Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;410112Just jumped in tonight on a friend's 1930's campaign...

That sounds like crazy, unadulterated fun!

Quote from: The Butcher;410117It's spandex-clad, four-color supers that's a hard sell for my group.

I have friend of mine who did not get supers, which was a real downer because as one of our regualrs that restricted our choices of games. The issue was he just too alien to him. He did read the good stuff (American comics) growing up, so he just didn't how to handle the genre and just could not get in the mind set of character who would dress up to fight crime for no pay.

What turned it around was the Justice League cartoon series. He started started watching a few at my place as tey were showing them on TV at time while we waited for all the players to arrive and soon enough he was hooked.

I know it just a cartoon, but the quality of the characterisations and dialogue in the JL cartoons does put a lot of live action stuff to shame and it helped him understand how to play an interesting, 3-dimenisional character while still sticking to the superhero genre.

Quote from: StormBringer;409841I am officially hijacking this thread.

Revel in the glory, bitches:  Villains and Vigilantes is back in the house, with Jeff Dee in charge of the artwork!

You don't get much more "not Marvel/DC" than that.

Thanks SB! I picked this up. Only partway through so far, but interesting.

Quote from: StormBringer;409841I am officially hijacking this thread.

Revel in the glory, bitches:  Villains and Vigilantes is back in the house, with Jeff Dee in charge of the artwork!

You don't get much more "not Marvel/DC" than that.

Thanks SB, I picked this up! Interesting.

Quote from: Silverlion;410027I've run a game where super-powers seemed to be symptoms of an STD...

Adam Warren's Empowered series uses something similar in the explanation of, "so, how'd you get your powers," for a few of the recurring characters in one of the early books.

Best part is where they act like, "well no, its not odd at all that all of us got our powers by banging aliens/robots/misc."

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;410112Just jumped in tonight on a friend's 1930's campaign....

Well, that certainly sounds awesome.

Quote from: Danger;410124Adam Warren's Empowered series uses something similar in the explanation of, "so, how'd you get your powers," for a few of the recurring characters in one of the early books.

Best part is where they act like, "well no, its not odd at all that all of us got our powers by banging aliens/robots/misc."

"Mars needs women."

"...the feeling is mutual."

Quote from: StormBringer;409841I am officially hijacking this thread.

Revel in the glory, bitches:  Villains and Vigilantes is back in the house, with Jeff Dee in charge of the artwork!

You don't get much more "not Marvel/DC" than that.

Actually, you really, really do.
I was thinking more along the lines of campaigns that were not just "costumed supers in a silver/copper/bronze-age context fighting costumed bad guys".

What I want to know is if someone's ever done anything like my Legion game, or Heroes, or Watchmen, or supers in a really unusual setting, or modern-day costumed supers with a twist you'd never be likely to see in a mainstream comic book.

RPGPundit

I always wanted to do a mecha game in a fairly generic supers universe, except that the pilots, rather than being angsty teens, were a bunch of university students competing for government funding in Boston, a city which is protected by...the Intercollegiate Mecha League!

I did various science competitions in school and wondered what such competitions would be like in a supers universe.

In addition to the game above. I've run Millennia (Leather and Vinyl to four color costumes.) A game set around "What if powers appeared roughly now--at the turn of the Millennium. The game wasn't traditional four color. Powers were good at hiding because they created psychic static. They were things of urban legend, and the damage they caused explained away easily because people didn't want to believe.

The setting (in part) appeared in H&S, a fuller version should appear in 2E, with details on running such things as urban legends. (With time, work and tiny bit of luck.)


I've run a fantasy superhero RPG loosely set in the Marvel Universe, where the characters powers had been seeded into "humanity."

Elves, dwarves, etc. were created by high tech space faring race--a Makluan! The dragonlike alien made sure that the the powers varied somewhat and so some of the most powerful ones were gathered by its enemy (another alien) to kill it. It explained the treachery of the "man" who gathered them together and that they should help it fight back.

Sadly it never finished.  Might have been fun when they realized all that was going on.


I'm tempted to run (but haven't yet.) A seemingly four color game that happens in the dreams of a disturbed little girl--she needs heroes to fight her monsters. An elaborate fantasy world constructed by her mind that is trying to fight back. Leading up to the heroes realizing that they are people--real ones, drawn into her mind, and what to do about it and how. What happens when she recovers? How did she draw real people from the real world into her fantasy? What happens afterwords?

I ran a game for about half a year using Palladium's Heroes Unlimited. It was set in the Nightbane universe, though their was never a Dark Day due to super heroes.

My Nightbane games usually have a heavy dose of Old World of Darkness as well. One of my players was a Werewolf. I made the rules for him from scratch, which is really, really easy in Palladium.

The premise of the game was a group of Psychics escaped a government research lab after being tortured. Think River from Firefly, but this was totally based on the Redwing Farm Incident / Pandora Project from the Nightbane source book, "Between the Shadows."

These guys broke out and wanted revenge on the world for what they had gone through.

Quote from: The Butcher;410117Yeah, I see what you mean. Apparently, Kevin Siembieda is a huge comics fan, and comic book sensibilities bleed through his writing. Rifts does feel very comic-booky, fluff-wise, in spite of lacking most of the usual mechanical attributes of a supers RPG system.

It's spandex-clad, four-color supers that's a hard sell for my group.

That also describes my own views: I grew up reading comics, and my games tend to show it. It is just that I'm no longer into the spandex, or a lot of the other basic ideas which seem to dominate the standard supers genre.

Quote from: The Butcher;410117Do tell us about these games!

As I've said above, I grew up reading comic books about super-heroes, and it shows in my games. So a great many of my games would fall under the general concept of this thread; it is kind of hard to know where to start.

For example, if I ran a fantasy game, the characters would tend to be Dragons, Storm-Giants, Godlings, etc. . . . I run other games, like Amber DRPG, which are pretty much focused on super-humans.

But I'll give a concrete example of a specific game I ran. I focus on this setting because it was specifically pitched to my group as an alternative to a standard supers game: (and I apologize if the following description is a bit too long winded)

   The game was set on a small, relatively low-tech planet. This world existed at the far edge of a great interstellar Empire. In terms of the Empire, think some combination of Star-Wars and the Traveller-Imperium, with some pretty impressive cyber-tech.

This far-edge planet had been colonized by humans (or at least mostly by humans) many centuries before the time of the game, during a period of Imperial expansion. Unfortunately, during a slightly later period of Imperial decline, the world had gotten cut off and forgotten by the Empire (there was no FTL-radio, so when ships stopped coming, contact was gone). Yet, during the time of the game, there was a renewed interest in this planet, and various factions were involved in the rediscovery process.

Planet-side, tech levels had fallen after loss of Imperial contact because there was not really enough population to maintain a high-tech industrial base (and they didn't have that many tech experts on their backwater world anyway). After being cut off from the Empire they did what they could, but production was much more small scale. Thus local tech levels tended to be somewhere on the level of mid 20th century Earth.

The Empire had begun to expand once again, the world had been rediscovered, and there was renewed interest. But there wasn't any concept of a full scale recolonization, at least not at first. Instead  smaller groups of characters were involved in more "low key" operations and exploration. These operations included fighting with other groups (some from interests outside of the Empire) which had different objectives.

The PCs were part of one of these off-worlder groups rediscovering this world and interacting with the local humans. Local tech may have fallen quite a bit, but the Empire still had very high technology. And the PCs had been equipped to deal with problems on their own and had access to ultra-high technology (cyber-ware, powered Armor, big-nasty-guns, etc). Some of the PCs were exotic aliens,  thus having numerous super-human abilities. And there were even artificial life forms.

So you had some of the same elements you'd have in a super-hero game.

The PCs stood out from the locals in terms of having exotic ultra-tech and other super-human abilities that the normal population didn't have. Obviously there was stuff like powered armor. You could have an analog to a character like the Thing or Hulk, in the form of a creature from a high-gravity planet. Various combinations of tech and/or exotic species allowed for a number of interesting abilities.

The planet was fairly Earth-like, and parts of it (the human inhabited parts) were even fairly similar to some of what you might find on 20th Century Earth. But it was also an alien world which allowed for me to go in directions I couldn't go with a standard Earth setting. There were even ruins and artifacts from an older pre-Imperial civilization, which is one of the reason why the various factions were specifically interested in this little back-water world.

Adding a few more examples. . . .



I've run a game similar to AlienNation, where super-human aliens arrived on Earth (note: the aliens from AlienNation were slightly super-human, but my aliens were even more so). The PCs played some of these super-beings trying to adapt to life on Earth.




And I have contemplated running a game based around the premise of an alien invasion of super brainy aliens. These living brains still craved physical stimulation and lived vicariously through less advanced species. So, these aliens took to setting up games played with local pawns (captured humans).

When the regular pawns became boring they decided to augment their pets in various ways, using their super-technology (genetic manipulation, cyber-ware, and bio-tech). The PCs were some of these augmented super people who had escaped from their captors (and were both on the run, and working to fight back against the aliens)



Also, I once played in a game where the PCs were super-mercs, doing various military ops. That one was set in a more standard super-hero universe, but the characters were doing different sorts of things than what you'd normally see in most comic books.

Quote from: RPGPundit;410163Actually, you really, really do.
I was thinking more along the lines of campaigns that were not just "costumed supers in a silver/copper/bronze-age context fighting costumed bad guys".

What I want to know is if someone's ever done anything like my Legion game, or Heroes, or Watchmen, or supers in a really unusual setting, or modern-day costumed supers with a twist you'd never be likely to see in a mainstream comic book.

RPGPundit

I think Comics have done it all now themselves though, from Elizabethan supers in 1602, to anarchist supers in The Invisibles, to anti-facist dictators supers in V for Vendetta, to anti-establishment magical supers in HellBlazer.

I really think that comics have covered all the angles I mean look at he characters in the Authority for goodness sakes.

I ran Necessary Evil for Savage Worlds, except the aliens were more horrific, the Atlantean's almost Lovecraftian, and the villains much more gritty and serial killer-types. Costumes were less about spandex and more about trench coats, BDUs and balaclavas. It was cool.

Sadly it lasted a whopping one and a half sessions. I made the mistake of buying Realms of Cthulhu for Savage Worlds - it needed to be run. Hastur demanded it.

-=Grim=-