Variations on the standard superhero campaign

[Grow-Arm-Hair Lad]

Most Champions games I run are based in a city (usually New York) and a superhero team establishes itself (through a unifying adventure) or else the players and I establish the background of the team forming etc. before actual gameplay begins.

 

In long-running campaigns, the story is just a matter of an ever-evolving roster of heroes.

 

But there are other ways of running Champions. I enjoyed doing a campaign that was sort of like the X-Men, with heroes on the run from a government and a society that had no tolerance for superhumans.

 

What about you? Any Champions campaigns that differ greatly from the Avengers/Justice League template?

 

[Ninja-Bear]

I always wanted to run a Street level Martial Arts game.

[Rich McGee]

Not just Champions, but I tend to lean toward using one of the small local cities as an initial setting, and the PCs are often part of an official government-approved supers program designed to spread hero coverage around the country instead of having them congregate in NYC and other big cities.  The PCs are usually the only full-time heroes in town barring a true vigilante or two, with NPCs and temporary PCs passing through now and then.  Resident villainy is usually pretty minor league, or "branch offices" for a big conspiracy, with the PCs gradually facing bigger threats as they establish themselves - either attracting them to town or going afield to deal with them.

 

Been doing that with variations on and off since V&V and Champions 1e.  The most recent iterations were the Syracuse Seven based in Syracuse NY (not exactly local, but several of us had lived there in the past) and the Tri-City Foursome based in the Albany/Schenectady/Troy area.  One advantage to using an area you know IRL is saving time explaining the setting's conventional elements, and as I said on my blog post here there's a lot to be said for using IRL urban history in your game when you can.  Much easier to explain there's a heist at the GE plant when everyone at the table has driven past the place a thousand times.  You can always jam in fictional elements when you want them, and you don't have to spend time developing the mundane infrastructure and demographics and economic parts.

 

For other ideas, I like the "road trip" model where your heroes are wanderers with a shared vehicle or two and drift around the country (or planet, or galaxy as power level allows) running into trouble or trying to avoid it.  Kind of a Scooby Doo with superpowers thing.  Have also had a good time with "occult defense force" games loosely modeled on Bureau 13, which lets you draw from urban fantasy/horror tropes as well as going on the occasional gonzo interdimensional quest.

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

I ran a survival/apocalypse game where the PCs were basically using VIPER gear against supers who were villainous.  

I ran a New Mutants style school game.

Edit: I ran a Golden Age game set in 1939+ NYC but I'm not sure that is non standard.

 

I have for a long time wanted to run a low end/street super game of cops with powers as a special unit.

I played a Fantasy superheroes game in a con where the GM had to adjust the bad guys on the fly because we were demolishing them.

I never did it but I thought that running a villains game could be fun, supers working for an organization or a mastermind.

 

I never had any interest in a super high powered/cosmic game or a galactic champions game

Edited August 11 by Christopher R Taylor

[DShomshak]

My "Seattle Sentinels" campaigns were set in that city instead of NYC or other such "default" cities, but they were otherwise standard.

 

The two "Keystone Konjuror" campaigns, done as playtest for Ultimate Super-Mage and then "Ultimate Mystic/Mystic World, had the heroes all be mages of various sorts, and based in Tacoma, Washington (when they weren't in Hell, Babylon, the Congeries, or other exotic dimensions).

 

In my last campaign, "Avant Guard," the time-traveling and precognitive super-genius gadgeteer Doctor Future gathered the PCs from various futures in which one megavillain or another was destroying the world, or had already done so. While they fought regular supervillains as opportunity presented itself, their special goal was to prevent those megavillains from destroying the world. To this end, they sometimes teamed up with low-end super-criminals or even a squad from the international criminal/subversive/terrorist agency CROWN. Because even most villains don't want the end of the world.

 

Dean Shomshak
 

[Rich McGee]

1 hour ago, DShomshak said:

Because even most villains don't want the end of the world.

"Destroy the world?  But I keep all my stuff there!" 

[Doc Democracy]

A Golden Age campaign has a very different feel, there is war, death, and a need to work with the flow of history while potentially providing things where the heroes might make a difference.  Not too much though, a whole alternate history could be a LOT of work.

 

Doc

[Steve]

I ran a shorter-lived PRIMUS campaign per the 4th Edition supplement with Assault and Special Agents that I based in Las Vegas. All characters were essentially low-end supers.

 

My current Kazei 5 campaign has all the PCs built as superhumans, but they are more fit for anime cyberpunk than a standard superhero genre despite having superhuman-level abilities.

 

i also have run in the recent past a sort of friendly neighborhood superheroes group of street-level types rather than a high-flying, city-protecting superteam, and that had a different feel.

[Gauntlet]

I am currently running a campaign in the United States that has been taken over by the IHA and all the characters are mutants.

[Stanley Teriaca]

What I want to play, setting wise.

 

Western Champions: A Champions game of low level supers in a Western Hero setting. The character idea of Lady Buckskin comes from this sort of world.

 

City of Steam: An Urban Fantasy Hero slash Victorian Hero game in a Steampunk setting. Not directly designed for Champions.

 

Damsel High School: Again, not directly connected to Champions, it is a idea for a series of light novels of a comedy bent, where being a damsel in distress is a job and there is a school for that. Defently more heroic level than anything, the main character Damsella is a male student of the title school (all students have to pick a Damsel Name when they enroll). The 'game' is more role play heavy.

 

And that is lt.

[Doc Democracy]

I ran a League of extraordinary gentlemen type game.  The PCs were essentially Justice Inc characters with a single power which had to be able to be clearly articulated in a single sentence.

 

So one guy could fly faster than a train.  One guy was invulnerable to damage.  Another was invisible. The third could move through glass without breaking it.

 

It did not have to be a single power from the book, it would be as many book powers as necessary to deliver the articulated power.

 

Doc

[Stanley Teriaca]

1 hour ago, Doc Democracy said:

I ran a League of extraordinary gentlemen type game.  The PCs were essentially Justice Inc characters with a single power which had to be able to be clearly articulated in a single sentence.

 

So one guy could fly faster than a train.  One guy was invulnerable to damage.  Another was invisible. The third could move through glass without breaking it.

 

It did not have to be a single power from the book, it would be as many book powers as necessary to deliver the articulated power.

 

Doc

Question: was 'normal' weapon bought as powers or cash?

[Doc Democracy]

Normal weapons were cash, unless you wanted a weapon that always found it's way back to you.

[Gauntlet]

So... How to the rest of us get into your game Doc? 😋

[DShomshak]

Oh hey, if we don't limit ourselves to the HERO System then my "Scion High" campaign might qualify. Scion is White Wolf's game about latter-day children of mythological gods and mortals. Very much inspired by the Percey Jackson series, though it tries semi-hard not to be and, well, it's White Wolf. I sort of went back to the source (though I hadn't read any of the PJ books yet) by having the children of the gods be teens in high school -- but a contemporary school among regular humans, not some segregated "Camp Half-Blood" that's only a jumping-off-point for quests. Everyone stayed close to the towns of Avalon and Etna, a bit east of Seattle, with only a few brief visits further afield (like to Vancouver, BC and the Ghost Dance Country). Nevertheless, the characters were superhuman and got more so as the game went on. In addition to the Scions themselves, and some rival children of the gods, the cast included giants, witches, and assorted other mythic entities,

 

I began with the side premise that this was a TV show on the CW, with as much influence from Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Vampire Diaries as from mythology. Not that these fields didn't overlap easily, with lots of teen angst, rivalry and 'shipping... (A cartoon series called 6teen provided inspiration, too.)

 

I think it's the best campaign I ever ran. My players liked it a lot, too.

 

Dean Shomshak

Edited August 10 by DShomshak

[Mark Rand]

I'm going to run a play-by-post campaign set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my home town.  Since I'm still in rehab from knee replacement surgery, it'll be a while before it starts.

[Duke Bushido]

7 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

So... How to the rest of us get into your game Doc? 😋

 

Send him all your unused Experience Points.

 

 

 

[Gauntlet]

I have played into a Superheroic game where everyone's powers had to be Magic Based. I played a Master Fey who by a Wizard was transformed into a House Cat. So I had the Physical Characteristics of a House Cat and the Mental Characteristics & Magic of a Fey. He also ended up with all the disadvantages of a House Cat so I easily lost my attention to something else.

 

And Doc, I have 16 XP for you. Hopefully that's enough.

Edited August 11 by Gauntlet

[Clonus]

Bad School:  The characters are newly enrolled students in a school for teens with superhuman powers.  Many famous superheroes are graduates from it. However, the current teaching staff are encouraging a situation where the strongest students are in charge with less powerful ones expected to defer to them and teaching the students to regard the unpowered as dimwitted and in need of protection and control.  It has become a school for supervillains.  (

 

Gamma Cities:  The characters live in a world where there are more superpowered animals than humans and civilization has been reduced to a few dozen autonomous city states defended by superhuman protectors.  

 

Jannissaries:  An alien empire has a superpowered force of slave warriors made up of abductees from Earth and their descendents.  Your characters steal a starship and proceed to seek out their legendary homeworld's hidden locaiton.  

 

The Unusual Suspects:  The characters are former supervillains (but ones with scruples about killing).  They have been offered a sentence of community service, using their abilities to protect and serve the community they once damaged. 

 

 I played two of these.  One of them was pretty successful.  

[wcw43921]

On 8/9/2024 at 5:59 PM, Ninja-Bear said:

I always wanted to run a Street level Martial Arts game.

 

Have you thought about adapting the Cobra-Kai TV series?  You've got rival dojos with diametrically opposed philosophies, shifting alliances, old rivalries renewed, new rivalries instigated--and there's plenty of fight scenes.  It would work well, I think.

[Doc Democracy]

17 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

So... How to the rest of us get into your game Doc? 😋

 

How kind.  My group, over the past 20 years, have experimented with all kinds of systems and been kind enough to allow me to experiment with different styles of HERO.

 

Right now my problem is time (and being in the UK when most folk are in the US).  I should retire in 4-5 years when I should have much more time to run games.

 

7 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

And Doc, I have 16 XP for you. Hopefully that's enough.

 

Will spend it on anti-aging (though should instead go for wealth and fly over first class for a week every month).

 

Doc

 

[DShomshak]

Oh, aqnd how could I have forgotten the Heroes of UNICoRN? I started this as a pick-up game for when we couldn't get the full group of players, but it was available for other GMs to run too (and they did).

 

I was in the same setting as the Seattle Sentinels and Keystone Konjurors campaign, but for this the premise was that heroes and villains are not spread evenly around the world, so some countries have a would-be hero but no local villains, while other countries have supervillains but no local heroes. The United Nations International Crim inology Resource Network tries to remedy the situation by sending volunteer heroes to parts of the world that need them, on a temporary and ad-hoc basis. This is no CU-style high-tech and well-funded organization, though. UNICoRN consists of a small office with some filing cabinets, an outdated PC, and a Rolodex. Unofficial motto is, "The mightiest heroes we could get on short notice and no budget."

 

Some adventures were fairly standard superhero scenarios with standard-power heroes. (In fact, some got pretty grim, since the Third World can be a grim place.) Others were played for laughs with goofy heroes such as American Ninja (ninja suit also a bright flag suit) or the Mad Piper of Inverness (sonic powers with a bagpipe Focus, and "rreal mad aboot crrime!").

 

Dean Shomshak

[Duke Bushido]

 

 

 

On 8/9/2024 at 7:27 PM, Rich McGee said:

 

 there's a lot to be said for using IRL urban history in your game when you can.  Much easier to explain there's a heist at the GE plant when everyone at the table has driven past the place a thousand times.  You can always jam in fictional elements when you want them, and you don't have to spend time developing the mundane infrastructure and demographics and economic parts.

 

I have tried this over and over- thinking it to be something of a shortcut to world building or getting everyone on the same page.  I wont claim to have done it hundreds of times-  realistically, over the years, _maybe_ as much as thirty times.

 

I have never, not even once, been able to get the players interested in playing in a real world location.  Even if I rebranded everything, once one of them noticed "hey!  This central Atlanta / Savannah / Jacksonville / wherever," they just lost interest.

 

So I stick with what my first Champions GM (the oft-mentioned Jim) taught me: a thing he called the DC approach, and we use fictional locations.

 

I mulled of it for years- why real world locations have never worked in our group, and it kind of hit me:  most comics (as far as I know, anyway) seem to be set in New York of Chicago or Los Angeles---

 

And from the POV and personal experience of my players in rural Georgia, those _are_ fictional places.  They are just as unreal as Metropolis or Gotham or Central City.  It is part of the feel that the associate with superheroes: a wondrous and dangerous place wholly unlike the places I know.

 

 

Now I want to reiterate that this has been _my_ experience with _my_ various groups, drawn from more-or-less the same area.  The fact that people still pitch this approach suggests on the whole, it works to at least some degree; I have just been an outlier.

 

On the plus side, I have also learned that building wxonomic infrastructures and such is, by and large, unnecessary, as the players don't really seem to care.  They want thw tech companies, the weapons and,chemical,companies, and who might be helpful and who might be secret villains, and that is about it.  After that: where do I live,and where do I work and where can I go for secret ID stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

On 8/9/2024 at 7:27 PM, Rich McGee said:

 

For other ideas, I like the "road trip" model where your heroes are wanderers with a shared vehicle or two and drift around the country (or planet, or galaxy as power level allows) running into trouble or trying to avoid it. 

 

 

For a minute, I thought you were talking about Traveller. 

 

though tossing out that Scooby Foo comment has put certain historic Traveller campaigns under a new microscope!"   

 

We do seem to share one tendency, though, and that is starting small and growing the heroes and their stories.

 

 

 

[Rich McGee]

17 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

And from the POV and personal experience of my players in rural Georgia, those _are_ fictional places.  They are just as unreal as Metropolis or Gotham or Central City.  It is part of the feel that the associate with superheroes: a wondrous and dangerous place wholly unlike the places I know.

I've had the most luck using the nearest "big" city (it barely breaks the 6-figure mark at night when the state workers go home) with my rural groups, which probably weren't any more familiar with urban life when we were young and what few of them are left are only slightly more so now.  No one wants to actually set a game in our podunk home towns (although we did wreck our share of local landmarks in our fictional youth) but Albany is just close enough that everyone knows it a little bit while it still feels kind of exotic to the folks who never actually lived there.  Other groups got a kick out of using my (current) college town and campus as a setting.  None of them were played straight - there were always fictional elements shoved in beyond just the PCs and their foes - but there were enough recognizable bits to save a lot of explanations.

 

Of course, it might help that Albany is a freaking weird town with a totally out-of-place vanity worthy of Nazi Germany project stuck in the middle of it, basically right next to the slums and what passes for a business district.  Schenectady (the next city over) is only a little less screwy, with a gargantuan half-empty industrial plant in the form of General Electric dominating downtown.  hove some supervillain lairs, fictional gangs and conspiracy groups in and it's pretty good turf to run low-powered supers in.

 

Not every group buys in to the idea of staying local, but it's an option to keep in mind.

17 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

For a minute, I thought you were talking about Traveller. 

 

though tossing out that Scooby Foo comment has put certain historic Traveller campaigns under a new microscope!"   

There are fewer differences between classic Traveller shenanigans and low-powered space supers stories than most people think.  Just substitute "better tech than the local schmucks" with "superpowers" and you can do a lot of the same hooks.  If you're on a Tech 8 planet that second-hand suit of battledress is a superpower, and the difference between a good blaster hero and an FGMP-14 is pretty thin.

17 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

We do seem to share one tendency, though, and that is starting small and growing the heroes and their stories.

RPGs just plain work well on a growth model, even when you start as a hero rather than a zero.  I find everyone's more invested when they earn their reps as world-class supers through their in-game deeds instead of just starting off as respected JLA/Avengers members or the equivalent. 

Edited August 12 by Rich McGee

[Christopher R Taylor]

Another game I thought would be interesting would be for the PCs to start as base level agents for VIPER, going on missions and dodging superheroes.  Over time they could get new experimental gear, be a choice for one of VIPER's villain-making programs, etc.  Maybe even take over their own nest.