Supers Campaigns: A New Approach

Neurosis · Post by **Neurosis** » Tue Jul 30, 2013 8:23 pm

Well for instance in the US there's a massive political panic over the emergence of superpowered beings. The first supers begin appearing in late 2011 so the issue quickly becomes politicized, with Left and Right taking sides on the issue of supers rights versus super regulation. Before a real movement for superhuman rights takes place, however, the government's primary response is to a) try and cover things up and b) try to protect people from superhumans by putting them in camps to protect the general public.

My campaign is very much deconstructivist Iron Age superheroes/champions, so Watchmen is a major influence. I.e. when Spiderman doesn't know how to pull his punches yet, and is still learning, sometimes he winds up accidentally gibbing some poor mugger into a hundred million gory pieces. One of the NPC heroes/villains (most supers are undecided yet) was a pro-football player, and when his powers as a speedster/brick "switched on" he was returning a kick at an NFL game. Suddenly, he was running at the speed of sound with the force of a bullet train and no idea how to control those powers, and wound up turning the guys trying to tackle him into a fine red mist and then crashing straight through the end zone and through the bleachers and through the stadium walls, vaporizing dozens of fans caught in the way. But that kind of stuff's just about applying the real life rules of PHYSICS to super powers in a way that is not classically four color comic-booky.

Recently, PCs, some NPC supers, and their patron/organizer got their asses handed to them big time by JSOC commandos (essentially SEAL Team 6) re-tasked to the operational control of the Defense Intelligence Agency for domestic operations on American Soil in response to the massive chaos that resulted from the sudden, unexplained appearance of superhuman beings (and other things, that might best be described as not human at all).

The supers might have fantastic superhuman powers, but the Joint Special Operations Command spec-ops teams have vastly superior skills, training, organization, and equipment, and so far that has won the day pretty decisively, at least until the "metahumans" learn to cooperate (although the chances of that are slim). The raid some of the PCs made on the camp outside of Detroit others were interred in went disastrously, their patron, the Oracle (whose powers include total precognitive clairsentience, and nothing else, and who serves as an organizational and inspirational role, but who never should have been a front-line combatant) took an armor piercing sniper's bullet to the brain and died for their proverbial sins, and the escaped prisoners and the rest of the PCs barely managed to teleport out with their lives.

Of course, the appearance of the first US Gov't sponsored superhuman helped turn the battle between the superheroes/villains and the JSOC commandoes even further against the more-than-human side.

Currently the PCs are attempting to kidnap President Obama from the White House to negotiate for some basic rights and protections for human beings. This is an extremely desperate maneuver and it shows. The campaign has been frozen in the middle of that combat for months and months, since a couple players have moved away/become too busy to game. Which sucks, I really want to see how it turns out. First time in my history at a GM that one of the entries on an initiative chart was "Barack Obama" LOL.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Oct 30, 2014 3:00 am

So how do the superhero settings that aren't a thin rehash of a DC/Marvel crossover fail and why? I had Aberrant d20 awhile ago because I was looking for a superhero setting before I discovered Mutants and Masterminds 1E and I thought 'is this supposed to be a superhero comic or something?' Of course, this was in 2003 before I slightly expanded my mind, but still.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Oct 30, 2014 4:27 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So how do the superhero settings that aren't a thin rehash of a DC/Marvel crossover fail and why? I had Aberrant d20 awhile ago because I was looking for a superhero setting before I discovered Mutants and Masterminds 1E and I thought 'is this supposed to be a superhero comic or something?' Of course, this was in 2003 before I slightly expanded my mind, but still.

Aberrant is basically just Wild Cards that has been IP scrubbed after having its 90s comic book manly grittiness set up to 11. I mean yes, that means that Aberrant was an RPG that was based on a book anthology that was based on a roleplaying game that was based on a comic book. And that means it had been IP scrubbed three fucking times. Once by Chaosium to make Superworld, once by George R. R. Martin to make Wild Cards, and once by White Wolf to make Aberrant.

Aberrant fails as a setting because it's badly written and the IP scrubbed characters aren't interesting. I can't even remember any of them. Also it is married to a really terrible game system.

-Username17

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Oct 30, 2014 5:57 pm

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So how do the superhero settings that aren't a thin rehash of a DC/Marvel crossover fail and why?

The short answer is because superpowers break fundamental parts of our understanding of the world and without a common framework of fictional references the playgroup has no idea what is possible or even which responses are appropriate for any given situation.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Oct 30, 2014 6:39 pm

Wiseman wrote: And as to the thing about established settings, at some point there had to be someone who first decided. "Powers? Sweet! Superhero time!"

Indeed. And its quite possible for that to happen. There are people in real life who dress up in silly costumes and fight crime and they don't have superpowers.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/photo/real- ... ts-n235591

These people don't get arrested because there's no law against dressing up in silly costumes and walking around.

Superheroes exist because there are people who want to be superheroes. And in superhero settings, some of those people get powers.

Cosumed superheroes work in principle similarly to a neighborhood watch or a crime prevention group like the Guardian Angels, just with more flamboyance.

The big danger for a super hero, though, are politically active but unsophisticated teenagers and such. It's very easy for the naive idealist + superpowers combo to go bad when trying to make the world better.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Thu Oct 30, 2014 6:43 pm

Josh wrote:The short answer is because superpowers break fundamental parts of our understanding of the world and without a common framework of fictional references the playgroup has no idea what is possible or even which responses are appropriate for any given situation.

Any chance of plundering Japanese and Spanish media for alternate takes on the central conceit of superhero fiction? I mean, I know sentai has a reputation for being shallow, even moreso than whiz-bang comic books, but you'd figure that there would be at least something to steal from it.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 1:56 am

Akira, and the Psychic-manga genre in general deals with "X person has superpowers in a world that was previously mundane"

Zetman is worth checking out.

Attack on Titan kind of deals with the emergence of a 'super power'.

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 2:30 am

I feel like I should mention Worm here. Though with the series in my rearview mirror I'm not sure if it actually says anything meaningful about superheroes. It touches on the idea that superpowers undermine the social contract but doesn't examine the it in depth.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 4:16 am

Partially that's because the people with the really sweet superpowers (namely Eidolon, who has three superpowers at any time and can swap any or all of them out for any other powers whenever the hell he wants, and Dragon, who can make pretty much any crazy supertech at will and controls a prison situated in the center of a hollow mountain surrounded by vaccum and then by really sturdy materials inside a spatial distortion making the walls literally hundreds of miles thick) have decided the social contract is largely still in effect.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 6:21 am

Figuring out a reason why supervillains don't get locked away forever is easy. You just have to have some sort of Magneto figure who makes a habit of destroying any prisons actually capable of holding supervillains in order to prove an ideological point about the superiority of mutants. You can also use the same plot point to justify why superheros don't kill supervillains: Your Magneto figure has a heart and refuses to break actual murderers out of prison, while the Justice League (or in world equivalent) has a no tolerance policy about not being the first ones to use lethal force.

The result is a steady state system where supervillains steal from civilians, then get beat up and thrown into regular, ordinary prisons and break out as soon as they come up with a new plan. Meanwhile the superheroes are out helping civilians, discover a super crime in progress, thwart it and then either use their powers to help fix what the supervillain broke or keep the stolen cash for themselves.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 6:44 am

Grek wrote:Figuring out a reason why supervillains don't get locked away forever is easy. You just have to have some sort of Magneto figure who makes a habit of destroying any prisons actually capable of holding supervillains in order to prove an ideological point about the superiority of mutants. You can also use the same plot point to justify why superheros don't kill supervillains: Your Magneto figure has a heart and refuses to break actual murderers out of prison, while the Justice League (or in world equivalent) has a no tolerance policy about not being the first ones to use lethal force.

The result is a steady state system where supervillains steal from civilians, then get beat up and thrown into regular, ordinary prisons and break out as soon as they come up with a new plan. Meanwhile the superheroes are out helping civilians, discover a super crime in progress, thwart it and then either use their powers to help fix what the supervillain broke or keep the stolen cash for themselves.

I instantly want to play the guy who breaks the truce. Having a no-killing policy against enemies willing to kill civilians is such blatant hypocrisy that in any closely examined setting the Justice League would have less than zero credibility.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 6:50 am

How on earth did you read "the Justice League has a no killing policy" into that? Look at what I said again:

Me, Just Now wrote:Your Magneto figure has a heart and refuses to break actual murderers out of prison, while the Justice League (or in world equivalent) has a no tolerance policy about not being the first ones to use lethal force.

The only way you can possibly get "Justice League members can't ever kill, even if a supervillain starts murdering civilians" out of that is if you somehow think that civilians aren't people. In which case, congratulations, you are a monster.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 8:39 am

Grek wrote:How on earth did you read "the Justice League has a no killing policy" into that? Look at what I said again:

Me, Just Now wrote:Your Magneto figure has a heart and refuses to break actual murderers out of prison, while the Justice League (or in world equivalent) has a no tolerance policy about not being the first ones to use lethal force.
The only way you can possibly get "Justice League members can't ever kill, even if a supervillain starts murdering civilians" out of that is if you somehow think that civilians aren't people. In which case, congratulations, you are a monster.

Skim reading plus conflating your setup with actual comic books, wherein the Justice League apparently does have exactly the policy I thought you were advocating. Then again no one stays dead in comics so maybe they're just saving themselves the trouble.

That still doesn't explain why they don't imprison the Magneto figure - unless you simply assume that no facility exists even in blueprint form that can stop him

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 8:51 am

Pretty much. The system requires that there be at least one (but preferably more than one) super who can neither be killed nor imprisoned and is capable of destroying superprisons. This can take the form of a flying brick who knocks them down as fast as the world can put them up, or it can take the form of someone who's powers let them walk through the prison walls and walk off with inmates.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Fri Oct 31, 2014 10:14 am

There is an RPG planned for this Setting:
http://marionharmon.com/wearing-the-cape/