So, tell us about them. What worked? What didn't? What will you do next time?

Lets spread some caped and cowled love...

I've run three superhero campaigns in the past three years and, perhaps usually for me, they've all been a great success.

The first one I ran with TSR's Marvel Super Hero system. It was set in the Marvel Universe (albeit by no means not strictly canonical) with a new super team with new characters. There's lot's of giid stuff I could talk about regarding this campaign but think the key think players appreciated was that their characters were never presented as the B Team but were treated with the same respect as the iconic teams like the Fantastic Four or the Avengers.If anything it the player character who had to recuse the likes of Iron Man and Thor. That seemed to give them a real buzz.

My second super campaign was for ICONS. It was more Batman: the Animated Series in tone with more street level superheroes operating in a world in which superheroes were still a new thing and not necessarily trusted by the police. One cool thing I did for this campaign was give out to the players a calendar of events. So that from day one they knew that on a certain date there would be a boat race and three days later the opening of an Aztec exhibition. Not every one of these events was tied to a plot seed but it did allow foreshadow some of the villain plots in a very natural sort of way.

And finally couple of months ago I finished my Necessary Evil campaign, converted to ICONS. Again, that was a lot of fun although by the time I was dine with it, the campaign resmebled the Savage World book only in name.

The final battle is probably one of the most complicated sessions I've very ran, with so much going on (defeat an entire alien invasion) and so many resource gathered during the course of the campaign now finally coming into play. To help the players I created the attached handout with reminders of the main targets, their special resources and a quick summary of special rules that might apply. I'm still shocked in actually worked!



So yeah, all in all supers is the one genre that has yet to let me down. The MSH game was prrobably the best campaign I ever ran but the other two were not far behind.

Your handout is really cool Soylent Green!  That must have been a fun campaign.  I've run some high level games that were in effect superhero games, saving the universe and all that, by keeping the alternate universe from merging with the campaign's.  Unsung heroes of the cosmos!

Quote from: Soylent Green;578162

Awesome! Love the sketches, especially the V'Sori warrior.

I'd be very, very interested in the details about your Necessary Evil campaign. How did you deviate from the book?

Awesome SG! Do you have a bigger version of the handout?

Our NE game was going very very differently I think since we were interested in heists, and yet saving the world could be done at the same time.

We had a super cold girl with penguin robot minions and a penguin blimp. I always wanted to call her Empress Penguin but I can't honestly recall her name.
A Spider-Themed Cyborg named Professor Tarantula
A homeless man's bran in a cyborg ape body. I don't recall the name their either
Burnout. The car thief who build a hot rod themed powered armored suit (had micro wheels rather than flying.) Eventually Burnout and the Professor created minions--OCTANE. Somewhere I've got what that means (Official  Criminal Talent for the Advancement of Necessary Evil. or something similar.)


We didn't get far. I think we stopped like a warlord of some kind and his crazy followers or something.

I haven't been able to run more than one shots in some time, but my last real successful games was a Golden Age of Champions game, where the heroes took down a Hydra-like organization of fifth columnists that was hindering the war effort, and a Dark Champions-esque game called Project: Morituri, inspired by the Suicide Squad (where the characters were mostly villains working off jail time by battling drug lords and super powered terrorists). The GAC game was shorter, but both were a lot of fun to run.

Although we never got too far with it, I did have a good post-Onslaught Marvel SAGA game going, with the pc's gaining their powers in the aftermath of the "death" of many heroes. The plan was for them to be rivals of The Thunderbolts, but it never got that far.

Quote from: Silverlion;578215Awesome SG! Do you have a bigger version of the handout?

Yes I do. I just have no web space to upload it to.

Quote from: The Butcher;578193Awesome! Love the sketches, especially the V'Sori warrior.
I'd be very, very interested in the details about your Necessary Evil campaign. How did you deviate from the book?

Okay this might take a whille.. :-)

The first thing I did is removed Dr Destruction (the NPC that is meant to order the player characters around and hand out missions) and just let the players organise themselves. It meant I needed to be more creative in how I feed players adventure hooks and clues but I think it works better.

Also, while I started off with all the Atlantis content fully in scope I soon noticed it had no traction with the players so eventually I just dropped it and replaced it with Project Fenris,  a top secret pre-invasion plan designed (much like DC's Cadmus) to deal with superhumans should they one day go rogue.  As such a lot of the Plot Points/Savage Tales relating to Atlantis got reskinned to fit Project Fenris and in the end I think that felt grittier.

But the biggest difference is how the whole campaign was structured. Necessary Evil as a campaign has an implicit end-game goal of sending the alien scum packing. At the start of the campaign this goal may appear very remote to the player but I wanted to make there was so sort of mechanism that help the players feel they were getting closer to this goal as well as something that would trigger the end-game in a way that wasn't just GM fiat.

Which leads us to the concept of "Resources". In my Necessary Evil campaign a Resource could take the form of a new ally, a bit of intelligence on the aliens, a powerful weapon or power source, basically anything that might help in the fight.

From a meta-game point of view Resources also acted a bit like a score card to track the campaign progress. Note however I did not I share the detail of how many resources they would need to trigger the end game with the players, partly not to make the campaign to meta but also, I admit, to give myself some leeway. I was just making this stuff up and I had no idea if it would work or chance to playtest it.

But I did give the following guidelines for Resources to the players at the start of the campaign:
 

• Securing a Resource is you main means of getting closer to the end game.
• Most of the Resources have been seeded into the campaign but others my arise organically from player character actions.
• You don't need to get all the Resources and there are no mandatory ones.
• Resource generally are one use only items.
• If you wish to, you can activate a Resource early but if you do so it won't count towards the end game.
• Failing a mission to acquire a Resource is okay, it's bound to happen. If you screw up often enough though, well I for one salute our new alien overlords.

The final climax was when most of these Resources would come into play. I was concerned the game would just buckle under it's own complexity at that point hence the above mentioned handout which I printed out on A3 sheets. It also acted like a campaign souvenir for the players, which is nice.

SG: How big is it? If it is a couple meg or so email me....if you can.


My favorite games were my Shadow X-men game, my recent Menagerie game, and the fun I had running AlienU


Shadow X-men took the idea that when Prof X split the X-men into two teams he kept a third, reserve group for investigation/proactive solutions to problems. He put them under the auspices of one of the "not on a team" X-men, depending on which Shadow X team I ran. The best version the player characters were Razor, who ransformed into an alligator, later in a "reboot" of his powers he turned into a humanoid lizard. Kaiji Kuma a super strong teen age girl of asian descent who was only 4' and odd inches tall, but nearly as strong as the Hulk. Arkane, a mutant who could tap magical energies, another whose name I forget who could teleport through darkness, and make shadow weaponry.

They started by going to a religious camp that had two guest speakers on the mutant issue and Christianity, Michael Stryker, and Michael Connover (who was saved by the X groups from the brood, although his wife was infected by a brood mutant with the queen.)

Of course that meant new brood mutants (Unknowingly created by Hannah, when she wasnt aware of her brood-nature.)

Plus of course Purifiers and a purloined Sentinel by Michael Stryker. Things erupted into chaos and the heroes had to stop both factions who were fighting, as well as protect the humans between them. Since of course Stryker saw the brood-mutants as demons.

From there things involved all manner of the Marvel Universe, including Sauron, Genosha, and so on.


The Mneagerie game went in unintentional directions. Several super-villains decided to have a game show to find out who would make the best agents/people they could imbue with powers for their cause. Of course the game got subverted by an unknown faction who used it to manipulate heroic personas into situations that gave them powers.

Due to an accident of naming, most of the heroes ended up with an animal-themed name, and the rest fell in line. We had the Jade Jaguar who was empowered by an ancient Oltec jaguar-man statue. Wolf Fang, who was turned into a werewolf by a werewolf tooth.  Nightowl, who got the awesome ability to see in the dark. Of course she took up a batman style mantle with throwing pinions. Slyfox, a psychic who was going to host Count Cortex vast psychic powers in human form. (CC was tired of his robot body.)

Two others played but didn't continue after the first game: WildCat a feral girl with claws and feline traits, and an ice manipulating hero who never settled on a name.

The game put them up against the Serpent Six (snake themed foes), Count Cortex, the evil Aztec vampire bat god, an assassin, some cyborgs, the evil organization SCEPTRE (from England), the Magmagician, and a few others.

The heroes met a few allies and potential new teammate: Stray (a shapeshifter whose primary form was a dog, and who was a kid with a cape other times) and Hummingbird, a very fast little shrinking heroine.

Quote from: Silverlion;578410SG: How big is it? If it is a couple meg or so email me....if you can.

Sure, check you mail box it should be there :-)

I have run many superhero games, and the one thing that seems most important to me is the characters having a common goal.

Especially when the charcaters might literally be Gods, you need all the players to be 'on the same page'

Allthough the enemies in the game might be insanely powerful, superhero characters can do pretty much anything them want. This makes themes like 'We are good guys' or 'We are villains but loyal to each other' become very important.

Superhero/villain loose cannons/murder hoboes make for a weak game in my experience.


I prefer Good Guy super games, but my all time favorite was actually a Villain campaing. They formed a Villain group, held tryouts to reqruit, and had epic battles with the worlds premier super team as well as a rival villain team.

It was a great campaign, because they always worked together despite being villains.

Well, two of the pc's did have a friendly rivalry, but nothing deadly.





Was quite fun when the characters were captured by superheroes and woke up in Cells. The three most powerful of the characters pounded or blasted their way out of three foot thick steel cells....only to discover they were in a space station. Say hello to the Vacuum!  

Epic!

I ran a bunch of successful supers campaigns playtesting Klaxon's Look! Up In The Sky! All different, all a crap-ton of fun.

Before that, the only successful games were running Tim Kirk's Hearts and Souls.

-clash

Life Lesson learned by an overconfident NPC superhero in a PC's as Supervillains campaign.....Never try to arrest five player character supervillains alone. Call for backup. Better yet...just hide.

Quote from: Bill;578672Life Lesson learned by an overconfident NPC superhero in a PC's as Supervillains campaign.....Never try to arrest five player character supervillains alone. Call for backup. Better yet...just hide.

That's when they put him in a deathtrap they know is flawed, and laugh as he struggles to get out?

Quote from: Silverlion;578676That's when they put him in a deathtrap they know is flawed, and laugh as he struggles to get out?

They killed him.

It was their first run in with a superhero. The characters robbed a bank in broad daylight, and smashed up the police cruisers that responded.

A superhero arrived, flying in to save the day, but the pc's began hurling cars, energy blasts, etc...and the hero was knocked unconsious.

The villanous pc with Density then chose to stomp on the poor hero, squashing him dead.

This brought the wrath of the worlds premier superhero team down upon them early in the campaign.

Most of the pc's were not murderers, and one of them actually rushed an enemy to the hospital once during a battle.