Idea du jour: Family Business

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Idea du jour

Because we're all locked up, I suspect there are more one-on-one campaigns happening. This popped into my head.

The premise is that the player is playing one of the three heroes in the city. (Well, the player plays all three — one for each tier of play — but usually not concurrently.)

My current thinking is a family or pseudo-family; we're either talking three generations (or you can finesse it to two), or three siblings, something like that, one for each tier of play: Premier, Champion and Backup. For example:

• The eldest is the Premier hero. Although technically seventy years old, some doubletalk has kept this hero young, whether it was being frozen for fifty-five years, alien antagathic treatments, mutant metabolism, or a magic spell.
• The middle character is the Backup hero. He or she is rebelling against the absent parent and deliberately chose to do work at the local level instead of on the national or global stage.
• The Champion hero is the child of the Backup hero, or the grown-up sidekick. This character is ready to step out on the big stage, now.

The GM creates a supervillain for each one, but I'd produce it commercially with that setup in mind. Some of the universe creation stuff is already there (the villainous organization SKULL; the Association for Parareal Technology; the Sisters of the Sigilant; and so on) so the GM doesn't have to come up with it.

Provide character hooks galore, and the player characters are intertwined: Grandad just came out of suspended animation, Mom's taken over her husband's hero role because she thinks he's dead and has re-married, Junior is angry at Mom for betraying Dad's memory and ignoring Grandad, who seems cool, and is struggling with some romantic interest.

Provide half a dozen adventures and villains lightly sketched out, and provide twice as many seed.

Three campaign models immediately suggest themselves to me:

• You can play as the presented family or sub in your own characters for them
• Play as superhero rivals to them
• Play as their arch-foes and do a Romeo and Juliet thing