Suplex Academy Handbook

Songs for S.U.P.L.E.X. Part 2 of Whatever

Today we're discussing one of my favorite S.U.P.L.E.X. Songs, and going over a particular bit of lore I always had for it. When I create a campaign and I need to flash forward scenes, I almost always picture them as a photo montage animatic set to music-it's just how I process that kind of information and capture tone and concept. So this song, Superheroes (Epic Version) by Edguy is always the song I picture when I think about a cape funeral.

It's no secret that S.U.P.L.E.X. Characters die and stay dead in the narrative; this is one of the creative choices I made when establishing the universe. You pretty much only get to die one time, and the most common reason a player character actually dies is because they leave the table for whatever reason-if I don't plan on having you show up in a future tabletop session, I pretty much reserve the right to kill your character for dramatic purposes. So when I was creating the original trading card biographies, anybody that I figured I would never see in the game again became a candidate for character death. But one of the things that I've always been fascinated with the idea of how warriors memorialize their fallen.

The death in question, just because it stuck out in my head, is for Crimson Claw. Crimson Claw was a member of the 5th wave and a potentially top tier superhero with nanite fused steel morphing hands that could form tools or weapons directed by psychokinesis. (A classic 'lab accident' origin.) It was a cool concept, but her player ended up not being able to commit to a full campaign, so she was killed off early on in a prison riot-shanked for a pudding cup. But as someone who passed the course, she was a fully fledged member and she got the whole funeral anyway and the song that I thought of was of course this one, a mournful ballad that explores the rituals that mourning warriors maintain for their dead.

Some of the S.U.P.L.E.X. Mourning Rituals include:

A name carved on the Memorial Rock at the Quarry, a very Red Dawn inspired concept. This isn't just for heroes either, but support staff or allies.
Mosin Nagants being used for the firing party (A 21 gun salute is standard)
Posthumous retirement of your character sheet with fully upgraded abilities-S.U.P.L.E.X. does in fact keep a character sheet for you (they call it your ratings sheet and it's how they measure your abilities and talents) and upon your death, they speculate what you might have achieved with a longer career and entomb your sheet that way in the Corporate office-as a reminder of your potential.
A TRULY decadent party, though often it ends up pretty subdued, and it's not really like S.U.P.L.E.X. needs an excuse for a decadent party anyway.

There have been other funerals in the tabletop of course, from Beastmobile to Keytaursaurus Rex to Quickie, but this one has always stood out to me because it was my first 'revival' of S.U.P.L.E.X. with a whole new group of players, and it occurred right around when this song came out of course.

So Crimson Claw got the treatment of course, and like most recruits she was perhaps most heavily mourned by the World's Luckiest Detective, as he mourns all of his trainees hard in the way that only the guy who is supposed to teach you how to stay the f**k alive can-with a heavy side helping of guilt. And I like to picture Melody in this scene too, as his rock in a funeral scene, both of them looking uncomfortable and awkward in suits as they carry Crimson Claw's casket. My son is always my rock during funerals, and I am sure that relationship carries over to CBTT and Melody. So this is a Dad-and-Son focused narrative arc, with the co**se kind of as a Macguffin, and it has always stuck out in my head even though we 90% skipped it in gameplay because it stands out as this raw, powerful, emotional scene in my head. Accompanied by this tune, it is a heavy burden.

But it is a sweet, glorious, heavy burden. Be sure to search for the mystic portal to the song in the comment section below.

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Songs For S.U.P.L.E.X. - Part 1 of Whatever

I have always, from the very earliest stages of the project in 2013 or so when it was just a bunch of degenerates around a gaming table in some mall ninja's crappy apartment, what the song over the end credits of S.U.P.L.E.X. The Movie would be. It contains both a philosophical message that is congruent with the brand and a nerdy musical style suitable to gaming table shennanigans. That song (mystic portal can be found below in the comments) is The Sun Is Also A Warrior by Leslie Fish.

It's basically a musical version of that Jefferson quote about war being bad, but not the worst thing ever-a cautionary tale of a god who takes away the power of man to strive and results in a horrific dystopia that cannot be resisted in any meaningful way. It's a lesson that is evergreen, as relevant now as it was in Jefferson's day. It's a song that is dear to my heart to boot, and that matters to me. So this song, in essence, is S.U.P.L.E.X. - because S.U.P.L.E.X. is not meant for or needed in a perfect world, but rather in a world where strife is always going to be part of the landscape. If perfect peace is impossible-and it is-then someone has to man the barricades, and to me that's the essence of being a superhero. Sure you could just do science or feed orphans with your powers, assuming they work for that, but signing on to fight the war against the dramatic types that blow up bridges or press down costumed boots on your neck, is the noblest profession of all, and this is a tune that I think reflects that while being somber enough about the grisly reality of armed conflict in a godless age.

Stay tuned for the mystic portal below and more game relevant songs in the future! (hey, it's content.)

Good morning and happy Sunday, folks, and welcome to the FINAL S.U.P.L.E.X. Sunday Lore Drop! In this drop, we're talking about the multiverse, the cosmos, the big f**kin' turtle with a tree on it's back, whatever you call it. I'm tripping balls on some mushrooms and I think this is the perfect time to explain exactly how reality works, so buckle the f**k up-it is, in fact, relevant to your job.

Now you'd need a scientist to explain most of this to you, and you wouldn't understand it anymore than I did, but almost all of reality comes down to frequency-as in frequency within the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Except for my brief foray into electronic warfare systems research for the book, I don't know s**t about this, but basically 'reality' is a frequency we can measure, based on the very low number of anti-matter particles or other spontaneous subatomic particles and waves that do not make sense within our Euclidian / Relativity model of physics. See, how 'real' you are isn't a binary condition, but more of a gradient, and by measuring that you get one blurpenforter (or whatever) particle passing through your matter every 1200 days (or whatever) a quantum physics scientist can in fact measure how 'real' you are. Heavy stuff, but it isn't exactly relevant to your job as a newly minted superhero, or at least it seems that way on the surface.

The thing is that belief has an EM spectrum signature as well. Your own body carries an EM spectrum from your brain activity, and-this is the interesting part-this signal 'pools' whenever a belief is shared by multiple beings and becomes stronger, and by tuning an EM type dimensional receiver to it you can actually tune into the collective idea. It's a sort of 'Jung with Teeth" thing, a collective unconscious, but that actually shapes the 'down' frequencies (lower vibrations) and 'up' frequencies which create things like the afterlife. We fought two whole ass wars in Hell, and we still aren't sure if the souls there are actually the consciousness of the person projecting them in life or just a sort of remnant of the thoughts, dreams and ideas of the person they resemble. But we know without a doubt that both Heaven and Hell exist and that that power sometimes bleeds through into our world. (Most physicists call it the Material Plane, because apparently a lot of physicists play D&D.)

But it gets weirder than that, because those 'levels' are reflections of reality as a whole, and reality as a whole has multiple variants, due to the random nature of the choices made. This is where it gets into your basic sci fi multiverse because in a situation with multiple choices, all the options are eventually played out in some fashion or another, because of the fact that the participants speculate what it would be like. So there are 'parallel' versions of the material plane, and near as we can tell they're indistinguishable from other versions of the material plane. But the higher and lower planes (some people call this the roots vs. the branch of the world tree, or sometimes the Astral vs. Ta***ic chakra planes) are distillations of every version of every person-it's why you can meet your own soul in Hell sometimes, because sometimes you died in every other reality besides the one you're in and they reference events and choices that they never made.

So it gets weird out there, and while it can be as simple as 'punch the demon, close the portal' the simple fact is that the higher and lower planes bleed into ours at any place and time where the barriers are thin. The thinnest barrier we know of is just beyond the moon, but there are others, such as the Hell portal in Coffin Hill, Kentucky in the old mausoleum. We don't know exactly why this happens, but it is more common in the depths of space or in places where intense horrible things happened to thin the barrier. And while it is expensive and dangerous to travel between the 'slices' of that cosmic pie, it can also be lucrative or even essential to resolve an issue that originates there.

Anyway, I'm just a flatfoot detective, so I'll leave the heaviest parts of the explanation for Singularity or some other big-brain type. But it's worth knowing about, because when a divine intervention happens or a demonic portal opens, the science behind how the universe unfolds affects the situations that you will be thrown into. So know it well, and good luck out there graduates-it's a hell of a world to protect, but some poor bastard has to do it.

How I spend my saturday mornings:

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