Put together using notes from this reddit post.

The Trigger: Setting

A recruiter from an Ivy League school was slated to come to observe the
Vance-Granville Vultures play. It’s the first place qualifiers in the Northeast
division and third place in nationals. They were a guaranteed shoe-in: the
team placed this well three years ago and five people were drafted with full-
ride scholarships. Now? The Ivy League school is talking about wanting to
shake things up with their roster. They’ll recruit more.

Everything is done by the books, but behind the scenes, there’s panic.
Higher stakes at the post-season games, not everyone is giving their all
because they don’t think they have a shot, and… the drug tests.

It’s the team manager, not the coach, who comes to the lunch table to
deliver the verdict. The drug tests came back with four cases of suspected
cheating on the test, one outright failure, and two more that looked
borderline. The scout didn’t bite: no scholarships, nothing. With all the
tension, it doesn’t take much to set this powder keg off. For too many of
these players, this was a life changing thing.

The Game

The GM is running this as a pen and paper campaign with players not all
guaranteed to show up to every session. Four players.

Backgrounds

Players each come up with two backgrounds. The GM comes up with two
of his own. The backgrounds are...
1. The Striker. A player with tendency toward violence, getting a lot of
penalties but performing well enough to earn her place on the team.
Her parents never fully forgave her after she hit her little brother so
hard she burst his eardrum- they only really tolerate her because
she’s holding her own on the team.
2. The Dodger. Back when she thought she didn’t have a chance, she
got up to shit, drinking at the park, shoplifting. The cops know her
face, but they know her by another name, because she used a fake
ID and had a friend’s sister pose as her parent. When the cops come
asking questions, they’ll figure it out quick.
3. The Runner. She started running away to get away from the drugs
and drug use at home. That running got her onto the team and she
hoped to keep running until she was gone. When she had an injury
last year, she used meth for the first time. It haunts her now, and she
knows if she doesn’t get out, she’ll end up a user.
4. The Ace. She was bullied by the group before it was discovered that
she was an incredible shot. She harbors a fair bit of suppressed
anger over the bullying still, even after being recruited and held up as
the star of the team. She fucking hates many of the people on the
team, and that hatred reaches a fever pitch as she realizes what their
fuck-ups have cost her.
5. The Snitch. She wasn’t going to be one of the scholarship recruits,
and her sense of ethics combined with a bit of bitterness led to her
informing the coach that people were cheating on the drug tests. But-
police? She didn’t expect this to be this major, or this bad. There’s
talk of people going to jail, girls crying, and people talking about lives
being ruined.
6. The Lancer. She was good, but never great at anything, except for
making the calls that made the others look as good as they did. Her
parents didn’t see it, the students, the boys… their eyes were on
others. Only the coach saw her talents, and as the news comes to
the table, she frantically texts the coach. The response: “Don’t talk to
me.”
7. The Manager. The one delivering the news, boyfriend to one of the
girls, he had a role in organizing and assisting the coach. He knew.
 He kept secrets, and ignored the signs that things were wrong,
because everything else was right. The coach asked him if anything
was hinky and he said no. He was asked to keep an eye on things
and he very intentionally didn’t.
8. The Dealer. Not the typical dealer. He’s just normal enough to not
be one of the nerds, and explains away his connection to the popular
kids by saying (correctly) that he’s related to them. But he’s good
with numbers and he knew the people to ask, and he was the one
who hooked up the team with the stuff for doping.
9. The Lover. A partner of one of the players, an unofficial cheerleader,
and the student who helped support the team by making healthy
treats, giving rides, and helping with studying. You had as much of a
stake in this as any member of the team.
10. The Enforcer. The big kid, sometimes a boyfriend of girls on
the team, friend of the most popular guy in school, muscle and seller
for the school’s dealer. He knows he’s the one who takes the fall if
they come looking for the source of the drugs, because he looks the
part and he’s just expendable enough. When the arguing starts, he’s
the first to grab someone and start punching.

Triggers

The GM uses some prompts to encourage diversity in triggers, suggesting

classifications for each player and the things that would lead to this
classification.

1. The team was your everything, your obsession, before you even
joined the school, then after. Your sibling was on it, and that was
your in, in a way. More than anything, it’s seeing it all go wrong, the
team finally fracturing after all that time obsessing, all that time trying
to keep the dysfunction functional, that makes you trigger.
2. It’s as voices raise that one voice shouts louder than the rest. If
they’re going down- you’re going down with them. A phone is held
up, and it’s you. It was a stupid party months ago, you tipping back a
 bottle while a haze of smoke surrounds something unidentifiable in
your hands. You lunge for it, but they’re taller or stronger, and they
hold you off, phone held high with thumb over the ‘send’ button..
Nobody’s helping you.
3. Why is it you that they keep going to for examples or blame? You
can’t- it can’t be you that takes the focus here. You try to change the
subject, deflect, minimize your part in things, and again, you come
into focus. You did this, you did that, people know and they’ll use it
against the team. In your desperation to deflect and control the
situation, all of your worst neuroses coming to the fore, you end up
sounding like a crazy person, everyone staring.
4. You had dreams, illusions, hopes… Reality comes crashing down
and you can’t deal with this, this reality, this awful end of all hope.
You get up from the table, while everyone is distracted by one of the
other girls doubling over, hands on her head. You head for the door
and people grab you, trying to make you stay. You pull away, trying
to leave the cafeteria, and a hand slams against the door, the person
hurling themselves against it to force it shut. The boom of the door
shutting echoes the reality crashing home, the end of hope and the
lack of escape.
5. You partook of the drugs, and they fucked up your body. They
worked, but it was almost not worth it. It changed how you look under
your clothes, changed your frame. It changed who you were in your
own head, your emotions. That it was all for nothing takes the illusion
and the hope away, and it leaves you in the present with a fucked up
body.
6. When things come to blows among the more aggressive members of
the team, something in you breaks. You start fighting to get hurt
more than to hurt, in a desperate bid to make this stop. You go for
the craziest person you can fight and say the things you know will
provoke them. It works in that it gets them to go too far, fails in that
they grab you and choke you out, crushing your throat and leaving
you feeble as the lack of air saps your strength. You realize it wasn’t
unconsciousness you wanted, but an injury or end that would leave
you the victim, not a perpetrator.
 7. Your parents chose your school and dictated your life. You thought
you could find relief by getting through, but as you realize the
consequences of the situation, that you’ll be found guilty for your part
in things, and the fact that your opportunities have slipped through
your fingers, you realize that the trap has closed around you. There’s
no escape from this dynamic of home life and school life, especially if
you end up repeating a year.
8. Your whole identity is wrapped up in your association with the team.
Your kid cousins look up to you. You’re fit, you have a future, you
were changing as a person, changing for the better. In a way, this
whole thing going wrong means you’re back at square one. The loser
you always worried you were.
9. People turn to you for help and support, and you’re not equipped for
this. No, it’s worse than that. You were the one who misjudged a
conversation and let things slip to the coach. That was why the drug
tests even happened in the first place. You present a friendly face, a
lying face, to your friends, even as you know you were the fuckup.
10. As the scuffle occurs, you find yourself caught up in it. Shoved
down amid lunch trays and metal cutlery, hot coffee scalds you and
something punctures deep. Puncturing- it’s a good way of framing a
punctuating moment, the pain driving the reality of it all home. You
trigger.

The Draws

Players each draw two random personalities and two random triggers.
They’ll go with their best judgment on this.

Adam (A) draws the Dodger and the Runner. The triggers are #8 and #9.
He chooses the Dodger, with trigger eight, where he links the dodger (who
didn’t think she was a contender, and who lied about her ID to the police)
with the trigger that emphasizes the growth and self esteem followed by the
return to square one.
Bash (B) draws the Snitch and the Manager. The triggers are #2 and #4.
She chooses the Snitch and trigger number two, where she’s implicated
and made out to be the cause of it. She says she likes the idea of being
the self-righteous goody two shoes that reports the team but who wasn’t so
‘good’ herself. She thinks she can justify some character conflict, a desire
to be heroic, and a dose of self delusion, to make an interesting character.

Chuck (C) draws the Ace and the Lancer. The triggers are #1 and #3.
Now, it’s usual that sometimes there will be conflicts between the character
and the trigger, and the Ace hating teammates while obsessively fighting to
keep the team together is something Chuck vocally discusses and opens
for the group to try and work out how it would work. It could be an
interesting character conflict, a lot of repression of the hate that finally boils
out. He decides not to, though, and after considering combining the Ace
with #3 (the ex-bullied, now-star finding herself bullied again as she’s made
the scapegoat and focus) or combining the Lancer with #1 (the second-
string player recognized only by the coach, trying to hold her team together
and make everything work- Chuck explains it as the obsession extending to
the coach as well), decides on the latter.

Dolores (D) draws the Dealer and the Lover. The triggers she draws are
#5 and #6. Some of these are hard to connect, but she decides that she
likes the idea of going with the Dealer who fucks up his own body with
drugs, using his own supply to try to make himself look better as he hangs
with athletes and popular kids.

Primary Powers
Adam has the dodger and the trigger about returning to square one. He
summarizes for the group.
I wasn’t one of the star players. I didn’t think I had a chance at a
scholarship, so I fucked around. I shoplifted, I drank in the park and I
vandalized stuff. I was a hooligan, and I kind of still am. The only
reason I didn’t get arrested and disowned is that I used fake ID.
 But, uh, let me look at the trigger. I realized I had a shot, and I
started trying. People treated me differently, I had self worth, my kid
cousins looked up to me. Then as the news comes through, I realize
it’s all for nothing, I’m back to being the loser hooligan, and worse, I’m
going to get caught after they realize about the fake ID.
Ace sits out while the group discusses. It was written to be a changer
trigger, with the focus on identity but it gets mixed up with being a stranger
trigger. For the power, the group discusses themes and ideas- something
hollow, ugly inside, or getting bigger (because importance or self-growth)
that might be fragile.

After discussion of plant themes (from growth) and image and identification,
with someone suggesting the character changed up her look to help hide
from the cops, they decide on a middle ground between the two.

Adam’s character merges themselves to their clothes and explosively

expands/unfurls clothes into weak but versatile giant rag-limbs and rag-
shapes. Very weak unless able to anchor herself to the surroundings.
Bash outlines her character:

“My character was the Snitch, but she wasn’t as crafty as she
thought. The group keeps accusing her, saying even the most ‘good’
member of the group was still pretty bad. She freaks out and panics.
It’s all being made out to be more than it is, isn’t it?”

After the group gets clarifying details on the trigger, they discuss. With the
focus on attention, the snitch is probably going to end up with a stranger
power. They discuss what kind, and emphasize the attention coming back
to her, the deflection, and the theme of both intoxication -the drugs and
alcohol-, the smoke, and the self-delusion.
The discussion is heavy on the idea of smoke and hazes, and both
intoxicating and confusing enemies, while keeping herself as a focus in
their mind.

She’s a stranger with the ability to make smoke- usually it’s a lightless
‘flare’ with a smokey trail behind it, that explodes into a small cloud about
10’ across on impact. She can detonate it prematurely, or detonate it
while holding it to shroud herself in the smoke.

The smoke does not block vision, but it saps all color, and it hides and
camouflages things within with an alien intelligence that mimics shapes
and movements. This intelligence masks Bash’s character if she’s within
it, granting evasion, and encourages others to collide with one another
when moving within it, and those outside the cloud may be led to shoot
friendlies. Those inhaling it or remaining within the cloud suffer a one-
time, minute-long intoxication condition that lowers morale and Wits.

Chuck takes his turn. He explains his character, elaborating on the idea as
he goes:

“My character was obsessed with her coach. She was the second
child in her family, her older brother was always the focus, and even
though she was an exceptional player, she never was good enough
at anything to stand out from the rest. Her coach supported her and
saw her, and she was willing to do anything for that to continue. So
she kept things together over months, helping the team, sacrificing
stuff, going the extra mile. And they fucked it up. Maybe she was
right to make all that stuff so important, because the coach definitely
dropped her the moment things went wrong.”

For Chuck’s character, the focus is on the months and years thing. That’s
a good cue for a tinker. Most debate in the group is about the fact that
most masters have a time component already, and you need an especially
master-tinker power to not just make it one or the other. Both the break-up
of the group and the loss of the coach factor into this.
They decide it probably is, in this case, and the discussion turns toward
how to make a master-tinker combo low powered enough. Once that’s
done, setting limits on the number of creations and control, they hammer
out the theme, style, and subspecialty.

The character’s thing is the creation of a single tinker puppet, something

that requires a container as big as a bathtub, a bit of DNA from the source
(dictating some of final appearance), some other biological stuff for a
primordial soup, and some tech with a computer to boil it. The control
device requires that she be close enough to it to see it, and her creation
takes the default form of a black knight, with hard flesh or chitin in place
of armor. As part of the transference/control aspect, she might be able to
transfer secondary powers through the knight.

Finally, we have Dolores’ character.

“I dealt the drugs. I’m a borderline-nerdy guy who got to hang with
the cool kids, and in trying to keep up, used my own supply. I fucked
up my body and ended up looking weirder, small balls and stuff, I
guess, weird bulges, moobs, acne, and that screwed with my head
big-time. I probably did the most criminal stuff, dealing with this stuff,
so I’m probably the most fucked, too.”

Again, the group thinks ‘changer’. It’s fine that two separate powers have
the same classification. The focus here is on strength and power versus
being powerless, and obviously steroids, so the group thinks ‘muscle’.
Because he was a nerdy, not-strong guy and he made this transformation
as part of a mask, one of the group members wants to emphasize the
strength being hollow- but there’s a disagreement.

In the end, they decide that the strength is only part of it, and that there’s
something lurking beneath. He’s the guy who was behind the scenes,
doing all the screwy stuff while putting on a good face. So, after
deliberation…

‘Nested’ Tower changer. He grows a shitton, as one player puts it, but in
doing so, he loses mobility and becomes a big target. It’s a lot of added
muscle and some armor plating, but he’s more brawn than Brute, they
decide.

The ‘nested’ part is what they ultimately decided on. While he slowly
changes to get stronger, there’s stuff going on beneath the surface. Bash
describes a mouth opening up to reveal another lesser mouth like in
Alien. He’s strong and slow, but he gets some randomly-decided
weapons and tools from a short list. Most of these unspool or end up
messy when deployed, so they’re very one-shot. Secondary powers may
be rooted in this- an example given is a smoke blast that ends up with
guts pouring out of his arm alongside the smoke and needing to be reeled
back in after.
A bit more of a normal power than a secondary, but stuff can be managed.

Secondary Powers

They decide on the following distribution:

‘Rag Tree’ Delusion Black Knight Nested Twr

Changer Smoke Puppet Changer
Adam Primary Skip (Kinda)
Bash Primary Skip
Chuck Primary Skip
Dolores Skip Primary

Each character is built with a ‘theme’ in mind.

Adam’s changer sort of skips the delusion smoke and gets something
tinkery- and the group decides that instead of having a puppet, she’ll have
the power-link hookup. If the character builds the tech, she can make the
delusion smoke part of the form she manifests, but this is the weakest
option. She can separate fragments of herself as lesser drones, very weak
and temporary. She can alter her primary power, using tech and worn
collars and bracelets to change the particulars, lose options while gaining
strength, or lose range in exchange for faster manifestation. Finally, she
can create her own ‘nested tower’ changes, getting gradual boosts to
strength or hidden one-shot weapons with a lot of build time and the tech
requirement for anything fancier than the most basic options. Otherwise,
the smoke is so minor as to be cosmetic, and the tower changes are there
but hard to leverage, taking a good minute to load up one charge.
Versatility is the key feature here- the rag forms, the tinker stuff adding to
options, all with the bulkier mutations as a backbone. Picture her- skin and
clothes moving away to reveal something monstrous beneath, bulging flesh
constrained by tech, that monstrousness swelling out and growing as the
rags branch out and fill the space around her. She latches onto terrain,
giving herself the leverage to deploy the knock-out hit.

Bash’s smoke generator can alter her clothes to form an augmented

costume- she can’t really root it in the ground for added strength, and
versatility is limited to a few forms, like a claw, whip, and barrier. She
doesn’t get any tinkerings, but can concentrate to mutate herself for added
strength, which is reliant on her being in her smoke (she changes in tune
with the smoke that has its own forms), and is generally very powerful but
short-lived. Lunging out of smoke with great strength for a single hit, then
losing most of that strength in seconds, and being normal eight to ten
seconds after. She’s the one who dances around the edges, evading
attention until she can use that. She’s the rogue of the group, all
distraction, evasion, utility, primed for the backstab.

Chuck’s coach-and-team obsessed tinker can change, with an emphasis

on the ‘tree’ end of rag tree. On staying still for a short while, she has two
options. The changer end is that her skin peels away into branches,
mimicking the environment in shape, with angular, brick-and-concrete
shades and silhouettes in urban environments, sweeping spoiler-like
curves around cars, etc. Provides a protective barrier that guards her,
turns a branch into a fortified perch, and makes her harder to spot if she’s
already in cover. If she focuses, she can shape it intentionally, creating
tools or crude weapons. This doesn’t obstruct her movement (she can
separate from it and bolt at a moment’s notice, but can do so for enemies,
and provides limited armor against one incoming hit. She also has smoke,
but it’s a once-every few minutes style maneuver, exhaling a briefly-lived
cloud to startle and give her cover to run. Both can be augmented and
altered by tech- collars for the gas breath and frames worn around the
arms and body for the branch cover, and either dampened in effectiveness
in exchange for augmenting her puppet (giving it the ability to grow
branches and self-repair, or channeling smoke through empty space to it,
shrouding it). The idea here is that of the dark priestess with a knight
guarding her, or the ‘summoner’. Her kit protects her and deflects while her
puppet does the dirty work. Most of her focus goes toward utility and
defenses.

Dolores’ ‘nested tower’ changer is more of a tidy package, all self-inclusive.

When he hits the point of growth where he can start deploying secret
weapons that are hidden within his bulky parts, these weapons include gas
deployment and tinker-decided assortment of weapons, plugged into the
body. He can choose to use the tinker plugins (node grants side effects
like fully healing when deploying a secret weapon, or enabling more
esoteric ‘nested’ options like spawning minions) or let pressure build up, at
which point the gas activates. The gas, in this case, tends to provide
longer-term benefits, like gas venting out around the body, cloaking them
and providing regeneration, or providing the ability to crawl on walls,as the
ghostly limbs and parts become corporeal - essentially low-key augmented
power/transformations. He’s the brute, the monster, with a singular
purpose, like the boy who gave up his body to be part of the ‘in’ crowd.

Kiss and Kill

The group first goes around the table, focusing on the person to their right.

A
↗ ↘
D B
↖ ↙
C

They draw their kiss/kill cards… and it’s…

A
↗♠ ♥↘
D B
↖♣ ♣↙
C

Only one kiss. A/C and B/D both take a ‘kiss’ each.

Adam Bash Chuck Dolores

Adam - ♥Kiss♥ ♥Kiss♥ ♠Kill♠
Bash ♥Kiss♥ - ♠Kill♠ ♥Kiss♥
Chuck ♥Kiss♥ ♠Kill♠ - ♠Kill♠
Dolores ♠Kill♠ ♥Kiss♥ ♠Kill♠ -

To make things fair, the GM decides to adjust perks/flaw distribution for

those who have two kills or two kisses.