Revisionist superhero gaming
Oct. 24th, 2011 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brushwolfFor a while I'd been thinking about running a superhero game, but I don't think it's likely to happen, and so here's the idea and my most recent tweak to it;
Terrorists have attacked the city. These are superterrorists - spandex outfits with skull masks capable of blipping out of sight in an instant, agents of WRAITH - the World Revolutionary Army Intelligence for Theoretic Harmony is my best guess to what the acronym stands for. They have things like Wraithcycles, Wraithbone armor, the Nazgul Steed IFV, that sort of thing, you get the idea. The Wraiths have pinpointed dozens of places, some intended to make a big stink - like City Hall or the Opera - and others for practicality, such as a power distribution hub (those stealth suits burn energy like crazy, and need to recharge) or the airport (naturally these guys have their own means of getting in or out, but if that fails, they'll want a secured landing field for evacuation). Since the big-name heros are off fighting for the big-ticket targets, it falls to our little band of player characters to tackle one of the lesser targets, such as the airport.
After the airport challenge, our heros find themselves going after WRAITH agents in the wrong part of town. See, a number of years back there was a supervillain, Spectre, who created a fairly energy efficient suit which could both phase and go invisible, and he was so successful that he wound up fighting a running battle with major heros for several years, and it broke him. He disappeared. Now he's a older guy, living in a crappy hotel downtown on whatever pension and retail jobs he can get, terrified that any moment major-league superheros are going to show up and pound him again. He still has the suit, so the Wraiths are going after it. Now, to keep the enemy from obtaining a horrible new weapon our heros have to save a former-supervillain-turned-broken-old-man-with-a-drinking-problem, as well as a whole batch of innocent civilian bystanders who, in this case, are people society doesn't want to acknowledge as the good people.
Our heros keep investigating, but there just isn't any information on WRAITH out there. Someone's blacked it out. Some of the conspiracy theorist types have stuff.
The best source of information winds up being the underfunded Russian superhero organization. Once the pride of Kruschev's Soviet Union, they've been losing funding and people ever since the 70s. Some of them were actually Ukranian, Georgian or Byelorussian, and split to help those countries; at least one died bravely during Chernobyl; a few of them claimed Right of Return. There are only a few former-Soviet supers still staffing The Red Star, a star-shaped prestressed-concrete and supertech base whose central tower looms high over the surrounding Siberian forest. The campaign continues getting more multinational as our heros run into Japanese supers like the robot warrior MASAKARI, and eventually wind up working with Haiti's only superhero, Captain Zombi (whose power is invulnerability, since he's dead already). The whole thing ends with a showdown with the Wraithlord himself on WRAITH's private, artificial island in the Carribean.
The unpleasant reason for the information blackout is that WRAITH had its humble beginnings as a right-wing South American group heavily funded by the Reagan administration. For a while there I was stumped about how to possibly set a batch of superheros at odds with the US government without having that be an impassible plot block, but now I have an idea for how to pull it off. See... if the funding and super-tech going to WRAITH was slightly unofficial anyway, then people trying to cover their tracks can't go the easy official routes. There's no way they can get the Army supers involved without having to let Army Intelligence in on what they were up to back in the 80s; they definitely can't go to the FBI. Thus the government heros called in to slow down and halt the player characters are actually on loan from NOAA. (I mean... what government agency would get more mileage out of people who can call up storms from nowhere, or dive deep and surface fast without even the slightest ill effect?) So it's possible to negotiate, since the PCs win if they can convince the government sponsored heros that fighting would be a waste of NOAA manpower and funds.
Terrorists have attacked the city. These are superterrorists - spandex outfits with skull masks capable of blipping out of sight in an instant, agents of WRAITH - the World Revolutionary Army Intelligence for Theoretic Harmony is my best guess to what the acronym stands for. They have things like Wraithcycles, Wraithbone armor, the Nazgul Steed IFV, that sort of thing, you get the idea. The Wraiths have pinpointed dozens of places, some intended to make a big stink - like City Hall or the Opera - and others for practicality, such as a power distribution hub (those stealth suits burn energy like crazy, and need to recharge) or the airport (naturally these guys have their own means of getting in or out, but if that fails, they'll want a secured landing field for evacuation). Since the big-name heros are off fighting for the big-ticket targets, it falls to our little band of player characters to tackle one of the lesser targets, such as the airport.
After the airport challenge, our heros find themselves going after WRAITH agents in the wrong part of town. See, a number of years back there was a supervillain, Spectre, who created a fairly energy efficient suit which could both phase and go invisible, and he was so successful that he wound up fighting a running battle with major heros for several years, and it broke him. He disappeared. Now he's a older guy, living in a crappy hotel downtown on whatever pension and retail jobs he can get, terrified that any moment major-league superheros are going to show up and pound him again. He still has the suit, so the Wraiths are going after it. Now, to keep the enemy from obtaining a horrible new weapon our heros have to save a former-supervillain-turned-broken-old-man-with-a-drinking-problem, as well as a whole batch of innocent civilian bystanders who, in this case, are people society doesn't want to acknowledge as the good people.
Our heros keep investigating, but there just isn't any information on WRAITH out there. Someone's blacked it out. Some of the conspiracy theorist types have stuff.
The best source of information winds up being the underfunded Russian superhero organization. Once the pride of Kruschev's Soviet Union, they've been losing funding and people ever since the 70s. Some of them were actually Ukranian, Georgian or Byelorussian, and split to help those countries; at least one died bravely during Chernobyl; a few of them claimed Right of Return. There are only a few former-Soviet supers still staffing The Red Star, a star-shaped prestressed-concrete and supertech base whose central tower looms high over the surrounding Siberian forest. The campaign continues getting more multinational as our heros run into Japanese supers like the robot warrior MASAKARI, and eventually wind up working with Haiti's only superhero, Captain Zombi (whose power is invulnerability, since he's dead already). The whole thing ends with a showdown with the Wraithlord himself on WRAITH's private, artificial island in the Carribean.
The unpleasant reason for the information blackout is that WRAITH had its humble beginnings as a right-wing South American group heavily funded by the Reagan administration. For a while there I was stumped about how to possibly set a batch of superheros at odds with the US government without having that be an impassible plot block, but now I have an idea for how to pull it off. See... if the funding and super-tech going to WRAITH was slightly unofficial anyway, then people trying to cover their tracks can't go the easy official routes. There's no way they can get the Army supers involved without having to let Army Intelligence in on what they were up to back in the 80s; they definitely can't go to the FBI. Thus the government heros called in to slow down and halt the player characters are actually on loan from NOAA. (I mean... what government agency would get more mileage out of people who can call up storms from nowhere, or dive deep and surface fast without even the slightest ill effect?) So it's possible to negotiate, since the PCs win if they can convince the government sponsored heros that fighting would be a waste of NOAA manpower and funds.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-10-24 07:14 pm (UTC)