And...Portal City

Superhero RPG

I was working on Strange City, which has its own rationale, but it is a somewhat complicated environment for someone who doesn't care about the other stuff and just wants to test out the system (I've used it for Mutants & Masterminds but I'll probably also use it for other systems.)

Anyway, I use Portal City. This is a small city on the Great Lakes (I play it as Canadian, but, hey, I'm Canadian). It had mystery men back in the 1940s and occasionally has visiting supers, but the PCs are really the first heroes who have stayed in town. (There's a certain flavour of “If you were really good, you'd go off to New York or even Toronto.”)

Here's what I've established for it so far:

• Lack of supers doesn't mean lack of superpowers. There are people with powers in town, but for various reasons they don't want to be spandex-clad supers.
• There's a certain amount of anti-mutant sentiment, so the twelve-step group dealing with “living with your mutant power” goes to a certain amount of trouble to keep the members' identities hidden, from the world and from each other.
• There is a university or college.

Idea du corporate

Any Superhero

Someone mentioned doing a list of random encounters for superheroes. This is one step up.

I wonder if there'd be any interest in a book (say, 25) sets of one- or two-page adventures?

While each adventure would have all of the essentials (setting, antagonist, etc) some of the adventures would share locations or antagonists, so that any one adventure only needs to specify a place or a character. Some of the locations would be so generic that you wouldn't provide a map, too.

There'd have to be an assumed universe or sub-universe. Let's say something on the level of a DC or Marvel universe. For sub-universes, you could do different books, but essentially you're looking at:

• Street-level or neighbourhood: Your Daredevil or X-Men young heroes kind of thing.
• Basic city level: your Spider-Man or Batman level things.
• World protectors: your Avengers or Justice League.
• Cosmic: your space stuff, typically your Guardians of the Galaxy or Legion of Super Heroes.

Don't take those levels terribly seriously: in the comics, you can find world-beaters defending a neighbourhood and your city guys stumbling on a threat to the cosmos.

Other lines of comics are really their own little sub-genre, too: I think the Claremont X-Men were really in their own little world. Solo (one player character) is different than team.

There'd be some planning to make sure that various bad guys or locations get re-used. As a first iteration, where you don't know if the product will sell, you probably want to do eight of the first three sub-genres. So you do eight little adventures involving the neighbourhood or the small town (because it might be nice to have a spin-off setting that's a little different, and that says “small town” to me).

It occurs to me that these are one step up from the adventure seeds that happen in a number of setting books. It's more than a seed but less than a full adventure.

Freethinking (2)

Mutants & Masterminds

Having thought about this for a day, I think that what I'm going to do is two arcs of four adventures. Each adventure is self-contained but (if I do it right) they build to two climactic encounters, one at four and one at eight.

To keep myself reasonably focused, the first four sessions will have the theme "Werewolf," which in this context is the two-faced thing: creatures that are not what they appear to be. I'm not talking about literal werewolves, but I want to be able to do stuff that riffs on Invasion of the Body Snatchers or on Jekyll-Hyde, or just the fact that superheroes and supervillains are often closeted and so are non-cis, non-binary folks. Then I can also deal with the idea of having characters with powers who don't want to be heroes.

The second will be focused on vampires, which again is thematic. I like the idea that in medieval mythology they were things without souls, that we can have villains who drain people of abilities, that it's a transformation for people you love, that one drainer-of-things can create more drainers-of-things.

Freethinking

Mutants & Masterminds

So a first session (even if there is a Session 0) is kind of a daunting one, at least for me.

You have to address the character(s), the game system, present the setting, and have a story. Not a big deal, right?

And I've agreed to do eight or more sessions for someone in Mutants & Masterminds.

So, here's what I know.

The player is trans, and the character is trans. That might not be the most important thing about them or about the character, but it's the biggest difference for me, so I lead with that. It might not make a difference to what I choose to run, but it will certainly make a difference to how I choose to run it.

For a first session, I want to introduce a couple of elements that we talked about in our session 0, but I want to keep the actual conflict mechanically simple. It should be difficult, but not hugely difficult: equivalent to a horde of kobods, I guess.

The PC is essentally the speaker for the dead, which in turn says serial killer to me, but I don't want to use up a serial killer on the first session. Unless I do something a bit differently.

Suppose the serial killer is training others. This is the tack that the uber-serial-killer has picked. Others have chosen to make the serial killer a spirit; I'm going to go one step further and say, not only a spirit but one that has decided to train others.

(It's a single-player game, so I can tune it to the individual. I welcome a single-player game for exactly this reason.)

And using a serial killer as our first session says that we're definitely avoiding Silver Age territory. (In fact, we'll head there eventually because I want to present a foil who doesn't care about consequences at all, but I don't think that works here.)

Okay, serial killer. I have multiple ways to get the PC involved — there are police ties, mob ties, and there are undertaker ties. The setting is a small city in Canada: I think of Thunder Bay as the model but not Thunder Bay.) So the serial killer is targeting...indigenous women? While that's a real problem I'm not sure I can present it at all realistically with less than two days to research. So we'll go with a slightly less real-world approach.

Mutants.

Kids who might be mutants, that is. One of the things in setting is that they haven't had a superhero for eighty years, and one of the reasons might be that someone is killing people with powers. So our Ur-killer, the spirit of teaching death, has been grooming people to do this. (Actually, that's a nice running plotline, so we'll stick a pin in it and it's a running plot if the PC decides to follow up on it.)

But: why this kid, why now, why the scenario? What goes on that makes it happen now?

Obviously, something has gone wrong. And because we have a newly-mint3ed superhero in the mix, that might be what's gone wrong.

How might it work? You're at a funeral home, the cops bring in a body, the spirit of the body says, "I was murdered."

Actually, that's pretty straightforward. The ghost says, "Hey, here's who killed me," but it's not like the police can do anything even if the PC says so. But would the ghost know who the killer was?

Well, if the killer was someone well-known in the community. Like a philanthropist of some kind.

And what about powers? Because this is a superhero game, not an episode of Law and Order: Batman.

Ideas:

• Go the Jack'O'Knives route. The NPC is possessed by a murder-spirit. Okay, but it seems kind of letting people off the hook, and getting it across might be difficult.
• Gadgets. There are enough specialty items there to create a gadgeteer. Okay, but at this second it seems like it cvalls for more creativity than I have.
• The bad guy is a mutant himself. (Serial killer: probably male.) He has a kind of self-hatred that builds on it.

Conversions from Mutants and Masterminds: Princess and Rook

Icons

I was going to do extensive versions of the various Mutants & Masterminds characters and never finished the first two. Well, now I've finished Princess and Rook and there's no reason why people shouldn't have them...but I shan't be doing any organized conversion.

• Princess
• Rook

Incidents or anecdotes vs adventures

All

I've never formulated this quite this way before, so it seemed significant when I backed onto saying it on Facebook. Here it is, with more waffling and watering down.

One of the things, it seems to me, that separates an incident from an adventure is that the players try something in an incident and either succeed or fail, and then go on with their lives.

A lot of random tables are like this. “On the road, you meet (rolls) 1d6 robbers who take your weapons and your gold.” Then the PCs go on, now poor and weaponless, because the real objective is to get to Riverden. Maybe the PCs later meet and trounce the robbers because they recognize a weapon or something, but it's largely kinda anecdote-ish. When they write their memoirs, the PCs will not assign it any particular significance except as a throwaway sentence: Because robbers took my money, I arrived in Riverden with nothing but the clothes on my back.

In an adventure and your commercial fiction, the incident is elevated; it becomes part of the whole try-fail cycle. The robbers take the gold the PCs need to hire the cleric to deal with the illness and yadda yadda yadda.

Part of that try-fail cycle is consequences—in one case, the theft leads them to arrive in the new city penniless; in the other, it impedes what they're trying to do. If they don't have a goal, you can't really block them on that, so how can there be a meaningful failure?

One of the ways you deal with giving something significance in improve is reincorporation. The PCs find the robbers; the villain returns. Something like that. So having something recur is a tool you can deploy (as a GM) to make something more memorable, but that doesn't really give it significance.

Now, you can give things significance even if they didn't start that way. Let's use a superhero example instead. The heroes have to rescue a cat from a tree. Even if the cat is odd—it's a leopard escaped from a zoo! It's a phase-shifting cat that resists any attempts to grab it!— that doesn't make it more significant to the evening. However, if it's part of something bigger it becomes significant. Maybe the leopard escaped from the zoo as part of microtremblors that Earthquaker is causing in the area on the way to the bank/scientific lab/alien embassy. Maybe the phase-shifting cat is a foreshadowing that the evil Empire of Ghosts is invading our dimension.

I've mentioned this sort of thing before: if they vanquish the enemy too quickly, the encounter loses significance (We've still got two hours left!) so you can give it significance back by making it part of a larger event.

This has bad personal implications for me because I suck at the continuity between sessions and picking up the threads that are left behind, so I have to think about how to record the dropped potential threads in such a way that they're easy to pick up and reincorporate in the future.