That Silver Age Feel

Any Superhero Game

Someone on Facebook asked about running a Silver Age-feeling game, and it so happens I've been thinking about it. Now, I greatly respect Dr. Christopher McGlothlin's work, but I think his Silver Age supplement for Mutants & Mutants misses the mark because it assumes you're going to set the story in the time period (about 1956–1984). Running an historical game assumes that people know about the time, which makes it a heavier lift.

So what do I think?

Less heavy continuity. Even when there were continuing plot elements—usually the soap opera elements—the event plots were one-and-done. The Ringmaster is here with his Circus of Crime! Lois thinks Clark is Superman and Metallo is out again!

A lot of the Silver Age stuff falls out of three factors: The Comics Code, the belief that the audience was kids, and the belief that the audience rolls over every four years.

• The Comics Code means there’s a lot of invention (not necessarily good invention) to get around what was forbidden by the Code. (You can find a copy of the 1954 version of the Code in a number of places, like here.) The Code had a couple of requirements that seem to be relevant to me: No horror, no crime; crimes are always punished in the story; no one can profit from a crime.
• The idea that the audience was kids streamlines the stories to (for the most part) down to: “Here is the problem or mystery; here it’s elaborated as they try to solve it; here they make a last attempt that doesn’t work; using the knowledge from that attempt, they solve the problem or puzzle.” You don't do a lot of continuing plots, even though you might have continuing elements. They tend to be more devices or tropes than plots, right. Lois Lane is a bundle of plot engine tropes: she wants to marry Superman, she is terribly jealous, she is nosy about Superman's secret identity.
• The belief that the audience rolled over lead to many versions of the same invention, because the audience wouldn’t know about the earlier stuff. Some of that was already being subverted in the “See ish 255” or whatever captions, and I was astonished at the nascent continuity in Supergirl Vol 2 trade paper. The author was clearly paying attention to the other Superman mags.

So it’s largely SF because the Code outlawed horror/magic stuff — Marvel danced around that later with “zuvembies” and Morbius, the scientific vampire. The Code also required the bad guys to get their comeuppance by the end of the story.

Now, how to translate that into a game.

1. Bad guys don’t kill the heroes and generally don't kill. Mostly they want to get the heroes out of town/the country/the planet.
2. Fun! The stakes tend to be high or miniscule: A comet will destroy the earth or help the young girl who hates superheroes without her knowing it!
3. Real world problems need not apply.
4. Sidekicks were huge, either formal (like Robin) or informal (like Jimmy Olsen). Possibly the best way to handle them in a game environment is to make them NPCs, because they function as a replacement for internal monologues (and well-meaning lectures) and as hostage-of-the-week.
5. Relatively little carry-over from session to session: a criminal’s plot is hatched, seems overwhelming, and is defeated in a single session.
6. Science fiction, not horror or fantasy. (The Code specifically forbade crime and horror comics.) It doesn’t have to be plausible, but it’s got to have an SF veneer. Even Batman spent time on alien planets (see “Robin Dies At Dawn!”)
7. Steal from classic SF for ideas. Robots. Evil twins (oh, man, there are like six ways to be an evil twin of a player character, and if I could come up with an overarching idea, I'd run an adventure with all of them, kind of the Superman Revenge Squad). Alternate dimensions. Psionic powers. Miniaturization. Aliens. Throw in some mecha, too.
8. As a trope, think about including talking gorillas, motorcycles, Atlanteans, an undiscovered forgotten land with monsters.
9. Anything can be a problem to be overcome.

   You want to do Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes? Okay. The 40 cakes were accidentally made with formitium, which looks like flour. (Miss Tessmacher was making birthday cakes for the gang.) It’s also exceedingly rare, which is why Lex needs those cakes instead of other cakes. He’s going to re-extract the formitium to build a device that will destroy Superman!

More as I think of them. I don't feel like these are actual tools to create a Silver Age feel yet, just suggestions.