So, tell us about them. What worked? What didn't? What will you do next time?
Lets spread some caped and cowled love...:D
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!
(http://www.therpgsite.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=651&d=1346280568)
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(http://www.therpgsite.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=651&d=1346280568)
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.
Quote from: Bill;578682Most of the pc's were not murderers, and one of them actually rushed an enemy to the hospital once during a battle.
Awesome, and very much in genre.
Actually, this is one of the draws (for me) in doing a supervillain campaign. Four-color comics villains have this nearly cartoonish, gentlemanly conception of evil, and strange codes of ethics. The not quite infrequent alliances between heroes and villains against actualy world-shattering evils stand as testimony to that. Not to mention the odd villain going over to the heroes' side (Magneto did this at least once).
Quote from: The Butcher;578708Awesome, and very much in genre.
Actually, this is one of the draws (for me) in doing a supervillain campaign. Four-color comics villains have this nearly cartoonish, gentlemanly conception of evil, and strange codes of ethics. The not quite infrequent alliances between heroes and villains against actualy world-shattering evils stand as testimony to that. Not to mention the odd villain going over to the heroes' side (Magneto did this at least once).
Some of the writers of Dr. Doom have managed to portray him as 'intelligent, non murderous' evil. Other than one annoying writer that intentionally made doom do something very evil, I liked doom because he was not a murder hobo.
Quote from: Bill;578716Some of the writers of Dr. Doom have managed to portray him as 'intelligent, non murderous' evil. Other than one annoying writer that intentionally made doom do something very evil, I liked doom because he was not a murder hobo.
I was thinking of Doom (my absolute favorite [strike]Marvel[/strike] comics villain ever) but couldn't pinpoint any particular incident. Like Magneto, though, he's big on the code of honor thing too.
Quote from: The Butcher;578722I was thinking of Doom (my absolute favorite [strike]Marvel[/strike] comics villain ever) but couldn't pinpoint any particular incident. Like Magneto, though, he's big on the code of honor thing too.
In 'Emperor Doom' and 'Torment' Doom is portrayed as noble, but with the will and ego of a god.
In Emporer Doom he takes over the world, and manages it in a way that eliminates war and poverty.
In Torment his motives are to free his mothers soul from Mephisto.
Both are excellent.
Epic Nergasm moment for me was Doom firing a rocket pistol round at Mephisto that had an Anti matter warhead.
Dr. Doom is the model of I used fort Count Cortex, he's noble, honorable (mostly) but he should rule the world and his methods are sometimes very wrong. He's not above helping a hero out against something that might threaten his right to rule the world.
Of course he also hate illiteracy and once tried to destroy television because he blamed it for the problem.
Its one of the reasons (when) I run NE, I think I may make a Dr. Doom stand in for Dr. Destruction, because you know.
Quote from: Silverlion;578777Its one of the reasons (when) I run NE, I think I may make a Dr. Doom stand in for Dr. Destruction, because you know.
I thought NE's Dr. Destruction
was a Doom stand-in.
Spoiler
Except in this case it's Namor/Aquaman impersonating him under the suit.
Yeah, when written well, Dr Doom is a superb character. Some of his greatest moments though often come when he was helping the FF (for his own reasons of course) like leading them against the Overmind (FF #116) when Reed's mind had been taken over or saving Sue's life when Valeria was born.
Didn't we do this thread like two days ago? Or was there something different about it that this thread spawned out of?
RPGPundit
Quote from: Soylent Green;578786Some of his greatest moments though often come when he was helping the FF (for his own reasons of course) like leading them against the Overmind (FF #116)
Depending on the kind of comics one grew up with, it's easy to think of supervillains as nonsensical toons. Keep the old adage "no man is a villain in his own mind" in mind and you can get much more depth out of your masterminds and archfiends.
Of course some villains, like The Codpiece, exist solely to be punched in the spleen.
Quote from: daniel_ream;579009Depending on the kind of comics one grew up with, it's easy to think of supervillains as nonsensical toons. Keep the old adage "no man is a villain in his own mind" in mind and you can get much more depth out of your masterminds and archfiends.
I don't disagree, I'm just not sure why I am being quoted.
Quote from: RPGPundit;578999Didn't we do this thread like two days ago? Or was there something different about it that this thread spawned out of?
RPGPundit
Not exactly no. One was brought up about helping in running supers, not about what you had fun with.
Anyway yes I know Dr. D's in NE's reveal that's one of those things I wanted to swap out, no reveal, because its OK that he be a nefarious and sinister villain to me.
When Scott Lynch made TRPGs, he made Deeds Not Words, which was a d20 System superhero game. I ran one of the playtest groups, and what I did was simple: "It's September 1990, you're all high school students, and somehow you got superpowers over the summer. It's otherwise as the real world. Go."
I had a Chicano techie coming out of the street racing scene, a Trust Fund kid who turned out to be a Nephilim, the New Girl who was a Psychic, the Grunge kid who got blessed by Nuada (via a silver arm, after a horrific accident), and a Punk street brawler/sorcerer.
They had a Hapless Best Pal who ran afoul of the first villain: a status-obsessed bitchy girl from a rival high school who was a stereotypical Queen Bee sort. She and her girl-gang rumbled with the PCs repeatedly all over town until the Queen Bee shot and killed a playground monitor at the adjacent elementary school. By then, the Feds got involved; Queen Bee got the arc-ending beatdown, and the PCs now had to handle the Feds.
Second arc came when Queen Bee's master, the head of a demonic cult, showed up to see why she's out of contact. He started by killing off Bee's surviving henchgirls and minions, drawing out the PCs, and then attempted to lure then into fake lairs to trap and kill them off. This ended when the cult leader tried one last time to do it, and the PCs bum-rushed the place so hard and fast that they cleaved through the opposition and finished him off by dogpiling him with everything they had.
At that point, the game broke up with DNW going to print (as it were; this was before PDF-based sales were really a thing, and Lynch blazed a trail here) and Lynch getting his book contract. We switched to something else.
Quote from: Soylent Green;579033I don't disagree, I'm just not sure why I am being quoted.
Just pointing out that one of the reasons Doom is such a great villain is that to himself, he's not a villain. Same thing with Magneto; their goals are understandable and in some cases laudable, it's their methods that bring them into conflict with society.
To me, these are the best kinds of villains because they force the players to think about why they're doing what they're doing. If Doom can make a compelling case that the world really would be better off under his despotic rule, why not let him take over?
Quote from: daniel_ream;579064Just pointing out that one of the reasons Doom is such a great villain is that to himself, he's not a villain. Same thing with Magneto; their goals are understandable and in some cases laudable, it's their methods that bring them into conflict with society.
To me, these are the best kinds of villains because they force the players to think about why they're doing what they're doing. If Doom can make a compelling case that the world really would be better off under his despotic rule, why not let him take over?
Once, Doom was attacked by a Heroine with 'Light Daggers' that essentially harm Evil people.
They had no effect on Doom because he thinks everything he does is justified and noble.
I bet Doom would ignore Ghost riders 'pennace' stare as well.
Quote from: Silverlion;578215Awesome 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.
That sounds very cool Tim :D I, of course, like Burnout cuz he sounds similar to my character "Chrome" in your H&S2 game :D
I tend to run games very much in the vein of X-men and Alpha Flight, so my version of Days of Future Past always makes an appearance, and the games usually progresses from that.
Quote from: Bill;579101I bet Doom would ignore Ghost riders 'pennace' stare as well.
In Supervillain team up, Doom faced off against Magneto (he took over the world with some kind of gas, but wanted a challenge, and freed Magneto, so he could challenge him). Ghost Rider got involved (as part of the Champions), and blasted Doom (the gas had no effect on his demon form), and it did hurt Doom (and supposedly his Soulfire/Hellfire burns the soul but originally only hurt evildoers), so that must be a sort of retcon (or the story where GR hurt Doom was a mistake on the part of the writers for that specific story)
I think both my superhero campaigns have been too large to really answer questions as general as those planted by the OP. I might be able to answer more specific questions, though, if anyone cares.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;579762I think both my superhero campaigns have been too large to really answer questions as general as those planted by the OP. I might be able to answer more specific questions, though, if anyone cares.
I'll bite.
What's your first session on a supers campaign like?
Quote from: The Butcher;579764I'll bite.
What's your first session on a supers campaign like?
Well, remember I only ever ran two supers campaigns in my entire career; but both have been very long epic campaigns and huge successes. The Legion game (now done) lasted over 6 years. The Golden Age is at about a year now and will likely continue to run several years more.
In the Legion campaign, the first adventure ever involved most of the PCs already being members of the Legion (all PCs were Legionnaire), except for one of them (Sun Boy) who was trying out for membership. And the first session was basically about that, about his try-out and his initial failure until he discovered the extent of his own powers. It was basically a "starting small" setup, the legion was still very new (about a year old) and only had like 10 members. So it was the PCs and about 5 NPCs, and the whole focus was on them getting to know each other, these initial NPCs, and the world of the 30th century.
The villains started small too, space-mobsters I think, if I recall correctly.
In the golden age campaign, it was similar in the sense that I chose to start at the very beginning of the age of masked men. There were maybe 3 or 4 mystery men aside from the PCs, and none of them had been doing it for even a year yet. I had the PCs meet each other, and one guy who'd been around slightly longer than them (The Crimson Avenger and his sidekick, Wing), and stop some bank robbers who were using a fake Halloween broadcast about alien invaders as a cover to pull a big heist.
So in both campaigns, I started slow, and in each session one or two new characters were introduced, or some new aspect of the world, or something along those line. Working at this slow but steady pace you quickly build up a huge pantheon of NPCs, setting info, villains and everything else, but in a way that the players don't get overwhelmed at all.
RPGPundit