Looking for ideas / inspiration / advice.

Last year I ran a Dresden game at our local con (www.carnagecon.com) and it was so popular we had to turn people away. So the RPG director has asked me to run another this year and I've been looking for inspiration.

The other night I watched the movie Super 8 and thought, "wow, this would make a great RPG adventure". So here are my initial thoughts, see what you can do to help me flesh them out.

The setting is our local area, Burlington Vermont and it's surroundings. That worked great last year.
I'd like to have a group of low powered (feet in the water) players facing something totally out of their league.
Something that they can't go toe to toe with and survive but that they can outsmart.

I'm thinking that the party is sort of a Professor X and students thing. The leader is a local priest (true believer) working within an order that looks out for young people with talent. I'm thinking 5 players would be good for a con game so I've got the leader, a were-form (something low power like maybe a dog), a changeling with glamour, and two minor talents. The scenario is graveyard and ghost based so one will be a ghost talker and undecided on the 5th.

We have a local graveyard that is supposedly the burial place of Ethan Allen (Vermont revolutionary war hero) but nobody is exactly sure where he's buried. There is a monument to him there but the monument is not his burial site. It could be a conduit to the never never for some crazed sorcerer to summon an nasty entity to our world.....

So my scenario outline is
A) sorcerer opens a portal at the monument and lets a big nasty loose.
B) players need to find Ethan Allen's real burial place and call on him for help.
C) With the revolutionary war ghost's help the players push the big nasty back into the never never.

Questions I need to sort out...
1) How to make sure the players realize they can't fight this things straight up?
2) Should I connect the sorcerer to the players somehow? How?
3) What should my 5th character be?
4) What else an I forgetting?

Here's your chance to help me flesh this thing out. Let's hear what you think.

Tom in VT

I'm creating some characters for a game set in Vermont. One of the characters is going to be a White Vampire who is the lead singer for a very popular band (think Phish or Dispatch or something similar). My hope is that he could feed on the emotions of the group during the show... touching the hands of fans leaning up on to the stage and so on. Plus maybe on the groupies that follow the band.

I could go with the standard lust but I'd like to tweak that a little and I'm not sure what to call it.

The ecstasy or high that people might get at a show like this might be too positive an emotion. Is addiction an emotion? I might be able to link this to drug use in some way... Maybe setting up the family as the local drug lords feeding off addiction. But I'm not sure if that works as an emotion.

Ideas?

Tom