who originally guarded the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece, which was later claimed by the god Apollo. It started off as a secret society made up mostly of mover and shakers from elite government, military, business and non-profit circles from around the world. They were involved with the occult, seeking intellectual enlightenment and foresight in order to make themselves more effective leaders. They were elitist, believing decision-making was best left in the hands of a small group of highly qualified leaders, but they also believed that their gifts should be used for the common good.

Somewhere along the way, they transformed, coming to identify with the dragon more than Apollo. They sought occult power not just for insight but to command armies and dominate others. They also moved from being a secret society to commanding first militias and then real armies. Instead of elite rule, they began preaching freedom, but a freedom based in exercising violent power, gradually moving from a doctrine of armed self-defense to armed domination. They came to glorify warfare, vengeance, and preach that those who were conquered were less worthy and undeserving of freedom, until they had been uplifted by their new masters, whose occult powers made them wiser and more worthy. In Kelly’s age, they have conquered much of the world and are threatening Kelly’s utopian society.

Python also claims to be saving the environment, identifying with the chthonic dragon Python and his mother Gaia, the primeval earth goddess. In practice, their constant warfare badly hurts the Earth and threatens to push the planet’s damaged ecosystems over the edge into large-scale collapse.