A possible premise for a superhero series

Any

I'm not suggesting anything new or even different: this has been used before. But I've done a number of campaigns with a superhero history, and my brain turned to something else.

Heroes have just appeared: there was a calamity — the equivalent of the gene bomb, the white hole, or any of a number of other occurrences. Hundreds of thousands died.

Including our heroes.

I'm aware that The Elementals used the characters' deaths as a portal. In this case, however, I'm imagining that most of the victims are in fact victims and are dead. Some fraction (five per cent, maybe?) come back with super powers.

I'm not interested in a game that's “you with powers” because that turns into murderhoboes too fast. So I'd want some mechanism whereby you have to pick hero or villain. You can switch — i'm not that rigid — but there's something keeping you in the superhero/villain game.

I don't know what that is, yet, but something will occur to me.

Possible rules systems:

• ICONS
• Prowlers & Paragons UE (I don't think I own it)
• Wild Talents though I have bounced off it intellectually every time I've tried
• BASH
• Supers! RED

Games like Champions, Mutants & Masterminds, Cypher - Unmasked, could do it (one could set up a Paragons M&M campaign, for instance) but that's not where my interest lies right now.

Thoughts on Day of the Octopus

Marvel Super Heroes

Another in my series of looks at classic (or at least fondly-remembered) superhero adventures. This time, I look at "Day of the Octopus", the introductory adventure that was in the Marvel Super Heroes basic set.

Marvel Super Heroes, or FASERIP, was published by TSR in 1984. The adventure was written by Bruce Nesmith. It came as part of the basic set, and you can get it online for free, apparently free of charge. (I am not giving the URL because I am not convinced of this, given how litigious Disney is, but it’s easy enough to find if you search.

Thoughts about Viper’s Nest

Champions

Thinking about the 1982 adventure Viper's Nest for 1st edition Champions.

I've been looking at old adventures, trying to figure out what makes a good superhero adventure. Part of the answer seems to be that you play it at the right age. However, in looking at these old adventures I can't help but think about the difference in games between then and now.

For this adventure, "then" is 1982, the first edition of Champions. I had a certain amount of trepidation looking at this, because I played it, wayyyy back in 1983. It was one of the first (if not the first) superhero games I played and so I was worried that looking at the adventure would spoil old memories.

But, frankly, they can still be good memories, even if we'd do things differently now. And I'll try to judge this without the rose-coloured glasses, but please be understanding if I end up being kinder to the adventure than it deserves; I'm trying not to, but I also don't want to be needlessly cruel.

Some historical context. Champions wasn't the first RPG with superhero elements (that was probably Superhero 2044) or the first full superhero RPG (that was probably Villains and Vigilantes). But it was the first to use an effect-based system, and the first to use point-buy rather than random roll. (That was a big thing for me back then: I wanted to play the character I designed, rather than designing the character based on what the dice threw up.) Some of those innovations are still with us.

The adventure "Crisis at Crusader Citadel" was intended as a tutorial; "Viper's Nest" is intended as a campaign introduction. The conceit of "Crisis" is thin, but the whole thing is intended to get you into two big fights.

"Viper's Nest" has loftier ambitions. It's a higher target and it's not quite as successful. It achieves its goal, but a higher target has higher standards.

(Brief digression already: Like "Crisis," this adventure contains at least one casual death meant to show you how eeeevil the villains are. I honestly don't remember comics in the late 1970s well enough to know if this was a thing. The character giving you information in the introduction gets offed by, it's implied, VIPER.)

There are three interlinked engagements that introduce you to the dastardly villainous society VIPER. Later editions expanded on VIPER, but in first edition, this is what there was. Possibly in a callback to the wargaming roots of RPGs, all three parts are called "engagements" here. They are connected only in that VIPER commits all three. You can either be disappointed that the various parts don't connect, or you can look at them as opportunities that a GM can grasp.

I'm trying to do both, here.

In my brain, engagement one would give the pretext for engagement two, which would provide the information for engagement three. It doesn't.

On the other hand, it gives us three supervillains, a hero agent group (UNTIL), and a villain agent group (VIPER), and a tremendously detailed map, plus an exhortation to make the adventure your own, which is nice.

While "Crisis" gave us notes on the tactical approach of each supervillain in the adventure, "Viper's Nest" talks about the tactics for the group VIPER. This...is more complicated than I cared about; in running it, even though I was running it for myself, I found it necessary to pre-figure how many VIPER agents and who they were in each group (a quarter skirmishers, a quarter overwatch, and half attackers). Very war-game-y.

The VIPER agents are designed so that a powerhouse or paragon character can take them out in one blow. A single punch from a normal human cannot penetrate their force fields. Really, the whole setup says "Minion" to me, so I'd use the minion rule after the first encounter. (In the first, I wouldn't use the minion rule because you want to build up VIPER.)

Incidentally, the adventure provides three villains to use (though there's an option to use some of the villains from the main rulebook). The villains are Brick, a, uh, brick, Bluejay, a flying energy projector, and Cheshire Cat, a teleporting martial artist. What's interesting to me is that although I played the game with Brick in the first engagement (and that's how I ran it for myself...the strong guy can get into the cornerstone if necessary), the villain Bluejay would probably not be used in the second encounter and wouldn't have room to maneuver in the third...so really, Bluejay is the villain to use in the first encounter. The rules never say that, though. If I were thinking about the different engagements instead of rolling villain forces on tables, I'd go Bluejay in the first adventure, Cheshire Cat in the second, and Brick in the third.

The Macguffin for engagement one is a room-temperature superconductor developed before World War II. (As is typical for comic books, no scientists keep notes.) The samples and notes are in the cornerstone of a building which is being torn down. This leads to a big fight with VIPER and possibly one supervillain.

Your trained heroes can also do well here; there's a bulldozer and a crane with a wrecking ball by the partially-demolished building. Even if the bad guy is someone they can't themselves hurt, the wrecking ball will probably hurt them.

Engagement two is an encounter in a park: VIPER is there to capture or kill a defector. (It's the "kill" part that makes Bluejay a bad choice here.) The engagement really lives according to the bystanders that the GM puts in. In this engagement, your obvious heroes, the ones who can't be disguised as normal people, are at a significant disadvantage.

Engagement three is a dungeon crawl. If you loved the detailed maps in "Crisis" you'll love the detailed maps here. I presume that with D&D being the reference point, every adventure had to have a dungeon crawl. That was, essentially, the model. (Also no bathrooms. That was also the model.)

I know you're surprised, but I haven't run out of thoughts yet. I want to talk about sexism and racism.

In one sense, this adventure avoids some of the casual sexism of "Crisis," but that's because it mentions sex almost not at all. All but one of the characters are men, even when it's implied that there are women around (the VIPER base has women's change rooms). There is one woman villain. Her motivation is rather...vague (she wants to fly the suit they've built, and having stolen it, she has no way of turning back). On the other hand, Brick's motivation is "I have amnesia and VIPER was nice to me," which is also kind of vague. Cheshire Cat might have a bit more: "A VIPER accident gave me superpowers and I have a wife to feed. VIPER pays me."

And I don't expect it from something written in 1981, nobody's sexuality is touched on. That's easy to change if you're running it, because there's just this void of assumption. Put something concrete in and it changes. For example, make Brick trans: before the accident, he was AFAB but the accident brought forth his brick persona a manifestation of his inner toughness. The adventure doesn't support that reading, but it doesn't not support it; that sort of thing doesn't enter into the adventure at all.

Race is even worse: there are no known characters of color. They could be: In a modern setting, there's no reason not to have Brick or Bluejay or Cheshire Cat or any of the VIPER or UNTIL agents as people of color. It's very cis-het, very white, very male. All of that can be changed, but you have to decide to put that in.

I lied: one possible NPC is named Vasquez, so some microdiversity there. But (my opinion here) when you have only one character of a gender or type, that character becomes an avatar for everyone of that type. All Latinx characters are by-the-book law enforcement sorts who hate supers. (To be honest, that was a trope in comics.)

Two of a type at least means you can have a good gay and a bad gay, a neat black woman and a messy black woman, a deferential trans Asian man and an outspoken cis Asian woman. It seems to me that’s closer to what we think of as diversity today.

It is a product of its time, but it can be reshaped to fit 2022. And it does a fine job at putting toys in the sandbox, as comics writers have said: it gives you VIPER and UNTIL and supervillains, and a reason for them to be there; it gives you a superconductor of unknown provenance.

It has its flaws, but that's pretty good.

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.

You got stones, kid

SYSTEM: Any
Here's an idea that you could translate to any system that uses hit points, whether it calls them hit points or stamina.

1. Give the players a number of stones or chits or bennies or whatever (I'll call them stones right now) equal to their number of hit points.
2. Instead of marking hits off the character sheet, they hand over stones.
3. When you're out of stones, you're out of hit points.

If you need a different in-game explanation, they're luck. Every attack is fatal; you're just buying off the lethality of the attack. When your character runs out of luck, he or she dies.

In fact, if you call the stones "luck" then you open up different areas of resource management: they can succeed at the roll but at the risk of being less healthy, at least until they regain a bit of it through resting, healing, prayer, or whatever is appropriate to your game.

You can make it more complicated:

• Maybe there's BODY and STUN or Wounds and Shock, so there are two different kinds of stones. When you're out of the non-lethal ones, you have to start spending the lethal ones.
• Or maybe you have hit stones and bennies. You can spend bennies on anything, but hit stones can only be spent on surviving attacks.
• Maybe you set up some stones that reflect armor, so you have, oh, three in front of you. If the attack does more than three, you spend the excess. If the attack does more than twice the number of stones you have as armor, you lose some armor. Or a critical means they ignore the armor. Or a critical means extra damage, whether you have armor or not.

Since the idea is that it makes things physical instead of abstract, you probably don't want to complicate it too much: it might be best for systems with a maximum number of hit points (less than, what, thirty?). Your seventeenth-level fighter might not be right for it. Or for systems where the amount of damage is constant, such as ICONS or CORPS: a Ruger Blackhawk always does the same amount of damage.

You may not wnat to use this idea for a system that tracks the stun for hit locations (like the afore-mentioned CORPS). The idea is to make this simpler not to make it more complicated by each hit location having 10 stun and 10 lethal stones.

Anyway, the idea of a pool of markers in front of you getting smaller and smaller seemed to me like an interesting visual way of representing declining hit points.

Some updates

I updated the Freedom Force characters and the conversions I did of Hero Games characters; appropriate links in those entries.

It's a long weekend here, so you may or may not see more of me. Hope the Canadians are having a good long weekend, and hope the American 4th of July goes well. (And for those who think that the USA has passed on its mantle of world leadership, that might be so, but the Romans endured for centuries after they stopped being a democracy. Just a bleak thought to speed you on your way.)


For gaming, I thought yesterday of doing a form-fillable PDF that would be printed on one of the Avery business card sheets, and each card would be a condition or quality that you know you're going to use, so there would be "Controlled" and "Off-balance" or "Tied up" or whatever. Then you could just hand them out. In practice, would it be as handy as a sticky pad and pens? Maybe not, but I notice that since the brain operation I feel like I write very slowly, and having a set I could pre-print and hand out would be useful to me.

I just have to figure out what conditions I want to represent (though making them form-fillable eases that somewhat). Off the top of my head, there's In Alternate Form (stone, ice, swarm of bees, light, etc.), Controlled, Big, Small, Immobilized (I suppose you could print both sides so there's Restrained and an Immobilized to represent different degrees without handing two different cards), Off-Balance, Prone, Phased, and Stunned. (Slammed moves you somewhere; it's harder to represent with a condition card.) If you have someone with Element Control, you might have On Fire or Encased in Ice. Heck, if the cards are form-fillable, the right design lets you also represent Determination Points, Advantages, or Troubles.

Fights in superhero RPGs

There was a discussion of hit points and alternatives in RPGs over on Facebook, and it got me thinking.

I was thinking about what comic book fights are like, but I am by no means an expert. (And—even if this is what comic book fights are like—fights in an RPG are probably more common than in comic book stories. We'll touch on some of the differences between stories and RPG sessions later.)

In comic book stories, fights feed into the whole "yes, but" and "no, and" mentality of stories. Yes, you win the fight, but the problem is bigger or different than you thought. No, you lost the fight and now you face a death trap or a crisis of confidence or the public loses faith in you. The heroes get into bigger and bigger trouble until the final confrontation, typically in the last quarter of the story. (See also the three try-fail cycles.)

The most common result depends on the opposition. There are fights with minions, fights with villain lieutenants, and fights with villain bosses.

Fights with minions: The heroes almost always win fights with minions. The fights might show that the heroes are badass or tough. From a story point of view, they're a fine example of "yes, but"—yes, you defeat the minions but you still have to track down the next clue/deal with the lieutenant or big boss. Generically, it's "Yes, you win, but the problem is bigger or otherwise than you thought."

If the character loses to the minions, the bigger trouble is usually that the heroes get captured and put into a death trap, or have to deal with the big boss. (Which I guess is a "no, and" situation.)

Basically, your RPG should have a way of dealing with minions, letting the heroes take on many minions, though too many minions or minions with the right equipment could beat them.

Fights with villain lieutenants: Lieutenants can win or lose at any point, because there's the threat of the boss villain behind them. Usually in comic book stories lieutenants win or gets away in the first half of the story.

In some ways, you have the most freedom with lieutenants. (And when the players defeated the boss too swiftly, I have sometimes invented a bigger plot or a bigger boss who controls the villain they just defeated.)

In an RPG, if the bad guy loses in the first half of the adventure, sometimes it's because the bad guy is working for someone else or because the bad guy wanted to lose for some nefarious reason.

Fights with the villain boss: In comic book stories, the villain boss usually wins for the first three quarters of the story. If the villain boss loses in the first half of the adventure, then it's because there's some bigger plot. If the villain boss wins, it seems to me that in stories, that causes a crisis of confidence (for heroes like Spider-Man) or investigation (for heroes of the Golden Age). This is a "no, and" situation again: No, you didn't beat him, and maybe you shouldn't be doing this, or you need to find the next aardvark-themed crime so you can out exactly how to stop this aard-fiend.

Now, how this applies to an RPG depends on what kind of game you like to run or play. So I'll pick two extremes.

If you figure that story is what we cherry-pick out of the events after the game is over, then a standard combat system against bad guys is fine, and story is invented after the fact. Maybe three of the bad guys in a group fall, and the rest of the evening is about dealing with the fourth bad guy and the three replacements he hires specifically to take on the heroes. Generally in an RPG there's a semblance of narrative in that the villains get tougher as the campaign goes along. (This is a side effect of the zero-to-hero thing a lot of fantasy RPGs have.)

If you are more into narrative structuring, then you want to make the "yes, but" and "no, and" systems a bit more explicit, either by making the opposition more intense (the Doom Pool, for instance) or giving the heroes Fate Points when they lose a fight, or something. Narratively, whether the characters win or lose in the first three-quarters of the story, the end result is to get them in more trouble.

*I'm using structure here as defined by Larry Brooks. It's not the only way to tell a story, though Brooks asserts it is, but most comic stories follow it.

1. The first quarter is set-up, where Something Goes Wrong—like a mysterious crime is committed—and we establish stakes and foreshadow the rest. In a drama, this is the point where we would introduce the interior problems that will keep the heroes from resolving things too soon. In a comic book story, we don't often do that.
2. The second quarter is response, where the characters act, but they don't really have an idea of the problem. They don't know that the bad guys have a subsonic transducer that makes the victim suggestible.
3. Then something happens at the half-way point, and they figure out what the problem probably is...but they have the wrong solution in this attack quarter. Maybe their solution is that it's magic, because done of the bad guys has a mystic gem.
4. Then, in the last quarter, there's a resolution—the heroes recognize the real problem (and solve that pesky internal problem in a drama).

If you're more into tactics (like I am), you want to make sure that the system has the tactical choices to make it more than "oh, it's time for a 'yes, but' fight." (Really, the players should never feel that way.) Some systems try to define "losing" very broadly, so the combat system can be used for social combat as well as physical combat. I appreciate the thought, but the few examples I've seen seem to water down the combat so much that it doesn't seem to me like combat at all—just dice rolling. (Yes, a good GM can overcome these difficulties. When you learn the system from a book, it's sometimes hard to be a good GM.) Here, instant narrative system:

First quarter of the session

Whatever the PCs do, it sets them up for bigger trouble.

• If the heroes win a fight, they get clues to the real problem.
• If the heroes lose a fight, the consequences are bad and social.

Second quarter of the session

The characters respond to the situation in the first quarter.

• If they win a fight, it reveals to them that the problem is bigger or different than they thought.
• If they lose a fight, they investigate or quit, and suffer social reprimands in either case.

Third quarter of the session

They have some idea of what the problem is, and they attack it...but usually they're not quite right.

• If they win a fight, it's usually by the skin of their teeth, and the real nature of the problem is demonstrated to them
• If they lose a fight, they discover that their approach isn't quite right.

Fourth quarter of the session

Armed with this new understanding, they probably resolve the situation.

• If they win a fight, that's great, and it closes out some problem.
• If they lose a fight, then you just bought yourself a series...but usually they pull something positive out of it.

I don't really have a point to make here; I'm just thinking out loud. Comments and disagreements welcome.

What about the Legion of Doom/LSV/Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?

A hero is as good as his or her opponent.

Given that as a usually-true statement, I am boggled that I haven't given more attention to enemies in my life.

My technique was that I would come up with situations, put the characters in them, and if any of the villains really resonated with the players, bring that villain back. So that was the case for Shrinker and the boys (I did give them a group name, but that was what we always called them), with Dark Silver, with the lovely plant-woman recently.

But I wonder if that was being a bit trusting.

Maybe what I should have done is (as per David Ducker's suggestion over on YouTube) is have every PC come with an arch foe. The player says why the foe is important; whether the character is designed by the player or by another player (as in the ICONS character creation system) doesn't seem as important to me, especially since villains evolve at a different rate than heroes do.

That buy-in from the player makes the arch foe important. (I've had players who weren't interested in the characters that I introduced as their "arch foes".)

Then, over the course of the campaign, you can introduce each arch foe. Essentially, the arch foe takes on the hero but has to deal with the other players as well. The arch foe loses (almost certainly) but then all of them can get together, join up to fight the heroes.

In a game like ICONS, which is forgiving of different power levels, that should work reasonably well.

I haven't tried this, because it really does call for a continuing series of adventures, and I don't have anything ongoing at the moment.

It could be an adventure series all by itself, a mini campaign: Four players, four sessions dealing with the arch foes individually, and then several sessions that deal with the combined League of Doom.

Getting the Band Together

In fantasy games, everybody meets in a tavern and usually trusts each other even though there's no reason to do so. But what do you do in a superhero game, set in something like the real world?

I assume that the players actually want their characters to get along, even if they grouse about it. That's genre-appropriate: even the characters who seem like fierce loners (I'm looking at you, Wolverine) have a reason to stick with the team. (If the players don't actually want to get along, you as GM should know that.)

I'm also going to assume that you as GM don't want to run each character solo until they join up with the team, or help create the team. That works, and I'm not knocking it. It's just not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is an excuse for the group to be a team, right from the start.

One of the nice things you can do comes from Masks. Just ask them. Start with one and say, "Who were you fighting in your first adventure?" The next player, you ask, "You decided to stay with the team, but why?" And so on... But if you want rationales, here.

The Coincidental Threat

The equivalent to the tavern meeting is that everybody shows up to fight the evil of Quatragon, and at the end of it say, "Hey, we're pretty good as a team." A variation is that everyone is captured by the Subjugators and they need to work together to escape (and bring down the Subjugator ship while they're at it).

The Premonition

This is almost the same, except that the reason everyone shows up to fight the demon Quatragon or the alien Subjugators is that someone (PC or not) has foreseen that their group will do well together, and has made sure that they're in the right place.

The Common Origin

It's possible that the event that gave them superpowers affected everyone in the team: they were all together when the polymetabomb went off, or when the gas was released, or they all snuck aboard the experimental spaceship. A variation is that they're all family members, and the common event happened years ago, when mom and dad got exposed to the mutagenic material. Now all the kids have superpowers (and possibly spouses who married in and had superpowers anyway: why wouldn't someone who can bend steel want someone impervious as her spouse?).

Tryouts

Well, the superhero team is expanding (or being created), and they need new blood, so they've announced tryouts on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  There's a standard set of tests, and a set of group tests; identities are hidden until time X. If it's a government team, maybe there are requirements about eventually showing the identity; if it's a private team, maybe not. If it's a corporate team, maybe they have to sign away individual looks, so that plushies and dolls can be made. In both cases, somebody is funding the team: maybe it's an ex-hero who will act as a mentor, or a  crazed billionaire who wants to have someone who will act on his whims. Either way, it's possible that the player characters have to leave the tryouts to deal with a real problem.

There are other ways to get folks together but those are the four easiest.

Adventure Aids from Dungeontown

So much of the adventure writing advice out there is for dungeons. Some people love dungeons. I get a GM advice thing and really, it’s a D&D/Pathfinder thing. It’s three-quarters full of “this is how to construct a dungeon fast” and “twenty-seven encounter types for the wilderness” and “six enchanted items.”

I prefer superheroes. But almost nobody is going to make a subsistence wage from selling to superhero GMs.

So let’s look at the dungeon advice and see how we can port things over. At worst, what can we steal?

But before I even start that, I gotta ask: why are you playing superheroes?

Because…

While there are many reasons to play any genre of roleplaying game, games with dungeons tend to be focused on different satisfactions than games with superheroes. If the itch you’re scratching is largely the same, hey, this might work for you. If it’s not, you’re going to be unsatisfied.

So if you want to satisfy your tactical ambitions, dungeon advice is going to work. If your interest is the encounters and you’re going to sift story out of it, dungeon advice is going to work. If you’re playing because friends are playing, dungeon advice is going to work. If you want to be fundamentally awesome from minute one in a way that the zero-to-hero fantasy progression doesn’t provide, then porting over dungeon advice might not work, but it might. If you want to tell morality tales with modern dressing, dungeon advice might not work. If you want soap opera with a genre dressing, dungeon advice will definitely not work.

Understand, I’m not saying that games with dungeons can’t satisfy these urges. They can. But what I’m saying is that the five-room dungeon and lists of encounters and drawing a dungeon map before any other planning, all of them presuppose a kind of narrative that isn't the superhero narrative.

But maybe it can satisfy you. Maybe the various dungeon things can help or inspire, though.

Dungeons

I forget who pointed it out, but dungeons are a kind of plot. Each room is a scene, and doors are a way to get from one scene to another. Things start off easy and get harder. Sometimes they just get harder relative to the characters’ current abilities, sometimes they expect the characters to get better as the dungeon progresses, but there is a kind of progression.

A five-room dungeon is an adventure. I don’t know if it was the original 5-room dungeon model, but this article over at strolen.com  suggests five rooms that map darned well to five stages of a story and different player satisfactions:

1. Room 1: Entrance and Guardian
2. Room 2: Puzzle or Roleplaying Challenge
3. Room 3: Trick or Setback
4. Room 4: Climax or Big Battle
5. Room 5: Reward or Revelation

If you allow the fact that superhero games don’t have “reward” in a treasure sense, the first four rooms fit with some wiggling into the four stages that Steve Kenson suggests in ICONS: Threat, Investigation, Challenge, Comeback.

In that sense, great. And in fact, if you’re coming from a fantasy or F20 background, maybe that’s a useful way for you to think of superhero adventures. You grab a theme or central concept, have the players encounter the concept somehow, do a thematically-related puzzle or roleplaying challenge, plan a setback, and then have a fight. Here, let’s compare two. In a dungeon, the Entrance needs to explain why no one else has ever looted this dungeon before, while in a superhero story, “it’s new” is usually the reason.

Stage	5 Room Dungeon	Superheroes
Entrance The Threat	A giant spiderweb that hid a particular cave is now torn away and loathsome spiders are spilling out into the countryside. But don't worry: there are still plenty of spiders in the cave to fight, even in this room.	We'll assume (because the season opener of Supergirl is on my mind) one of the characters is vulnerable to Neonite. The players intercept the latest in a series of drone attacks on scientific R&D locations
Puzzle / The Investigation	The entrance to the next chamber is blocked by the dead body of a horrendous giant wasp. Gotta move it to find out.	Investigation shows that from this site, unlike all others, something was stolen: a solar power device unique in its range of radiations to absorb, and the more radiation it absorbs, the better. (It might turn out that the other attacks got rid of other places that might produce it with the plans.)
Setback / The Challenge	Inside the next chamber is a big mother of a spider, and after a battle that was tough but not as tough as they thought it would be, they win...	The next attack is easily stopped...but turns out to be a diversion because the bad guys have stolen a fist-sized sample of Neonite, the dangerously radioactive mineral that totally doesn't affect normals. The cyborg powered by the Neonite shows up on cue and kicks their butts by first defeating the character vulnerable to Neonite
The Big Battle / The Comeback	Which is when they discover that the giant wasp planted its young in the spider, and by killing the spider, they've hurried the hatching process. The big battle is against some number of newly-hatched deadly giant wasps.	With a daring plan, the heroes fight the cyborg again, this time winning
Reward	The spider has gold, gems and scrolls from the travellers it brought back to feed its children.	Technically, superheroes don't get rewards, but maybe they learn more about the creators of the cyborg

Now, aside from the fact that neither of these adventures is particularly good, they do have the same high points. The puzzle in the case of the supers adventure is a bit more investigation than figuring out how to move a dead bug, but I was making this up in both cases and we’re all just lucky that I managed not to make the supers one about cloning or the food of the gods, and therefore essentially the same adventure.

But articles like “How to make your next dungeon a Hallowe'en experience!” might be useful as a source of inspiration, rather than things you can take directly.

Encounters

Something I see often in my perambulation around the web is the list of encounters or ways to make encounters interesting. Something like “12 Tavern Encounters” or “Six Slippery Traveling Salemen” generally.

Tough to make them relevant. Again, there’s certainly nothing you can take directly, because the idea of the F20 encounter is baked right in, but sometimes you can steal attitudes or motivations. Heck, if you really want to, you can put these stolen attitudes in your own table. A table can certainly help when your players back you into a corner and you have no ideas.

Eleven Reasons to Pick a Fight With the Hero

Roll (2d6)	Reason
2	If I can get him to beat me up, then I'm in no shape to answer questions from him/the police/my spouse/go to work tomorrow.
3	Keep your attention on me, okay, so we can lift something—anything—from the only member of the Super Six with pockets.
4	If I can get video of him throwing just one punch I can sell it and pay for the operation that the kid needs.
5	My significant other just broke up with me, and it'll just show them if I get beaten to a bloody pulp.
6	Everyone knows that hero name doesn't randomly attack innocents, so I won't get hurt, and I'll look cool in front of that person I want to impress over there.
7	I am sooo drunk that I don't realize he's obviously more powerful, and he's blocking my way to the pinball machine. He's not so tough.
8	This hero always talks people down, right? I'll gain serious cred and not get hurt. Or am I thinking about the other guy?
9	I've been paid to do this, and I'm willing to do it because I am in desperate financial straits. (You as GM will have to figure out what the plan is for paying. Humiliation? Fact gathering?)
10	Hit me. Tricia at the nail place/the psychic/Dr. Seven says that will give me powers/cure my leukaemia/cancer.
11	Go ahead. Kill me. I can't do it myself.
12	Pain is kinda thrilling.

And you notice that for one of them, I had to pretty much say, “Hey, here’s a hook but you gotta figure out the rest.”

Sometimes the random encounter table is locations. You can make that work by transferring the attributes of the place to a modern or comic book location. Still, it’s one of those things where you should probably do it yourself ahead of time and have a handy table yourself.

Six Ways to Describe the Warehouse (Instead of Abandoned or Deserted) (roll 1d6)

Roll (1d6)	Description
1	Dilapidated, run-down, untended, rat-infested, broken skylights
2	Clean but stained, smelling heavily of bleach, windowless, industrial, many forklifts
3	Wooden, surprisingly large, sheet-metal-clad, double-sashed windows high up
4	New, concrete, equipped with floor drains, access to sewers, security system
5	Future tech, roboticized, computerized, automated, not obeying shutdown instructions
6	Dirty, busy, well-used, crowded, with a sign that says 4 Days Since An Accident and the 0 right beside it and numbers past 5 are missing.

And here, have one more:

Themes for a themed super (probably villain)

Roll (2d6)	Theme group	Specific examples
	Holidays	President's Day, Memorial Day, Remembrance Day, Thanksgiving, Valentine's Day, Labor Day
	Emotions or states of mind	Love, Hate, Fear, Madness, Ennui, Like, Prejudice, Greed, Jingoism, Lust, Unrequited love, Duty, Paranoia, Shock, Awe
	Elements, modern or classical	Earth, air, fire, water, wood, metal, diamond, gold, silver, platinum, uranium, phosphorus, sodium, neon, radium
	Elemental concepts or forces	fire, light, heat, shadow, magnetism, sleep, darkness, gravity, electricity, nuclear force, transmutation, cosmic radiation, X-rays
	Classic monsters or old monster names	Vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein's monster or golem, ghost, cannibal spirit, Springheel Jack, revenant, Djinn or genie, kraken, ogre, giant, medusa, sphinx, cyclops
	Animals, usually hunters	Lion, puma, jaguar, wolf, wolverine, honey badger, weasel, myrmidon, ant lion, termite, cricket, grasshopper, wasp, hornet, stinger, crab, shark, hammerhead, mako, grizzly, cheetah
	Evocative things	Blood, sand, bone, hair, blob, rust, grass-roots, thunderstrike
	Things or acts of power	Genocide, slaughter, sniper, wrecking crew, demolition, groundswell, blitzkrieg
	Games or game pieces	Chess, Gammon, pawn, knight, rook, castle, king, queen, bishop, quarterback, draughtsman

No, Seriously, Like Dungeons

You can make the adventure take place in a dungeon-like environment. (I mean a place with restricted movement, not some BDSM club.)

Most superhero adventures are a bit more like a wilderness hexcrawl thing, but there are a couple of superhero tropes that can be treated like a dungeon.

The most common is the base. Most comics with a base have done an us-against-the-base issue. The Danger Room (Wreck Room, The Kitchen, whatever you want to call it) is a limited version of it. Another is the enemy base, often combined with the heroes-have-lost-their powers idea.

Dimension-hopping can provide something similar: each dimension is an encounter.

Something I’ve never tried is using some other fantasy system to represent the dream dimension and run an adventure on two parallel tracks.

Flashbacks

I've been thinking about whether you can use flashbacks during a game. The answer should be "Yes" but how?

The big problem is that you don't want anything to actively contradict something in the present. 

There seem to me to be a couple of options that might work or not.

Most likely to work is the explanatory flashback. The players know what they want to explain ("Why Indy hates snakes") and they are playing it out, either because it's fun or because they want some details. The outcome is probably not in doubt (though you can set this up so the outcome determines something in the present) but we wonder about how.

In the flashback all of the players play younger versions of their characters, some do, or one do. The flashback might explain what happened when the team came together, how some of the team earned the enmity of their arch-foes, or why that regenerating character is so dangerous. (For my players: "I'm having a bad day!")

In a game with a retcon facility, this is almost a retcon.

You could make it a retcon--you might charge players if they contradict current continuity, and give them the cost back if they fix it. You'd charge them at the end of the scene, and be willing to pay them back if they fix things later. The character takes the place of the bad guys but uses a robot to replace themselves, for instance. 

If you don't know the point of the flashback, it's more likely to go wrong and contradict the current. Now, sometimes those contradictions can be useful--they give you a seed for a future story that explains the contradiction. 

Another option might be the alternate past. In this case, the scene is meant to be a cautionary tale so you want to use it in a case where you want to show a variety of options. 

The third one might be the Rasomon story. Maybe this is various characters memories or theories of how something went done--a kind of Justice League Rashomon--and the real answer is in the contradictions. You need a certain buy-in from the players so that various characters do similar things in line with the point-of-view character of the moment, but you migh be able to pull it off once. You wouldn't do it often.

Sparking the imagination

While I was looking over the ICONS material in preparation for this playtest, it occurred to me that some of the games systems I read cause a flurry of sparks, and some do not. Wild Talents does not, even though I can see where it should; Champions did. What I've heard about AMP doesn't yet, but I haven't read the book(s). Interestingly, Mutants & Masterminds 3rd edition doesn't for me, but 1st did. (Second edition is sort of in the middle.)

ICONS first edition did, and second edition less so.

So I've been trying to figure out why that is, for me. Because this is a very personal thing; I know what makes one person's head light up makes another person go, "Meh."

Part of it is the specificity of the game system. The more generic the game system gets, the more flexible it might be, but the more I really have to get into it before I can say, "Oh, here's something we can exploit." In Champions, I was younger but I would also create characters based on the game system. Oh, this character uses this power, which means he can do this, or he can't do that. System mastery is, I guess, part of that appeal, but there's also the old creativity exercise--it's very hard to describe a wall in an interesting way, but it's easy to describe a brick.

Another part is the setting. Does it have nooks and crannies that I can take advantage of? There's a fine line between Freedom City's plethora of characters who probably render the PCs redundant, and the lack of a setting in ICONS or Supers! but both the latter have implied settings that you can grab onto. (Or not, depending on your tastes.)

Part must be presentation, but I'm not sure how.

Part is creativity. I'm sorry to say it, but a chunk of the problem for Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul for me is that none of the sample characters grabbed my attention. If they had, maybe I'd have looked deeper into the system and grokked it more fully. I grabbed the first villains book, hoping it would do it for me, and it didn't. Now, that might be rectified if I played a game with someone who knows, but I often have to teach myself these games out of the book.

You can combine the setting and the creativity to get some idea of the core activities, what the world is like. I know that to a large degree, the worlds are superhero worlds, and yet some of them (just like some comics) fall flat for me.

Your thoughts?

Sidekicks

One of the things that's part of superhero lore that doesn't show up a lot in RPGs is the sidekick. (By sidekick I also include pets and familiars, so Zabu, the sabre tooth tiger with Ka-Zar, counts as much as Robin or Stripesy.) I'm really talking about sidekicks as sidekicks, not a Teen Titans model where they fend for themselves.

A superhero sidekick is tough to play. When I think about it, I've only had sidekicks show up three times in decades of superhero RPGs: Once, the sidekick was actually an ex-sidekick; another time, the sidekick was simply another player character hero, and there's an agreement between players that character B is the sidekick of character A; in DC Heroes, where there was a specific in-game mechanic for handling sidekicks (that also existed in Golden Age of Champions, but I never used it). I've used sidekicks as a GM to comic effect (such as with Gecko and Lizardboy, where Lizardboy was actually the crazed millionaire's middle-aged butler), but for players, not so much.

Who Plays the Sidekick?

There seem to me to be four options:

1. The GM plays the sidekick.
2. The player plays the sidekick.
3. Another player plays the sidekick.
4. Rotating people play the sidekick.

Which is best depends on the situation and your players.

If the GM plays the sidekick, you have the advantage that the sidekick can do things that the player doesn't expect. There's also likely to be more emphasis on the disadvantages of a sidekick.

If the player adds the sidekick on to his or her usual load, you have the advantage that the regular PC and the sidekick really do function as one person. The player gets twice as many opportunities to act, which can be a disadvantage (though the player probably paid for this advantage, with an actual cost or a quality). It's rather like Duplicating powers that way.

If another player plays the sidekick, you have the same advantage as if the GM plays, but the amount of trouble generated depends on the players' relationships. I would assume things are easier for the character, but that won't always be true.

If you play the sidekicks in troupe style, then you can take advantage of all of these. 

I think it might be interesting in a low-membership group to have each player take a sidekick of one of the other players. That is, Player A plays Character A and Sidekick B, Player B plays Character B and Sidekick C, and Player C plays Character C and Sidekick A. You get six characters and because the sidekicks are usually lower-powered, they don't stress the players out as much.

Odd Sidekicks

Everyone thinks of Robin, the boy hostage, but really there are a variety of sidekicks and one of them might be right for your character, at least for a while.

• The sidekick is the one with the power, rather like Johnny Thunder and the Thunderbolt.
• The sidekick is unwanted, rather like Frogboy or some other minor character who tries to emulate the PC.
The sidekick is actually disposable: the hero is running a Be A Sidekick For A Week contest on his website (or such a contest was run without his or her knowledge), and the winner of the contest is an elderly man who has always wanted to be a superhero. ("Look, Brassman, you said that in the armor, anyone could be a superhero. So I built a contest based on that. You signed off...it was in that stack of forms.")
The sidekick draws fire, either because he or she is immortal or very tough in some way.

In terms of powers, sidekicks are usually copies, having powers or origins essentially like the PC (Robin, Kid Flash), so the operative phrase becomes "Like the hero but..." However, some sidekicks are spackle or complements, filling in some of the gaps that the hero has. In both an RPG and a book, this often occurs because the GM has determined that they need some power in order to get the plot coupons they need to advance. And some sidekicks are wildcards, some kind of random assortment of powers, joined to the PC through some social or psychological mechanism. 

Animal companions tend to be complements, granting the hero some extra powers in battle or reconnaisance.

What Stories Do You Tell?

If having a sidekick is going to be a special event, then you have to know what you plan on doing with the sidekick. Usually sidekicks are all about Learning Responsibility and About Power. (We don't need sidekicks as audience stand-ins because the players have regular characters for that.) 

You could also use sidekicks as a way to talk about the grit and stick-to-it-iveness that one needs to be a hero. There's also betrayal and infiltration stories, where the sidekick turns out not to be so nice.

What Do You Do Mechanically?

In Supers!, a sidekick would be an Advantage, with the number of dice indicating how powerful the sidekick is. Unless there's special approval from the GM, I'd insist that sidekicks are less powerful than the PC; it's probably a 2D or 3D advantage.

In ICONS, you dedicate a quality to your sidekick. Unless you've arranged otherwise, sidekick powers top out at 7, with origins adding to the powers...until they get to 7. (This gives them roughly the two-thirds suggested in some game supplement. Wasn't it ICONS Team-Up?

The TL;DR version is that I suspect it's rare to have the sidekick as a regular thing...perhaps a bit more common with familiars-as-sidekicks. But there's no reason why you can't introduce a sidekick as a running plot for a while.

What's your game about?

SYSTEM: Any

So Howard Tayler was, as of GenCon, writing a roleplaying game set in the world of Schlock Mercenary (I think the Kickstarter is over, so if you didn't know about it, you have to wait until it's really available). The podcast Writing Excuses this week was about worldbuilding for RPGs, and the very first piece of advice from the guests was knowing the purpose of your game. Not the higher moral purpose, but rather, when someone is playing your game, what are they doing? What's the usual activity?

And for superhero games, part one of that answer is almost always going to be, "Beating up supervillains." Another part is going to be, "Encouraging fun at the table" (however you describe fun) which I prefer to "good roleplaying" because I have discovered that "good roleplaying" varies with the group and the player or GM. So can "encouraging fun" but you run into fewer conflicts about whether a particular action was angst or wangst.

But as it happens, I'm also drafting the part of one manuscript where I talk about potential rewards.

One of the things I happen to believe is that, when you get points for killing things, everything looks like it's got hit points. (I ran into the equivalent when running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.) So what do I want to encourage in the context of the game? What's the point of this little adventure?

Back in the Herozoic era, when I began, there was a table for XP, and it had things like:

• Just being there (1)
• Long involved adventure (2)
• More than one session (+1)
• Outnumbered (+1)
• Clever, inventive, roleplayed well (+1)
• Characters totally failed at purpose of adventure (-1)

Now, that's not "Kill things and take their stuff" territory, but it is kind of vague, and you notice that only the lines "clever, inventive, roleplayed well" and "totally failed" have anything to do with what you as a player did after you got there. More than half was just showing up. Frankly, my first draft of experience looked pretty much like that. (I've been influenced, what can I say?)

Both Supers! and ICONS have abandoned that XP approach for an "achievements" approach. Minor achievements might be just showing up (and as I get older and life seems to get more complicated, I do appreciate it), but they can also be things like resolving the storyline. There's a little less of the "you showed up, you get a point" kind of thinking.

Still, they don't give you an actual guideline. In one way, that's awful, but in another way, that's great. You get to define what your game is about. You get to say what a minor achievement is, and what a major achievement is. In fact, Base Raiders formalizes this as goals for your character. (Some other time we'll talk about goals-you-can-achieve and goals-that-are-your-pole-star, and whether they're the same for everybody.)

Because you know that players are going to do whatever gets them character advancement. If it's "solve a mystery" then they're going to find a mystery and solve it. And, out of fairness, the GM better put the thing in there that gets them character advancement. It's not nice to say they advance by solving a mystery and then not providing one, or worse, by killing kobolds and then giving them a whole village of kobolds they have to save.

Frankly, I still think just showing up is worth a point, but why not give it out at the beginning of the session instead of the end? Every Supers! player gets a competency die, just because they're there. ICONS players get Determination points.

But beyond that... Depends on the type of campaign you're running.

You are the city's premier group.
Minor achievements:  Rebuild the section of town destroyed by natural disaster. Resolve the plot of the session. Protect your secret identity. Make it to your son's graduation. Have a date.
Major achievements: Rescue the mayor. Save the city from the doomsday device. Help the new team. Expose the imposters.

You are shadowy vigilantes.
Minor achievements:  Don't get caught. Take down bad guys without help.
Major achievements: Escape jail. Keep your secret identity.

You are students at a super school.
Minor achievements:  Get that cute MOTAS to notice you. Survive hazing. Reach out to the new kid. Survive the betrayal of the cute MOTAS. Fight off the bad guys from the rival school but be open to the good guys from the rival school.
Major achievements: Get picked for a super team. Pass the test. Discover and defeat the invading clones. Get the school to change its policies.

You are a supervillain's enforcement group.
Minor achievements: Succeed in the mission, which he will outline to you; keep your family in the dark; escape jail; don't lose any members in a fight with the heroes; avoid getting killed or fired by the boss.
Major achievements: Get a promotion; get your superior arrested or slaughtered; get your daughter into a good school; manage to hide your true identity all through Parent-Teacher Night even though rival villain or hero group shows up.

Digging a hole for myself...

SYSTEM: Any

There are a couple of superpowers that show in games where I look at them and go, "What?"

Now, these are perfectly cromulent superpowers. They have reasons to exist, and they fill those reasons very well. However, if you have a random character creation system, you look at the power and say, "Hey, maybe I can trade it for a Boost or an Extra."

For me, one such power is Burrowing.

I recognize the utility of it, sometimes. I think that the Troll, in ICONS, should be able to dig himself a hole where he can hide. I think that giant ants should have a way to make their giant anthills, and the machine from The Core should be buildable in your favorite game system.

But man... Burrowing.

Part of the reason is that it's slow. In some one-buttocked attempt at realism, many designers throttle back when it comes to burrowing, just like swimming. "Yes, you can burrow, but only at a speed that is one quarter of your overland movement speed." That's kind of like the M&M game where I suddenly realized that although the bad guy could fly, he could only fly at fifteen kilometers an hour. The heroes just paced him, occasionally whacking him like a beach ball.

We've got a game system where people fire blasts of concussive energy from their eyes, where people have mouths in their hands, where people make plants grow tremendously fast, and you're seriously concerned about how fast they can dig?

It should be a Bugs Bunny cartoon, where the tiny line of dirt is heading at the same speed as a running man. (And seeing the line of dirt is a complication or a limit.) It should be a total surprise when the building suddenly collapses because the hero has removed two meters of topsoil from under the foundation, or that the heroine uses her burrowing claws to trace a circle out on the floor, so they fall through, just like that woman in Underworld escaping.

Another part is that you start down the reasonableness path: well, if he can dig through gravel, maybe he can dig through that fencing that sticks down into the ground. Maybe he can dig through that concrete foundation. Maybe he can dig through that guy's chest...it's no harder than concrete. And the Champions players say, "Well, she can fly, so maybe she can go through water at the same speed. It's only a thousand times thicker." The characters just do it, and occasionally get a bonus when they launch themselves at the target like a cannonball. (This is one of the areas where the existence of bonuses and extras makes it seem like you ought to be able to or not to do something.)

Sometimes I wonder if there should just be a power called Movement, and the player gets to limit it by defining the medium...or doesn't. ("She can fly, and she's just punching her way through the rock.")

A special form of Burrowing might be an incredible knowledge of the sewer system—you know the paths like no one else does, so maybe you can get places no one else can. Your Burrowing level is actually your knowledge of the area. You fail the roll, there is no connection that you can get through. At low levels, that would work quite well, actually.

Or another special form might be a limited form of animal control: you can manage to control the ants and moles and what-have-you that they will make the space for you as you go.

Well, maybe Burrowing isn't so lame. But Dream Control....there's a power that's tough to play in a game....

Scattered thoughts on the economic solution versus the lawful solution

SYSTEM: Any

(I'm scattered today, so this might not get to the point.)

In the real world, when there's a demand for something, someone usually steps in to supply that demand. Not always; in a superhero world, you have to distinguish between something that you can supply and something you can't. A number of villains want world domination, but that turns out to be difficult to supply. (Most people who can get it won't give it up, although there's an interesting meta one-shot, where it turns out the whole thing is virtual reality, so that Visigoth Feral can finally take over the world...and the sequel is what happens after he discovers the ruse.)

However, in a superhero world, there are a number of things that aren't legal to sell that are still wanted. Vampires and blood, for instance. Blood is not really legally available for sale, but making it available could reduce the total amount of vampire-on-human violence. ("I managed to pay my way through college by pimping humans to be vampire blood bags!") Various radioactive materials are necessary for the life of various supervillains, who would presumably not be indulging in crime if they could just get what they need. [1]

So supply and demand says that most of the time, if there's a demand, there's going to be a supply. That trade is going to be illegal if the law doesn't recognize it. Sometimes the law is vague or fuzzy; the status of blood as a commodity is one: it falls under some health laws and it might be illegal, but it might not. Most people refuse to sell it because of that gray area. (There's also the question that can't legally enter a contract to buy something because they're not recognized as persons.) Sometimes the law is just slow...it hasn't recognized vampires, AIs, robots, zombies, uplifted animals, and extraterrestrials are legally persons, and can't legally enter into a contract to buy something. [2]

In your superhero world, there are almost certainly people working in favour of making some of these things legal (Atlantis should be recognized!) and some people against it (What happens to shipping if we recognize Atlantis? Is there a competitive trade advantage to ports that recognize Atlantis, or are the sea-dwellers too scattered or rare to make a difference? Is the threat of terrorism by Atlanteans an acceptable risk? [3])

The attempts don't have to succeed, but you can have them in the background to give verisimilitude to your superhero world. The idealistic college student who is all about how vampires are only violent because they can't get blood (and who may or may not have suspicious scabs along the femoral artery); the working man who is sure that the current set of anti-invasion laws are sure to make things better for him ("All the interdimensional guys gotta get sent back because they're taking jobs from guys like me!"); the businessman who claims that the attacks by created villains improve the economy (because they stimulate building and repair work, and a certain amount of R&D).

You could even have a presidential hopeful who offers solutions on these problems—the kinds of solutions that make trouble for the heroes.

1. And the water of the fountain of immortality is probably a fair advertising issue: Touting it is outlawed as an unprovable claim, because it takes decades before you discover that you're not going to die.

2. There's always been the question in my mind of why Bruce Wayne doesn't pay thugs to quit crime. In fact, that's part of the appeal of the Wayne Foundation: it's a tool where Bruce Wayne tries to make the world better so that Batman isn't needed. (Which brings in mind the millionaire sketch from Second City: Bruce is out of money, because he's spent it all on thugs and crimefighting equipment. What does he do now?)

3. In my recent Emerald Knights campaign, I had the Atlanteans as freshwater aliens living in the Great Lakes. They were recognized and had treaties with Canada and the USA. The fact that they regarded an area of the lake as taboo played into the game a bit. The early parts of the game are on Obsidian Portal, if you want to look at it. I think it was called something like Steel City or Steel City Blues.

Hey--long time no see

Happy new year, by the way.

It's been quite busy, but I'm not ignoring you...at least in the sense of not thinking about you, you inchoate audience mass, you. I'm sort of ignoring you in the writing to you kind of way.

Most importantly, it's been busy at home and work. That's certainly my priority. And I'm doing two adventures for small publishers.

The one I guess I can talk about (because Walt Robillard mentioned it on a podcast) is a Supers! REd adventure, which feels simultaneously too long and too short.  I worry that I've written it too long, and then I look at things I have to cut out of it, and I think, "Ohmigod, this will end up being too short!" However, it's gone in some interesting places even though I've been slow about writing it. (I want "careful" on this one--it's an adventure with time travel, and a slap-dash approach will only make trouble down the line--but I worry I've just been slow.) Call it Fall of the House of Echo, which is not the real name; it's just what I use to refer to it when I don't want to use the real name. That's pretty exciting.

I've play-tested it with Mythic GME and Supers! but I'm not really in a life situation where I can get a group together. (Something about work and commuting for twelve hours a day.) I've even found commercially available (and unsuitable) maps for three of the locations that might need maps, and for another I used the Rosie's Bar map from Champions.  I'll try to get Walt's permission to do another playtest with humans, by Google Hangouts. Drop me a line if you're interested.

I'll tell you the real name when it's available from Hazard Studio. Then I can add it to my tiny portfolio of RPG stuff (Assault on Precinct 9, from Fainting Goat Games, and two of the World's Most Wanted villains).

I'd like to collate all of the Fallen ICONS stuff into a single PDF to make it easier for people to download. I don't think I'll offer it for sale; I don't want to go through the hassles of setting up a OneBookshelf account. If I do that, though, I'll probably get Steve Kenson's blessing in the form of the ICONS-compatible logo. The other thing I'll do is scour the web for free or cheap graphics. The PDF will be free and the look will reflect that, but at least it can have a few pictures.

I was looking for something or other in the ICONS line on RPGNow, and I realized that there really are quite a few villain characters for sale. So I'll have to resist the temptation to kvetch and moan because, really, they're out there.

And how's your life going?

A moment of reflection: DC Heroes

SYSTEM: DC Heroes

I just wanted to take a moment to think about that other influential system, DC Heroes. Yes, the TSR Marvel game turned out to be stunningly influential, but aspects of DC Heroes have also influenced the modern superhero game.

I haven't the brainpower to spare today to actually trace the effects it has had, or even talk about what a mess the whole Blood of Heroes thing became. I just want to talk about the system and me.

I bought it in first edition. It concentrated on the Teen Titans, who were hot at the time, and it had (for me) two really revolutionary things. First, the action-opposition-effect mechanic was, well, beautiful. I still keep trying to recreate it in other things, and fall back on its division of physical, mental, and spiritual effects. I mean, wow. Other games have collapsed mental and spiritual or even provided mechanisms where all three are the same thing (only separated by power modifiers) but to me, there's something elegant in the domains of the mind, the body, and the soul. (Mind, it got confusing early in play trying to keep straight whether soul was the aiming attribute or will was or maybe spirit...but the structure of the cards kept it straight.)

Second, everything was on the logarithmic scale. Now, that wasn't new to me: Champions was already using powers to calculate strength. But applying it to everything? Wow. Information, time, distance, strength...all of it. You can see that influence in later games by Steve Kenson: both M&M3E and ICONS Assembled feature benchmarks that have almost all the same features. Heck, M&M3E even features the funky equations for distance, time, and speed.

Except...no one would play with me in first edition. So I eventually got rid of it.

Then a friend, my system whore friend, convinced me to try it again. We would run two campaigns that intersected: they took place in the same town but he would run the superheroes and I would run the mages. So I got second edition. And a number of the supplements. (I still own Magic. I might own others, but I haven't checked.)

I thought the campaign was a blast, and I still remember some of the player characters: the voudoun professor and the psychic private eye, and the mercenary who had been trapped alive in Hell since the Hundred Years' War. (Sorry, Jim, I don't remember your character. I don't even remember who I played as a superhero, except he was probably influenced by Batman because all my characters were influenced by Batman.) We were still playing it when the third edition came out, and I bought that so I wouldn't have multiple books to carry around.

Now, for all that I loved the game, I thought there were a couple of issues.

• The power names were too specific, and it was often the case that you had the same power three times, once for spirit, once for physical attacks, and once for mental ones. The gadget rules in the first edition were clunky...well, the gadget rules were always clunky. And the numbers were huge...at the time, I had played Champions, where a character was between 200 and 400 points...the idea of playing 1400 point characters scared me. (It still does, a little. No, I've never played Rifts. Why?)
• Even though the exponential growth is a way to make Jimmy Olsen and Superman fit on the same chart, it does lead to characters being rather similar at the low end.
• And I really wanted a formula instead of the tables. Having to do table lookups was a bit of a nuisance to me....still is.

But the game...well. Great. I can see why writeups.org is still a going concern.

What Street Level means to me

SYSTEM: ANY

Someone was asking for a street-level system over on G+ the other day, and I had answered before I really examined my assumptions. So here we'll take a quick look at street-level supers.

If I say I want a street-level hero, then I probably mean Black Lightning. Or Arsenal. Or Batman...wait. Do I mean Batman? Or Spider-Man? I mean, the Bat goes up against Darkseid on a regular basis, as part of the Justice League. And while Spider-Man whups a certain amount of hoodlum butt, I never think of someone like the Green Goblin or Doc Ock as street-level, so why should their arch-foes be street level?

But on the other hand, if we measure a hero by his or her occasional opponents, then anyone who has ever been in the Avengers or the Justice League is not street level. (And over the years, they've had pretty much everybody.) Even though the Justice League has a number of decidedly cosmic foes, it has also had members like Vibe, who it's pretty safe to say is street level. And Black Lightning.

And, frankly, it can't be power level, because I don't think that we can count Adam Strange as street level, even though he's just a dude with a raygun and a rocket pack.

Where does Squirrel Girl fit? I mean, her whole raison d'etre seems to be to take down cosmic villains with a plucky attitude and a set of frankly silly (uh, sillier than usual) powers.

So it can't be occasional opponents and it can't be power level. What about regular opponents? Well, for the early part of his existence, Jim Corrigan as the Spectre confined himself to thugs and hoodlums. In those days, he was the spirit of vengeance. Star Lord has, well, the kind of powers that would do him okay in Hell's Kitchen, but he is a regular in cosmic stories.

There is no hard-and-fast rule, especially as characters wander between titles and teams. So the term "street level" has got to be a guideline, a kind of wish list, rather than an absolute.

With that out of the way, when you say a character is street level, here's what it means to me. Your definition might vary.

• The character isn't that powerful, or that really intense power is limited in some way. Perhaps OmniNom can turn anyone into a piece of bedroom furniture given their true name, but most people don't even know their true names. OmiNom has to be like any regular trained person...until finding out the person's true name...and then exacts retribution. Or Hulkette can bench press a tank, but has normal tensile strength problems when trying to lift or move heavy objects.
• Some guys with guns are an actual threat. Kitty Pryde and Colossus probably aren't street level by that metric. Batman might be; every once in a while, they get a lucky shot (when guided by the plot).
• The usual stomping grounds is a neighbourhood or city, and it's a noteworthy event when the character goes elsewhere.
• The usual foe hasn't got ambitions beyond the city. There are no plans to take over the world, but rather plans to knock over the 7-11. Or bank. Or maybe get that valuable item out of the vault. Or revenge. If he or she gets hold of an unstoppable robot killing machine, the most likely use is to rob jewelry stores.[1] Again, it's a noteworthy event going up against a foe with bigger plans.

These aren't absolute; characters can be really powerful and be limited mentally or morally, or have sworn an oath to defend this patch of land. But really I need three out of four of these for a character to sometimes be street level.

It feels more like scope, though that's not all of it. Spider-Man is street level mostly because he chooses not to deal with world or nation threatening problems. Cosmic characters talk about worlds and universes where street level characters talk about buildings and streets. They save the world or the universe on a regular basis. (Must be tough to get insurance on Rann.)

In an RPG, lowering the available points/dice is an easy adjustment, but if everyone's on the same page, you might not need even that. 

1. And then drive the Unstoppable Killing Machine out of town to unload it, but the cops are still following it, so you have to kill or disable the cops, and then the spy satellites have it, and it's just sitting there...with a load of bullion...waiting. Killing anyone who comes near. Man, that sounds like a setup for a story.

Criminal Times

If one were to do a crime of the week thing, with a map and perhaps with a villain or gadget, how would that be different from an adventure? I mean, if you wanted to help the weary or suddenly on-the-spot GM.

What I would find useful is a map, a list of powers that make the crime a non-starter, and a textual description of the villain. The GM provides why the villain is doing it and tailors the crime and equipment a bit to suit the heroes, if necessary.

The map and the villain might even be references, because there is a certain amount of overlap, but this is one of the cases where specificity is your friend. Otherwise, you do six or even thirty-six of them, run through the major plot situations, and are done...without it having much utility. There's a limit to how generic we want things if we're in a hurry.

No, I'm thinking of stuff like a map of a restaurant and the wine cellar in the basement has an extremely rare bottle of wine that the thieves have been hired to steal. In a superhero universe, how do they do it, and how do the heroes find out? (We assume that the thieves are competent.)

Or the villains need something, so they've kidnapped the dependent of one of the heroes (or of an NPC hero, if everyone has created brooding orphan loners who work together), and the crime is to stop the hero and find the dependent. (Variation: The dependent isn't kidnapped at all, but has been sent by the thieves on a free vacation to a spot without wireless. That requires a very particular personality type on the part of the dependent.)

It's more a criminal situation than an adventure.