Silver Age weirdness

Any

Someone on Facebook was looking for Silver Age weirdness, like Batman and Robin on a giant typewriter or Superman going back in time and dating Marilyn Monroe on Krypton or something. (I think those are the examples he gave.)

So I put too much thought into this.

Adventures like that span both the Golden and Silver Ages, and to me it seems like they derive from a few things:

• First, they're mostly a DC thing, probably because Marvel was mostly doing monster and romance comics in the fifties. You can still find weirdness at every publisher, but we remember the DC ones.
• Apes and motorcycles always sold well; put them on the cover!
• They kind of come out of the idea that there aren't consequences. The audience for the stories is presumed to turn over in four years or less, so you don't get tied down in continuity. That's how you get some of those guano-crazy Bob Haney scripts, where Batman sells his soul to the devil or that Haney created Wonder Girl because he didn't realize that Kanigher had created Wonder Girl as the adventures of Wonder Girl when she was a teen.
• Some of it was just for the convenience of the artists. Giant props? They added visual interest while being things that might well be around the house, so it was easy for the artist to get it. None of this Harvey Kurtzman "No, Jack, the sulfa goes to the left of the gauze pad" business here.
• The comics were still trying to be “hip” and relevant to the kids today, so they would sprinkle in stuff like JFK or Marilyn Monroe, but often with slight changes to avoid legal problems.
• They weren't winking at the audience, who were presumably kids. If Superman fell in love with Lerilynlon-Roe on Krypton, he really did fall in love. The emotions were real, even if shallow, because the audience wasn't presumed to be ironic or sarcastic. They were kids.

Given all of that, you had to have what Orson Scott Card calls "event" stories and what Robin Laws calls "iconic" heroes. The characters didn't change because the characters couldn't change — you couldn't guarantee that a kid was going to get next month's issue or had bought last month's issue. (I've got a collected edition of Supergirl from the 1960s that's starting to get some continuity but in no way is it necessary for the stories...sometimes Supergirl uses something from another comic, and some things happen over two or three issues, but the changes are rarely permanent or are rarely personal.

Instead, you have more of a problem, attempt to solve, complication kind of structure.

Anyway, the original poster wanted some way of recreating the goofiness, and what occurred to me eventually was random tables. So we start with our premise, which is:

"An A gets powers but has to be pursued because he/she/it B, causing conflict, and there's this complication: D.

Use the appropriate die for each one; I'm just knocking this off, so I'm not striving for 6 or 10 or 20 of any of these.

A: the problem (apply 1. Giant or 2. Miniature if necessary)

#	This thing
1	Ape
2	A pet (cat, dog, something)
3	Insect
4	Robot/alien invader
5	Close friend of hero
6	Rival of the love interest

Changes in some way (gets powers, falls sick, is mutated, arrives on earth) but the heroes have to engage because it has:

1	Secret, like nuclear launch codes
2	Disease cure
3	Hero’s secret ID
4	Celebrity
5	Hero’s love/hate
6	Is actually a transformed friend of hero

So there's conflict. But there's a complication, which is part of what makes the story goofy.

Goofy complication

1	Hero is shrunk
2	Hero is grown
3	At place that makes giant working props
4	At historical period or mythical place of interest to readers
5	At historical period of interest to hero (Krypton, Crime Alley, etc)
6	Hero is altered some way (powerless, gender-swapped, obese, has head of ant, traded with subject of problem)

That gets you Superboy shrinking into a small engine (a Julie Schwarz joint, written by Kurt Busiek!), various Krypton adventures, probably goofy things with Atlantis, most Jimmy Olsen adventures... Get a motorcycle in there and you might be good.

The Sidekicks Origin Generator!

Another repost from back in the day.
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Because I'm always most creative when I'm avoiding something else, here's something I whipped up.

Special ICONS Origin Generator for Sidekicks

Instructions: Roll a d6 once for each parent on the appropriate table for the character. (Roll for the correct number of donating entities if the character's origin is Unearthly.) Mentor refers to the primary hero; roll once on the Mentor table to determine identity.

Mentor:

Roll	Mentor is...
1	The real or adopted parent
2	Actually younger than the sidekick
3	Actually a group of heroes, such as a team
4	A close personal friend
5	The biological or adopted parent
6	Entirely ignorant of the sidekick right until they show up at the same place and time

Birthright:

Roll	Original Parent is...
1	Captured by evil people
2	Absent, back home
3	Willingly gave up child to die
4	Has somehow misplaced the kid
5	Objects to this crimefighting lifestyle
6	Is the character's main foe

Gimmick:

Roll	Biological Parent is...
1	Conveniently absent or comatose
2	Wishing he or she could operate the device but these brittle bones...
3	Is actually an agent charged with finding the sidekick and mentor
4	Inconveniently absent and the sidekick is covering up
5	Dead
6	Is the character's main foe

Transformed:

Roll	Biological Parent is...
1	Worries so about this dangerous lifestyle
2	Gave his or her life so that child would have a motivation to fight crime
3	Has no idea that this kid does that stuff
4	Conveniently absent (out of the country, etc)
5	Coma
6	Dead

Artificial:

Roll	Creator is...
1	Mentor
2	Friend of Mentor
3	Missing
4	Dead
5	Dead
6	Dead

Unearthly:

Roll	Parent Is...
1	In another dimension
2	On another world
3	On another continent
4	Forbidden to be involved
5	Approves of this
6	Character's archfoe

Trained:

Roll	Original Parent is...
1	Comatose
2	Dead by fire or explosion
3	Dead by flood
4	Dead by disease
5	Dead by criminal action
6	Dead of causes to be specified later

My first thoughts about adventure scope: A reprint

SYSTEM: ICONS

This was originally over on my LiveJournal, before I started this blog. But some of the roleplaying stuff should move here, I think, so I reproduce it to meet the twin needs of wanting content here and collecting all the superhero stuff on one blog. It was at http://doc-lemming.livejournal.com/265175.html#comments

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Originally, I was thinking about classifying various superhero adventures. I complained last year (or the year before) about how many of the published adventures were "road" adventures. (I complained because I wanted to see local adventures, but road adventures are not necessarily a bad thing. Most of D&D is built around road adventures.)

Anyway, the obvious range for superhero adventures may have a mix of magic and science, or be one or the other. We'll do a Kinsey scale thing and call it 1 to 6. At the extreme ends, you need to have someone skilled in manipulating that technology; in the middle it's just trope flavouring.

An ICONS adventure such as A Murder of Crowes is essentially all about magic, but you don't have to be magic (call it a 2), while something like The Skeletron Key is all about technology (call it a 5). Most adventures sit in the middle—Gangbusters! has high-tech weaponry, but that's just flavour. Most adventures explicitly show you one pole or the other, but don't rule out the opposite....The Skeletron Key might have all the shiny tropes of technology, but it doesn't rule out the presence of Magus Rune, Lord of the Inscriptive Arts.

The other scale is scope, with it extending from local to cosmic. Say the range is City - Nation - Continent - Globe - Solar System - Cosmic. (I'm not sure that Continent gets a lot of play in North America—only three big countries—but it could be very common in Europe.) (I tried placing Neighbourhood in there and claiming that anything off earth was Cosmic, but several adventures take place near-earth and I wouldn't call them cosmic.)

You could go binary with this thing, with the two values being road and local, but as an adventure classification, you probably want to know how far the PCs are going to go.

Dimension hopping is rather like scope. I was thinking about it, and rather than dimensions being woo, another axis, they're really a bit of flavour. Another dimension is another city or farther; same scale as scope. If your players go to Opposite World, where everything has managed to come out mostly the same despite everyone having the exact opposite moral compass, or Annelis, the world that exists on the surface of a fluke burrowing ever deeper into the body of the glutton god Azagulp, really the difference is how distinct they are, not how far they are. What you're measuring is how much the everyday behaviour of the heroes is appropriate to what they're doing. I just indicate dimension hopping with an asterisk...and let the scope indicate how different the rules are. Even though everyone on Sauroglobe is a reptile, the world acts like ours. Call it a different city (Nation). Opposite World is a global change: It's at least as different as someone from Poughkeepsie going to Mongolia. Annelis is probably cosmic.

A big part of changing scopes means, I think, losing allies and being unfamiliar with the local customs. So if you normally run Zebulon Odd and his adventures with the Omicron Gang, having him be trapped in one city forces him to deal with things he can normally ignore. In the same way, when Vine-Swinging Gupta has to travel around the world, he gets to deal with all of the culture shock details he normally doesn't.

Remember: we've already established that things like lethality or noir-ness are set by your campaign.

For the set of adventures I did (all the Ad Infinitum, Impossible Tales, and Stark City stuff), there were 33 adventures. Fourteen were restricted to a city, the rest were not.

There's certainly wiggle room: First, I don't have all of the adventures handy and had to go by memory. Second, there were other choices; for instance, I chose to say that the prison complex in "Jailbreak!" was far enough away that it counted as national, but there is a precedent in comics for putting dangerous prisons full of supervillains right in or by the city. Call it roughly half were in the city, and half were a road trip of some kind, either shrinking into a man's body, taking a trip to Alaska or New Zealand, or discovering extraterrestrial empires.

However, I chose the values so that they could be used for random creation (though I'm not sure you'd want to). The scope is a simple D6 roll (though if you want to weight it heavily, use 2D6:

2d6: Scope	Means...
2-7: City	Something happens in the city. Your city. Go beat them up.
8: Nation	Road trip! There's a problem that you'll have to travel to, but fortunately, there's transportation available.
9: Continent	Be careful...they do things a little differently where we're going.
10: Globe	We're going to be cut off from our regular allies, and at risk of sowing confusion and interruptions, but this is something only we can fix.
11: Solar System	There's some problem in a satellite, a space station, an experimental space craft, or the hidden world on the inside of the hollow earth.
12: Cosmic	"Help me, Obi-Wan <insert-name-here>. You're our only hope!"

Now, those descriptions (beside being firmly tongue-in-cheek) also assume that the city is your normal stomping ground. If you normally run a game of the Planetary Protectors, those aren't the conditions that apply: you probably have allies in Tokyo, Norway, and maybe even on St. Pierre.

For magic versus science, it might be:

Magic vs. Science D6	Means...
1: Magic galore	The main threat is a seriously magic one, and knowing some magic is essential.
2: Magic	Lots of magic, but science can certainly help here. You can make do with Grimoires For Dummies.
3: Magic flavoured	It's a bad thing with a magic label, but we can all thump it.
4: Science flavoured	It's a MacGuffin with a science label, but anyone can hit it.
5: Science	It would really help if we had someone scientific to help, the answers might be available on Wikipedia.
6: Superscience	I hope you have a tech whiz available, because just pulling out the plug is not going to work.

(I did a bubble plot in Excel — because I had to learn something in Excel, I figured I would do this as well — but haven't saved it as an image and put it up. Later.)

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harvey_rrit pointed out that some settings are rich in both science and magic, so maybe you need to roll twice.

Nowadays, I'd probably set the scale at neighborhood - city - nation - international - solar system - cosmic.   

Parts of the city... (Locations part II)

I'm sure this has been done elsewhere...perhaps in a fine supers RPG product...but I haven't found something similar for years (not that I've been looking).

Most hints on RPG adventure plotting tell you to come up with an idea or a timeline for the villains first, which is great. Even the two superhero adventure random generators that I've seen are really about coming up with a plan for the heroes to disrupt.

But the place often gets ignored. It might be because the place falls out of the combination of plot and your campaign, or it might be because place is too random. Maybe it's better suited to a random encounter generator of some kind. So here is a random list of areas and some typical settings within them for stories. I did a location list before--many of those were specific. This is more where those locations might be put. These areas might flavour those areas: a mall in the middle of a depressed slum might have a very different tone than a mall in the middle of a ritzy enclave.

1. Business district: corporate headquarters, travel agencies, office buildings with a variety of companies, mail order firms, restaurants.
2. Civic area: city hall, municipal offices, arena, park, skate park, pool, main library, community centre, adult recreation building, jail, police or fire station.
3. Disaster site: restricted access, fenced in, former supervillain fight or lair, smoking ruins, leftover cleanup equipment.
4. Educational or military: area including a college or university or a military base, so there are cheap places to eat, the actual schools or base, low-rent housing for students or military families, stores for booze and groceries.
5. Ethnic concentration: A specialized form of town, with a higher concentration of commercial establishments that deal with items unique to that ethnicity. We're talking Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Italy, Little Moscow, Little Portugal, Tokyo Lite, and so on. In some campaigns, that will extend to aliens of a particular stripe or all aliens.
6. Financial district: banks, stock trading houses, investment corporations, insurance companies, very high end stores, restaurants.
7. Industrial district: factories, warehouses, illegal or low-rent housing, breakfast places.
8. Hidden city: the disenfranchised, the homeless, a place to hide, large quantities of the underworld or criminal element.
9. Residential: light industry, illegal industry (such as grow-ops), middle-class houses, lower-class houses, gated communities, golf course, coffee shop, beauty salons, suburb.
10. Rural: Farming, test fields for agricultural work, clusters of houses that can't be called towns, service station-restaurants, various equipment stores, prisons, sewage or water treatment plant, power plant.
11. Slum: houses, tenements, abandoned institutions, shining lab built as an inspiration, low-tech factories, bodegas, fast food places.
12. The Strip: Some kind of entertainment area: theatres, restaurants, dance clubs, strip clubs, porn shops, head shops, cinemas.

Again, these are ideas only, not a strait-jacket. You might find one element inside another, or oddball things certainly happen. Maybe this city has a farm in the middle, because the Bauer family refuses to sell, and they own enough that  they can enforce the fact that this university campus includes an alfalfa field. Or any section might have a police station or a fire station, a water tower, construction or destruction of some kind, a power transfer station, or a public transit hub.

And I formatted this nicely as a one-pager and it's on the web: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Qcn9P_vww4lJFofIYZ_WtP7p-WGfzcB9HBOIl9giFA/edit?usp=sharing

The abstract dungeon...er, city

Just ran across this (though it's years old). I wonder if this could be profitably applied to random encounters in a city?

Abstract Dungeoneering (by the Angry GM)

The Systemless Random Hero Generator

If I were going to do a systemless random supers generator, which I'm not, I'd have them roll for a theme first. The themes would be broad; so would skills be, because it's a trope of the system that "Dr." in front of your name lets you do any science-y thing. I don't know if theme would affect the roll for origin, but it probably determines which disadvantage/quality/aspect chart you pick from/roll on.

I'd use levels something like FUDGE or FATE: everybody starts at average and we're checking the deviation.

Then attributes overall, and give them points depending on how they deviated from "Excellent" because superheroes are gorgeous and wonderful-looking by default. They get to spend the points.

Powers...the biggest default might be a pyramid of powers, maybe like the FATE skill pyramid. (Other choices would be "One-trick pony" and "Broad and shallow"). That gives you a number of powers, so you then roll to see what they are and interpret them according to the theme you already rolled. You get to chose which one is great, which is good, and so on.

Then qualities-qua-disadvantages.

Your random superhero environment

So I was wondering if you could do a random environment—not just an urban encounter table, but a series of tables that build the important part of your city for you. Part of this is inspired by the Stark City world-building rules, but converted to a set of tables so you don't have to do the same thinking. (You still have to think...sorry.)

This tries to straddle a middle ground between simulations or "realism" and narrative. Interesting things come up more often than if we were just extrapolating the reality of the setting, but not to the extent of every roll result being something you have to act on.

Some hasty thoughts jotted down while waiting for a meeting to start. Will come back to this later; expect it to grow.

Mood

First, we match your hero and your city. If your hero already has a mood or theme (Superman is about optimism; Batman is gritty and noir; Spider-Man is about perseverance when things go wrong), well, heck, give it to your city.

But if you feel the need to contrast, or if you have some heroes of different moods, then you can roll d6-d6:

d6 - d6 Roll	Mood
-4, -5	Corruption and nihilism: Hub City in the 1980s Question series
-3, -2	A corrupt city that needs a beacon: Gotham City, or Daredevil's Hell's Kitchen
-1, 0, 1	There are good places and bad places...some are very good and some are very bad
2, 3	Things are pretty good here, though there are still some bad things: any of the DC midwest or western cities
4, 5	Scientific utopia and optimism: Metropolis, Kandor...though there are bad spots, villains are often trying to tear down what's good

Keep the roll in mind; it will be a modifier for other things. (That is, when you roll for a location, a corrupt city might get as much as -5 to the roll, while a city on the hill like Metropolis might get as much as +5. Or for some rolls, I might make it half the modifier, rounded toward zero: -5 or -4 is -2, 5 or 4 is 2, and so on in between.)

Scale

Again, if your hero already defines a scale, go with that. Your flying hero can cover more area than the guy who only swings, or has to take a bus. Still, if you're willing to give your hero a car, plane, transporter, or spaceship, add 1 to the d6 roll. If your hero does not have any fancy method of travelling high speeds, subtract 1. Use the Mood modifier to determine suburb or inner city.

d6 Roll	Scale
0	Neighbourhood/Ghetto/Village
1	Town/Borough
2	Inner City (if Mood is negative) or Suburb (if Mood is positive)
3	City
4	State
5	Nation
6	World
7	Solar system, cosmic, or interdimensional

When you start a new scene and randomly generate "a new location" it can mean something appropriate to the scale, though of course you can always choose to go wild ("Suddenly, Batman finds a clue that leads him to Fictistan!"):

• A different room or apartment or building
• A different section of town
• A different borough
• A different city
• A different state or province
• A different country
• A different world

Weather

A chart to provide weather isn't a bad idea; I'm totally on board with the sympathetic fallacy, and weather can provide interesting challenges for your hero. Pick or roll for the season. If you get a 6 (special occasion), roll again and check on the last column.

d6 Roll	Season	Special Occasion (also a D6 roll)
1	Winter	Christmas
2	Fall	Hallowe'en
3	Summer	Independence Day
4	Spring	Equinox
5	Spring	Eclipse
6	Special Occasion	Birthday, anniversary: something personal

Remember that it's always bad weather in noir stories, so add half the mood (you end up subtracting if it's negative and adding half if it's positive):

d6 Roll	Weather events
1 and below	Blackouts: Snowstorms or thunderstorms, howling winds
2	Extreme temperatures.
3	Precipitation and maybe fog.
4	Mixed seasonal: cloudy, clear, maybe rain, maybe not. Unsettled.
5	Clear.
6	Great weather for the season.

Time of Day

Some heroes are nocturnal...usually they're your grim-n-gritty noir heroes. Nocturnal is more common (possibly because heroes have jobs, too). Still, if you don't know what time of day it is, roll and add half the mood modifier.

d6 Roll	Time of day
1 and below	Night and all right-thinking people are asleep.
2	Night, but most folks are still awake.
3	Dusk (if Mood is negative) or dawn (if Mood is positive)
4	Early morning or late afternoon.
5	Mid-morning or mid-afternoon.
6	Broad noon.

So you know when it is.