#megagame

Following the example of Superman, my disguise had a few components. In my civilian identity, I was a slouching freelance reporter with a hat and press pass lanyard, always with a notebook in hand following the success of that prop in the last game. That's me in gray in the middle of the first group shot.

When the time came to transform into a gentleman thief, all I had to do was ditch those props and my glasses, swap them for a matching blue tailcoat and domino mask, and adopt an upright, hands-on-hips posture like you can see in the back of the second group shot.

It turned out to be remarkably effective in the large megagame format: Aside for some mishaps like forgetting to change for the very first phase of superheroic actions, the bustle and confusion of a thirty-person game meant that most of the players took until the latter half of the proceedings to realize my two identities belonged to the same person.

For my part I spent most of the game engaging in journalistic investigations and heists to gather clues. My powerset was well-suited for that, and also included a lie detection ability that I should've used more: When I went to a fae super with some clues about fairies causing havoc, I accepted her story at face value instead of using that power to challenge it, and she later revealed herself to be a villainess whose minions had been gathering the components for her master plan.

There were more achievements than mistakes. Uncovering the secret that a CEO had faked his death with a superheroic heist allowed me to exonerate the other master thief who had been framed for his murder by releasing the evidence through the press. When I later discovered that a popular heroine was secretly an escaped survivor of a super-soldier program, I instead offered her the evidence and the choice of whether to reveal her past and punish those responsible or keep it buried. She chose the latter.

I wasn't the only person who had a secret identity: The player who had been Fastjack in Mirrorshades here went around with a magical tome in hand, making pacts, and when the final turn came he revealed his true identity as a devilish figure who would use those contracts to compel heroes to villainy! With my journalistic credentials, I prevailed upon those heroes to reveal any weaknesses they had before their rampages so that the others could safely subdue them. In the end, heroism won the day, though I had less of a part in it.

Each turn we'd get to take an action as a team or individually, like running a raid on a corporate building to steal their stuff. The corps had their own activities, like R&D and corporate espionage, as well as a lot of money to pay us punks with.

I decided to position myself as a fixer, bringing along a notebook and recording lots as the game went on. That hadn't been part of my character brief but seemed appropriate and useful. Our only chance of victory was to keep the corps divided and put their money and shares into the hands of friendly runners. Because of that, my focus was on pointing out soft rewarding targets for runs, keeping the crews fighting the corps rather than each other, and driving up the "standard prices" we punks charged the corps for everything. Those prices were the only information I outright lied about, doubling whatever I'd last heard quoted.

Our crew got lucky with an early job from a CEO which paid enough up-front to supply each of us with top-end static bonus cards to our respective specialties, and that advantage lasted us the whole rest of the game. Initially I thought I'd have to buy and trade information, but instead it turned out that everyone was happy to answer questions on how their runs went even when I was visibly scribbling notes down. Apparently my notebook gave me a lot of credibility!

I don't know how much of a difference I personally made, but there were no shootouts between crews trying to hit the same building, more than one corp became noticeably strapped for cash, and we rose in wealth and popularity, cornering both the market for bribed votes and the votes of runners with bought or stolen shares. My friend on the Fastjack team also made good use of the more freeform aspects of the game, gathering enough money to bribe her way into ownership of a building that should've been corp-exclusive to earn us more votes, while Fastjack himself was bursting with charisma and energy. In the end, despite a merger between two of the corps, we managed to win by a margin of one bribery card, to the surprise of the organisers who gave Fastjack odds of 1 in 20 to win.