Inspiration for a new campaign

[fredrik_nilsson]

Our group has lost a player to work abroad for a few months, so during the summer I shall run a short Champions adventure for the remaining players. They have no HERO System experience at all, but they still want to test the system as much as possible. If this short campaign turns out as we hope, then we might start with a larger campaign after the group is reunited.

 

The campaign will primarily be run bi-weekly, and the group will probably be reunited sometime in September. According to my math skills, the campaign will be approximate ten sessions long.

 

The test group will consist of me and three players. Their initial choices as characters are:

 

Player One: A character reminding of Gambit, but with some of Longshot’s luck

Player Two: A mentalist

Player Three: A skulker

 

What I want to achieve is the following:

 

1. Show the players some of the potentials of the HERO System

2. Give an introduction to the Champions Universe

3. Show a few of the heroes and villains of CU

 

The players asked for a campaign in the same style as X-men, so the villains of this campaign should primarily be CU villains reminding of X-men villains.

 

Can someone give me some inspiration for this?

[JakSpade]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

My current campaign revolves around a secret government project that stems from intelligence gathered from the Germans during WWII. The Germans were working on a super soldier formula (were they successful?), and the Americans stole it and decided to continue the research.

 

The Americans were successful in their efforts during the 1950s in producting the first superhumans, but their powers were unstable, or hard to control. With further research (genetic manipulation, crossbreeding, and nanotechnology), the second "generation" (in the 1970s) and the third generation (in the 1980s) were created with more stable powers.

 

Sometime after this, however, one of the scientists involved in the project became more interested in selling the technology instead of leaving it to the government to control. The government gained wind of his plans, and tried to assassinate him. He survived, and was able to destroy the secret base, steal the research, and scatter the test subjects to the wind. Now the government is trying to recover from this serious breach in security.

 

The player characters are just discovering that they are the children (or grandchildren) of the Prometheus Project. Who really knows how many other children are out there, and what kind of special abilities that they possess. This could go several ways...

 

1) The government wishes to hunt down the test subjects and their children...

2) The "children" of the project begin to locate one another and form groups, either for good or evil...

3) The "grandfathers/mothers" of the project decide that the government needs a wakeup call, and decide to make their presence felt...

 

I hope this helps...

Jak

[fredrik_nilsson]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

Thanks for the help.

 

Before I decided on X-Men (I might change again) I had this idea of running a time travel game based on (most people would call it a ripp off) the magazine where the Avengers find Captain America.

 

In the "based on" campaign I thought about having the players travel back in time (or to another diemsion) where Captain Patriot were still active. Looking at his write-up in CU I still haven't come up with an idea why they would do that (besides the familiar feeling). Still, the write-up says he might need to be improved in a post-WW2 game.

[Crackerjacker]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

The 3 man team of a skulker, a gambit type, and a mentalist seems a bit shady to me...

 

an idea that Im getting from it is that theyre proffesional super-saboteurs. For instance they would never wanna face Dr.Destroyer, but they might take a job to sabotage his latest technomystical weapon of mass destruction. It's an ideal team, with the skulker facilitating infiltration, the gambit type being the fighter, and the mentalist who depending on their psychic powers will probably be redundant of one of the other two.

 

Mercenary supers who specialize in sabotaging devices, plans, ect of supervillains.

[Chuckg]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

One word.

 

Planetary.

[TheEmerged]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

Here's a thought I've had juggling in my mind for a while. Begin with a cosmic event, and as a result of that event people find themselves empowered/emerged/erupted -- whatever you want to call the arrival of superpowers.

 

Now, I've done a dozen of campaigns to this point. Here's the twist that I think might work very well for an "intro to HERO" campaign.

 

Instead of generic empowerment, people are blatantly and obviously recieving power sets of fictional characters. So you have someone who is obviously Spiderman, someone that is obviously Doom, someone that is obviously Gambit, and so forth -- except that physically (and usually mentally) they remain the people they were before.

 

You'd have the "world not yet used to powers" aspect that IMO is one of the elements that seperates the X-Men from the rest of their universe. You wouldn't have to worry about a long history because the powers just arrived (one of the strengths of an Emergence campaign). Yet you could still have the players operating with known power sets *without* having to worry as much about expectations ("Dude, how did I get pulled off that wall -- that NEVER happens to Spidey" -- "You just haven't learned how to stick properly yet").

 

My current group is satisfied with our current direction or I'd be trying this one myself

[freakboy6117]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

Hmm I think you could go with something a bit like the current mystique comic.

 

Charles Xavier leader of the X-men has his semi public team designed to deal with obvious threats and convince a wry public of the mutant minorities good intentions. Meanwhile unbeknownst to anyone he has a secret covert operations team who sabotage and destroy anti mutant programs.

 

So now the teams master tactician/wealthy benefactor has gathered

together a group of less than wholesome supers to do things the public team could not!

 

Lets see

blackjack

tow handed blaster toting with john woo style acrobatic moves and luck powers

Sort of gambit longshot and grifter combined

 

shadow stalker

shadow wielding Night crawler/Shadowcat combination. Maybe powers like wall crawling and de-solidification only through shadows and the ability to generate shadow fields.

 

MR. No-one

mentalist with powerful metal illusions and psionic disguise also team tactician and communicator.

[Sketchpad]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

Hmm ... X-Men themed, eh? Well, with a three man team, a strike team could work. Maybe include a fourth character as a NPC to add some flavor to the team ... but have them either working for a shadow agency that has a VERY public front (which they work at in their secret ID) or go the school route and make them younger students trying to impress some teachers. Either way, I'd make a makeshift package deal for the patron organization and ask the players to make sure they have it in their creation progress.

As for villains ... Gravitar is a shoe-in for Magneto ... plus, using people like Ogre and Menagerie could emulate a Brotherhood feel (though may require some tweaking if you go with the mutant angle). Keep in mind, the X-Men stories are about fitting in and some of the darker sides of humanity ... keep the game in the shadows, but becareful about loosing your sight It should always be fun ... when it stops being fun, it needs to change

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

When dealing with a limited-run campaign, you'll want to have a very specific objective driving it; a clear goal which the heroes can achieve in the time allotted. In the case of an X-Men style game, you usually have the characters attempting to avoid persecution by the government and/or a powerful secret organization, while still attempting to help people. To me that says that the focus of the campaign will be to try to defeat the persecutor, or at least get it off the characters' back. The heroes' opponents usually have a reason to want them alive rather than dead, possibly for study and duplication of their abilities.

 

What I'd suggest is that the characters have a common origin which ties them to their main nemesis in the campaign. Some possibilities include:

 

The PCs are former "students" of PSI who have escaped. They're aware of PSI's control of powerful figures in the campaign city and seek to expose them to force PSI to go underground;

 

The PCs were potential members of the War Machine augmented by the Warlord's technology, but discovered a particularly destructive plan by the Warlord that they can't condone and feel they must stop;

 

The PCs were creations of Teleios who escaped his labs and he wants to recover them, or perhaps were created with false memories and don't yet know their origins. They want to force Teleios to leave them alone, and perhaps to free other of his creations.

 

If you want to showcase more CU characters, you could combine the plots involving some of these characters. For example, Teleios may have created the characters on "order" from the Warlord; or PSI may have learned that the Warlord has developed tech to induce mental powers, and wants to study them as much as the Warlord.

 

If the characters are known to have been associates of one of these villains/groups in the past, they may also run afoul of law-enforcement groups such as PRIMUS, UNTIL or a local superhero team. They might try to convince the forces of good to help them defeat their villainous persecutor.

 

I hope there's something there you can use.

[Ghost who Walks]

Re: Inspiration for a new campaign

 

Haven't read the X-Men in years, something I'm happy to say.

There are so many elements to the X-Men "theme", you may want to be a bit more specific.

 

 

Assuming you have Champions Universe, I would set the campaign in the past.

Find an event in the timeline that appeals to you, and flush it out, either here or yourself.

 

Players new to the Hero system won't be familiar with it, and it will.

 

Assuming the players like the Hero system, when your gaming group gets back together, they may decide to keep it. In which case, ou move the campaign to the present, and make their old characters NPC mentor types.

 

With the characters they have, I would suggest wither well balenced solo villains that they have to cooperate to defeat, or groups of agents/normals.

 

If you don't like the past setting idea, there is always the old VOICE-style scenario.

 

An NPC Hero team is ambushed and killed/hospitalized by a villain team, reasons unkonwn. The surviving NPC heroes recruit the new-hero players to bolster their numbers, so they can get revenge against the villains, and find out why they did it.