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How much worldbuilding?


Chris Goodwin

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I'm starting up a Champions game soon, and I'd like to get some guidance and input.  If you're not using a prepublished setting, how much worldbuilding do you do?  

 

Having a stable of villains and NPC heroes is probably a given.  Aside from that, on a scale from 1 (wing it all) to 10 (everything in fine detail), how much setting do you pre-create?

 

I have a tendency to start with wide brush strokes and then find things that interest me and go into weird detail, but they often come out unsatisfying to me.  I'm thinking start with just the basics and let the PCs Complications flesh out more, but half of my players are new to RPGs and all of them are new to Champions, so I'm doing most of the chargen anyway.  I'm trying to get story input from them on backgrounds and the like, but what does Herodom Assembled think?

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Do enough to give the players an idea of what kind of world it is.  If it's our world and superpowers just appeared 5 minutes ago, then that's all they really need to know.  If superpowers have been around since the 1930s, then they probably need some kind of history lesson.  Are there fake cities in this world?  Fake countries?  Are there evil organizations that the public knows about?  Was the world ever invaded by aliens?  Are there mutants?  Do people hate them?  Basic questions like that need to be answered.

 

There's little point in fully crafting an entire campaign world, all the way down to the favorite hangout of the local superteam in Terra Haute, Indiana, unless your game actually takes place in Terra Haute, Indiana.  You run the danger of defining things so well that there's no longer any room for the players to affect the world.  Worldbuilding in a game should be a shared process involving both the GM and the players.  You may not have any ideas for evil occult groups in your world, but one of your players thinks that would make a great element of his backstory.  The more people and the more ideas you have involved, the more diverse your game will feel.

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Choose a SETTING familiar to the PLAYERS and GM. Young Justice, Teen Titans Go!, etc... 

 

Choose  ORIGINS of SUPERPOWERS. 

 

Choose IMPORTANCE OF SUPERHEROES. Does the Justice League exist? Are there Avengers or X-Men?

 

Choose a META PLOT for the campaign. (Battle vs. Hydra, Keeping 084s out of the Bad Guys hands, etc,,,)

 

Highlight one or two PLAYER SUB-PLOTS per session. (Hunteds, Watcheds, DNPCs, or something you liked about the character's story or something you know the PLAYER enjoys.Say Pirate themed Bad Guys for the Swashbuckler?) 

 

This is usually where I start. The PLAYER's CHARACTER's run rough shod over anything more detailed. (The Bad Guys in my Champions of Vancouver campaigns were supposed to be VIPER, but a random mini series encounter with VOICE changed the entire campaign Meta Plot. 

 

 

QM

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I've pretty much just run generic, with a default to the 3e and 4e Champions world characters. Likewise with the campaign I played in with another group.

 

In both cases pretty much everyone "got" superheroes and were happy to play characters that fitted in well, and liked playing off genre tropes. A lot of tribute characters amongst the NPC heroes (my villains tended to be original aside from ones out of HERO products). Aside from naming the campaign cities, there wasn't too much groundwork done in either campaign. Worth noting that both campaigns pre-date 4e by many years and developed without the 4e campaign design parts of the system. Both myself and the other GM largely use a seat-of-the-pants style (I learned it from him :)

 

I did a lot more design work for later campaigns with a group in another city. One was based out of the Channel Isle of Jersey, so I built a full team of French heroes as well as doing a fair bit of research on the area. The other was a Golden Age campaign, for which I built a fictional city in New Jersey (Jefferson City) and (for the first time) worked to a strict timeline keeping track of days. One of the PCs had powers affected by whether the Moon and/or Venus were above the horizon, so I obtained that data for 1941 for that location. Also did a one-page newspaper between sessions to add colour (The Jefferson City Journal) which ran to four issues and has been a bloody good artefact to remind me of what we did :)

 

Chris, one big question, more important than your players' experience with RPGs or Champions or HERO, is what are their expectations of Superheroes? Are they old farts like me that harken back to the 1980's and still remember Crisis of Infinite Earths as a new thing? Or are they all about the MCU and Netflix shows?

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And lo there shall come a world.

 

Yes if your not doing a heroes start now a stable of npc heroes s a given. And villains whenever you start. But don't neglect criminal orginizations. I prefer at least three so that they can each have different styles. For instance there will usually be a mystic/magic using one. True I might not get any pcs with a trace of magic around them, so they ignore the group. But at least their there to throw a different sort of challenge at the heroes.

 

Next you need to consider npcs. First the ones the charecters will come into play with often. Not knowing how you plan to use the heroes I can't make a list, but a beat cop, or news reporter they run into frequently would be a good idea. You also need to consider the city itself. In most comics the city's mayor rarely comes into things, but you should know who they are and what their like.

 

Now we come to the city itself. Where is it? That will have a great effect. If you set it in Kansas it probably won't be a 4 million large city with a big harbor district. Personally I like to keep my options open so I'm vauge about where it is. I also include a harbor/river, airport, train station, sports teams, and stadium. Then you need to consider neighborhoods. This gets into your detail question. In one game I knew the name of the poor area, and the exact street it started one. In another I just knew the areas name.

 

Next you need to consider the social groups/ heroes. Yes I know you don't have any heroes yet, but you need to consider them anyway. At least one will probably be a tech guy. So knowing the names of a few of the city's biggest tech companies is a good idea. What I like to do is break out Millenium city or another Champs setting book, and make sure I have three or four listings for each subgroup like business world, entertainment world etc.

 

Finally any special facets. Is there a giant statue in a park, outside a park? I had one city with a pseudo castle mostly used by film companies and renaissance fairs, but available for rent

 

As to how much detail. Start easy. Name the leading tech company and it's ceo. If no one makes a hero with tech skills, it can go to the back of the fill in the details list. If someone makes a character who works there move it to the front. But no matter how much detail you include you'll find you didn't include enough. I had one player who had a contact with a beat cop. They went to talk to him, and brought along another hero. I had him keeping an eye on some gang bangers when they arrived. The second hero immediately asked exactly how many people were in the gang. Figuring a beat cop would only keep track of how many were on his beat not over the entire city, I didn't make up a number and just had him say not sure. The hero then demanded to know why the police weren't keeping a closer eye on the gang problem. He just gave her an odd look ad pointed at the gang he was watching.

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Before character generation, I'll create a list of potential campaign elements. It won't be detailed, pretty much a bullet-list of possible items. For example:

 

Heroes:

  • Hardshell - powered armor
  • the Observer - gadgeteer, specializing in surveillance
  • Aquila Negro - luchador-themed martial artist

Villains:

  • BASILISK - reptile-themed organized crime
  • Dr Hyperion - mad scientist

Ambiguous:

  • Liberty Squad - Captain Liberty, Bulletman, and Templar. Tea-Partiers with superpowers
  • Project Herakles - US Government super-soldier program

 

If the players display interest in something, it gets more detail. I'll also incorporate elements that players come up with.

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I'm starting up a Champions game soon, and I'd like to get some guidance and input.  If you're not using a prepublished setting, how much worldbuilding do you do?  

 

Having a stable of villains and NPC heroes is probably a given.  Aside from that, on a scale from 1 (wing it all) to 10 (everything in fine detail), how much setting do you pre-create?

 

I have a tendency to start with wide brush strokes and then find things that interest me and go into weird detail, but they often come out unsatisfying to me.  I'm thinking start with just the basics and let the PCs Complications flesh out more, but half of my players are new to RPGs and all of them are new to Champions, so I'm doing most of the chargen anyway.  I'm trying to get story input from them on backgrounds and the like, but what does Herodom Assembled think?

 

 

The big decision you first have to make is how long superheroes have been around.  If your group is one of the first, then you can use the "real" world for they way things are, and add things as the game progresses.  You can introduce things like villains, evil organization, and secret government agencies as the time goes on.

 

If superheroes have been around a while then do an short outline of their history, no more then one or two pages.  This will be information that everyone who lives in this world would know.  Details will come during play as the heroes interact with both allies and enemies.

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I run a very episodic Champions campaign.  I always use the setting of 'modern USA', in the city the gaming group lives in, with the addition of supers who have been around a long time.  It is a mashup of CU + Marvel.  Since I have mostly lived in the mid-west we don't have the issue of running into 'big name superhero groups'.  The players have fought Viper, Cobra (offshoot of Viper), Wreaking Crew, a bunch of villains from the Champions villains books, etc.  I basically check out what is going on locally, tie in a supervillain or group to that event and aim the players on their way.

 

The last session involved the return of Cobra and his minions showing up at the PRIDE parade (they were their to kidnap people and try and take down the heroes once and for all).  The battle all took place in a park so the PCs had lots of NPCs to deal with plus all kinds of interesting landscape (trees, bushes, etc) to deal with.  Snipers in trees and bushes were fun.

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One reason I tend to wing it and not over-plan is so that Hunteds and DNPCs get their time in the sun. Since some players may or may not be there for a particular session, it's better to leave some wiggle room to tweak the plan.

 

Plus, of all genres, Superheroes probably has the greatest potential for players breaking the scenario. 

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No set rule for me. Always a matter for discussion with the player as to what they want... I've even used the "fill in the blank" approach where the particular hunted isn't defined until we've started play. But I've also just picked an appropriate character out of an Enemies book. One player wanted to be hunted by his evil twin.

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Thanks for the feedback, all.  :)  We hit the stopping point for our D&D campaign yesterday, so I'm now in Champions mode!  

 

 

Chris, one big question, more important than your players' experience with RPGs or Champions or HERO, is what are their expectations of Superheroes? Are they old farts like me that harken back to the 1980's and still remember Crisis of Infinite Earths as a new thing? Or are they all about the MCU and Netflix shows?

 

MCU pretty much.  We've all seen enough of the films and shows to get the general tone and feel.  I'm using that as my touchstone.  

 

 

Do you already have a full roster of players, Chris?  

 

I do, yes.  Six players plus me as GM; that's about all I can handle. 

 

 

Actually Hunteds are interesting. Do you require the heroes to take one of your premades, they can or make their own, make their own and give you a general description, or make their own give you a name and leave it to you?

 

All of the above.  This is pretty much how I and all of the GMs I've ever played with have done it.  

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I tend to worldbuild a lot. Nevertheless, I began my first Champions campaign with nothing but the PCs and about a dozen villains. (One of them was Demonologist, before I thought of the Devil's Advocates, so good on me, I guess.) I created more villains and expanded the universe as I needed it and as I was interested. Many early ideas were dropped over time and replaced, but overall I think it worked out pretty well.

 

Eventually I found I had a lot of supernatural characters and setting development, so I focused on that with the "Keystone Konjurors" campaign, which became the playtest campaign for Ultimate Supermage. But I never planned on that when I started.

 

I did a lot more prep work with my current (well, on-hold) campaign, but that's because I wanted to do something other than another "Heroes Of The City" campaign. If your players just want to give Champions a shot, and have no particular desire what direction the campaign should go, I suggest starting as I did: Come up with a dozen or so villains and some scenarios for them to appear in, and see what develops.

 

Dean Shomshak

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I think for a champions campaign you can go super simple on the worldbuilding, mostly because the world is 90% built already: its the world.  Each adventure you can build on it, but you're really not going to need a ton of content right away.  Its fun to know the whole history and why people have powers and all that but its really irrelevant for the game in almost every situation.

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The other question is once you've made the world how much do you tell the players? I tend to end up with 20 pages of notes about all sorts of things other then the villains, I feel bad not giving the players everything because you never know what might inspire a player. By the same token the players have at least a general idea of what they want to play. They don't want to have to do homework reading about the 4th manager of the biggest bank who has ulcers hates, his cousin, and will be a jerk to them for the five minutes they'll interact five adventures from now. 

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It's interesting for me at the moment as I'm doing a twenty year update of an old campaign and working out what has happened to my old NPC and PC rosters since we last played, so I AM doing a lot more world building than usual :)

 

Even so, it mostly just comes down to "active, retired or dead?" and if they've had kids.

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I haven't run a Champions game before but all of my campaigns sort of follow the same general lack of structure. You touched upon having a Rogue's Gallery. I've heard tales of a random character generator for Champions somewhere. Might be good to build up a few personalities that can be built with those random characters.

 

Beyond that, I have some sort of meta-plot idea that I can work into the ongoing adventures. From there, I wing a huge amount of the game. On your 1-10 scale, I fall around 3 or maybe 4. I am nowhere near to 10. Player decisions, speculations, and expressed interests drive my campaigns a lot.  

 

Other people dropped in some good ideas about understanding your world and how the characters fit into it. 

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Probably one of the main differences between traditional Superheroes and other genres is that the major opposition (supervillians) are ideally as unique and colourful as the heroes, are just as hard to kill off (if not more so) and are expected to come back later on. In many respects it resembles professional sports and circus entertainment more than real crimefighting or combat... it's probably no coincidence that Pro Wrestling takes a LOT of cues from comic book fights. Or that the traditional cape and tights costumes were adopted from those of circus strongmen and acrobats. Robin the Boy Wonder is even *explicitly* from a circus acrobat family.

 

And even with a more modern campaign, a lot of these genre conventions survive.

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I haven't run a Champions game before but all of my campaigns sort of follow the same general lack of structure. You touched upon having a Rogue's Gallery. I've heard tales of a random character generator for Champions somewhere. Might be good to build up a few personalities that can be built with those random characters.

 

There was one in Champions III that probably could be adapted. A few months ago I experimented with using the 6e superhero gallery as a random generator, and posted the results. (The characters were playable, but there were too many items that picking martial maneuvers or skills to make it a viable random generator.)

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Players vary in how much they care about setting background and detail. Some players will read through your world notes looking for clues to a villain's secret weakness or the real story behind some big event. Others will be angry if the PCs fail to stop a villain plot because they didn't read the notes and therefore didn't know crucial information that you thought the characters would know about the villains. They want a fast, fun game, not homework.

 

One of my friends found a way to pass along information that I thought was pretty fun: Theme lists of NPCs, such as "Five Bad Guys Who Hit Really Hard," or "Top Ten Super-Scientists." It helped that he is a genius at describing fun, distinctive characters with not a lot of words. I've used the schtick myself.

 

Dean Shomshak

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Players vary in how much they care about setting background and detail. Some players will read through your world notes looking for clues to a villain's secret weakness or the real story behind some big event. Others will be angry if the PCs fail to stop a villain plot because they didn't read the notes and therefore didn't know crucial information that you thought the characters would know about the villains. They want a fast, fun game, not homework.

 

One of my friends found a way to pass along information that I thought was pretty fun: Theme lists of NPCs, such as "Five Bad Guys Who Hit Really Hard," or "Top Ten Super-Scientists." It helped that he is a genius at describing fun, distinctive characters with not a lot of words. I've used the schtick myself.

 

Dean Shomshak

 

I like that. I did something similar in the form of a newspaper front page for one of the Golden Age campaigns. As well as reporting the previous sessions' events and some foreshadowing, I'd throw in hints about well known characters. Not always accurate, mind you - it WAS just a newspaper, even though some of the reporters were supers and had inside information.

 

Keeping up with the times, you could do a Superhype! webpage or UNTIL public database.

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In the past I've made some use of CU organizations and notable villains, but mostly home-brewed campaign stuff.  Currently, it's 100% homebrew, though obviously there are homage NPC heroes/villains "with the serial numbers filed off".  If you feel like the campaign won't last beyond a year, it might make sense to mostly use CU stuff.  If you foresee a long term game, it can be really rewarding to DIY.  

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Remember that Retroactive Continuity (AKA "RETCON") is your friend.  The best example of this is how SHIELD is introduced in the Marvel Cinematic Universel in Iron Man.  Agent Coulson appears after Tony Stark's rescue, and it seems that SHIELD is a secret organization that is unknown to the general public.  However as the series went on we see that SHIELD not only has a Helicarrier, an Aircraft Carrier, and a huge headquarters in Washington, D.C..

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