First Supers in the World campaigns

[nexus]

What are some of potential pitfalls of a campaign where the PCs are some of the first superhuman beings to appear in their world? Has anyone run one of these games long term? What were some of the high and low points?

[Trebuchet]

We've been running one of those since 1992. The game universe started with the first public appearance of metahumans in February 2000, caught on camera by the BBC as they rescued the Duke of Edinburgh from IRA terrorists.

Upside:

No long-existing anti-supers organizations.

No pre-determined reaction by the authorities.

No anti-supers laws.

A chance for the PCs to decide for themselves whether they want to be JLA-like heroes, little known Defenders types, or hunted-like-the-X-Men.

Downside:

No legislation or guidelines on how the authorities will react, so you have to make that up as you go along.

No long running threads to pick up.

Few if any good Hunteds. (We got around that in my campaign by having metahumans secretly operate for several years before they were "outed." Also most Hunteds in our campaign are organizations rather than individuals.)

Deciding just how may supers are in your campaign. (We settled on about 1500, including supers based on training and/or technology.)

Determining a (the?) source of superpowers.

[OddHat]

1) No institutions set up, so governments can't deal with the problems at first.

2) Supers are deeply part of our pop-culture. It can be very hard in a First Suers campaign to avoid some pop-culture-ref problems, if such things would mess with the tome of your game.

3) Some tone issues. How do you enforce no killing when you can't promise players that the killers they've caught will go to Stronghold? ties into issue #1

4) Directionless games. Heroes need worthy villains, or you get weird introspection rather than action-adventure.

5) Rubber science problems. If your players are past a certain age, you need to know how they view heroic origins, and how much of what kind of rubber science they are willing to take.

That said, first supers games can be great. Just similar planning issues to those you always deal with.

[Lord Mhoram]

I ran one for nearly 11 years. Things to consider -

1) Why do they put on costumes and become superheroes.

2) What is the scale of the new superhuman population - ie how many supers are there?

3) How, and why, can people get superpowers after the intial burst of them.

4) If supermagery is allowed, why is there a sudden increase in powers in the supermages.

Other things that are cool about this kind of game... the characters can become the classic comic book archetypes (Urban Trickster, The Female! superhero, The brooding detective, the selfless one, the patriot ect). By about 2/3 of the length of my campaign, I realized that the players had pretty much covered all of the archtypes.

The Heroes can mean something - sometimes (especially in the CU) the bad guys seem to outnumber/outpoint the good guys. In a powers are new situtation the Heroes can be the best/strongest around right away.

No mutants. Powers just started, so you can't have mutants. This could be a good or a bad thing. For me it was a good thing.

Building vilian organizations to fit the hereos. Because the villian angencies and groups will be forming right along with the heroes, you can tie them in much closer. In my campaing, Genocide showed up after about 8 years, and 4 of the inner circle were tied directly to the PCs.

[OddHat]

Best campaign I ever did was a multi-generational game tracing the first supers of each era, from the stone age to WWII.

[Kal'daka]

I have been running a game like that also for years I introduced supers into the Bab 5 universe. Granted they had Psi corp and the likes but it definatly made for interesting adventures .

[Trebuchet]

Building vilian organizations to fit the hereos. Because the villian angencies and groups will be forming right along with the heroes, you can tie them in much closer. In my campaing, Genocide showed up after about 8 years, and 4 of the inner circle were tied directly to the PCs.

After six game-years we're just starting to see the first hints of an anti-metahuman backlash by certain zealots. Our team is enormously popular worldwide, and I suspect we'll be largely immune even if "lesser" metahumans are not. But we certainly won't go so far in our campaign as Genocide in the CU or the Marvel Universe Sentinels robots. If you'll pardon a loose analogy, this is the Avengers, not the X-Men.

[lemming]

I ran mine as first having them appear in the midst of WWII with the first ones being already in the military and then a rather quick spread from there.

My current campaign (well, it would be current if I ran it...) is present day in the same world. I still don't have the whole thing worked out yet. Ain't procrastination grand?

[Michael Hopcroft]

My current campaign (well, it would be current if I ran it...) is present day in the same world. I still don't have the whole thing worked out yet. Ain't procrastination grand?

One of these days you have got to do something about procrastination.

Seriously, how much of the campaign CAN yoiu work out in advance? The players are, in a sense, manufacturing the world's history right in front of you. In a first supers camapign, how the world in genreral reacts to a phenomnon that previously only existed in popular fiction is going to be the most interesting and important Gm decision. Usually players don't like situations in which, for example, the government drafts all supers to prevent super-crime, with those who want to avoid being the lap-dgos of the governemtn forced underground. But if sueprs were to suddenyl emerge after never existing before, that would probably be the first thing governments would attempt -- especially if the villains come first.

It is generally assumed in this disucssion, though, that the first supers are heroes. Which doesn;t seem all that likely to me. i see a situation in which the first supers to emerge are villains, and then out of nowehere someone with the "hero gene" or however you want to explain the presence of powers decides he's going to protect the normals rather than opress them and becomes the first real superhero. even so he might want to do many of his heroics in secret.

Another interesting wya to do it is to take the approach of the classic superhero TV series The Greatest American Hero -- the heroes operate in secrecy because poeple don't want to believe supers are real and anyone who says "I'm a superhero" is likely to be considered insane. This could last for quite a while, until some 9/11-caliber event makes it impossible to ignore the presence of supers among us.

[OddHat]

The method I used was lifted from Farmer and Zelazny, with George R.R. Martin finishing the mix, and it can be (and has been) used in many settings, including the CU.

I had a tiny portion of the population as Supers throughout history, with a few periods of higher Super populations and a general level of 1 Super per 20 million or so normals, then added the idea that the most powerful Supers were trying to keep the world's real history a secret. That keeps the numbers tiny, and lets you explain mythology and superstition as "They weren't very good at keeping some secrets." It also lets you have centuries old secret societies, secret races, ancient artifacts, a real era of Victorian Fantastique, an era of Pulp Heroes ... all without upsetting history on the surface. The dawn of the Supers era can start with your characters (and a boom in the worldwide population of Supers for whatever reason), and when you're ready, you can start dropping hints that they are not really the first.

[assault]

Effectively, most of my games have been "first Supers in the world" ones, if only because few if any other heroes have been around.

I would have the first supers being villains. In particular, various masterminds would have begun their operations well before heroes start appearing.

If I was playing a Silver Age game, I might have a few monsters and aliens wandering about. In the Golden Age, there might be pulp heroes and villains, and probably a low key mystic world, which might suddenly become unbalanced.

What I _wouldn't_ do, is have lots and lots of supers emerging. I notice some people have suggested up to 1500 supers being around. Personally, I would go with something more like 15.

Oh, sure, if you go to the Lost City of the Mole-People, there might be thousands of "superbeings", but in the general world there would be next to none.

I would discuss the question of genre conventions with the players, so costumes and all of that would be handled in an agreed manner.

Basically, I would create the world as I needed it. If I wanted more supers in a particular scenario, I would create them.

[SKJAM!]

One thing to make sure of for a "first supers" campaign is to make sure you have a consensus in the player group as to what genre you're playing.

A couple of them I've been in have been seriously derailed because half the players choose character reactions that boggle or disgust the other half.

[Trebuchet]

The method I used was lifted from Farmer and Zelazny, with George R.R. Martin finishing the mix, and it can be (and has been) used in many settings, including the CU.

I had a tiny portion of the population as Supers throughout history, with a few periods of higher Super populations and a general level of 1 Super per 20 million or so normals, then added the idea that the most powerful Supers were trying to keep the world's real history a secret. That keeps the numbers tiny, and lets you explain mythology and superstition as "They weren't very good at keeping some secrets." It also lets you have centuries old secret societies, secret races, ancient artifacts, a real era of Victorian Fantastique, an era of Pulp Heroes ... all without upsetting history on the surface. The dawn of the Supers era can start with your characters (and a boom in the worldwide population of Supers for whatever reason), and when you're ready, you can start dropping hints that they are not really the first.

That's pretty much how we handled it in our campaign. Our longest-term badguys (and secret goodguys) are Atlanteans, some of whom pass as supers now and others who have passed as heroes and villains of legend (Gilgamesh, Merlin, Morgana le Fey, Lilith). We also have "normal" heroes who were basically costumed pulp heroes, such as Double Eagle I who fought crime in the 1930's with his twin .45 Colt autos. And anything you've seen in a movie was probably true, such as the Indiana Jones movies or The Rocketeer(Albeit their facts may have been somewhat wrong, but what can you expect from Hollywood?).

Clark Savage, Jr.; Sir John Clayton (Lord Greystoke); Dr. J. Benton Quest; Dr. Hadji Singh, and other notables all sit on the Board of Directors for the philanthropic organization which secretly funds and supports MidGuard. (We have a much bigger list, but I forgot some of them. I'll check with Mentor when he gets back in town.)

[Champsguy]

We did one of those for a little while, until it sort of fell apart (for reasons outside the game). It was a bit of a cross between a Golden Age game and an Iron Age game. We had a team of villains decide it would be a good idea to blow up Congress. Fortunately, the Superman-type character of that world was able to make it there on time and stop them. The problem comes up in that you can't just put psychotic supervillains in Stronghold--because there isn't a Stronghold. So you end up with rather unique solutions ("Well, I'll drop Captain Deathbeam on this deserted island 1000 miles from any shipping routes, and I'll drop off food once a month"). It was fun, but you've got to integrate other aspects of a superhero world relatively quickly, otherwise things start to go Iron Age really fast ("Well, no place I can put this guy where he won't escape. Guess I'll have to leave him floating in space...")

[Kristopher]

I ran one for nearly 11 years. Things to consider -

1) Why do they put on costumes and become superheroes.

2) What is the scale of the new superhuman population - ie how many supers are there?

3) How, and why, can people get superpowers after the intial burst of them.

4) If supermagery is allowed, why is there a sudden increase in powers in the supermages.

1) It all starts with a superhuman committing a crime wearing a mask. Later, someone's family gets incinerated by Firedevil because that someone stopped him from torching a senator. Pretty soon, everyone is interested in protecting their identity.

3) Depends on the origin. If the initial cause leaves behind traces, or causes an overall change in the world itself, then there's always that latent possibility for more supers to emerge.

A burst of "strange space radiation" or a mad scientist's retrovirus unleash genetic changes on the world, but the "supergenes" are recessive, and so anyone's kid could be born with powers.

Someone opens a portal to another dimension and bathes the world magical energies, thus leaving open the ongoing possibility of someone stumbling on an imbued artifact, or a latent reserve of mana that changes them, or a creature that possesses them, or whatever.

4) Maybe they've always been that powerful, but have hidden themselves for privacy and safety. The emergence of other superhuman forces brings some of them out of hiding. If you use a magical origin for all characters, then whatever triggered the creation of superhumans also increases the powers of spells and artifacts.