Unusual Campaign Ideas

[mallet]

We had a big wind storm here last night and I couldn't get to sleep with all the nosie, so my mind, of course, wandered into that lovely "twilight zone" of RPG campaign ideas that I will never get around to using. I came up with one and I thought I would post it here for everyone to pull apart, comment on, and the like.

 

====

 

The game would have to start out with the GM being a little bit sneaky, and at some point a few weeks before starting (maybe on a night with all the player there, but nothing really happening) the GM comes up with the idea that the group should work together and make the "perfect all-around-superhero". Then eveyone sits around and with a group discussion slowly build up what everyone will agree to be a cool, playable super-hero (Not just powers and stats, but disadvantages, personality, everything).

 

Time passes.

 

Then one night the GM says "Hey, let's start that new Champions game we have been talking about playing." Of course the players will be "But I haven't spent the last 2 weeks min/maxing points and ideas to make a superhero", but the gm just laughs and says, "Don't worry, we'll try something different this time. Lets start out like you are normals and we will roleplay your "orgin story". Sound good?" Eventually the players agree and they sit down to play...

 

GM: You wake up with a killer headache and the faint smell of smoke still lingering in your nose. Somewhere a window is broken and a strong wind rushes through the room. "Where are you?" you mutter as you slowly pull yourself to your feet. Damn, you hurt in places you didn't even know you had... Somewhere in the gloom around you other figures are slowly moving and getting up, but right at your feet is a body that is not moving. You slowly bend down to get a better look and see if he needs help. With a startled shock you leap back from the body! It can't be... It's impossible... But the body at your feet is yours! Not compreheanding you look about the room and slowly emerging from the darkness you see... yourself... 3 or 4 more exact duplicates of you. What the hell is going on?

 

At that point the GM hands out the character sheets to the player.

 

They are all the same.

 

Everyone is playing the same "Perfect All around Superhero" the group built a few weeks back.

 

Chaos insues and the campaign begins.

 

======

 

The basic story is that the players do not know what they are. Are they alternate reality versions of the same person? Are they clones? How did they get here? Was it a supervillains attack that made them? Or a scientific experiment gone wrong? And who killed the original version of themselves?

 

They all have the same memories leading up to two weeks ago, when everything goes black until the moment they woke up in the room. Talking to DNPC's shows that the hero disappeared two weeks ago and no one knows what happened to him.

 

Now the players have to get on with their lives, but with the problem of having 2-3 more versions of themselves running around town. That posh penthouse apartment, doesn't hold 4 people so well, and who is the one that gets to keep dating the Girlfriend? How do you split the money? And what will the city do with 4 or 5 idential caped avengers" running about?

 

In time they would find that their are slight differences between them in temperment and personality (because each player will play the hero differently) and when they spend xp they can spend it on different things, like one player becoming more of a brick/MA, the other a Mentalist, another a EP, or buy off disadvantages the others do not, etc... So slowly over time they will all become distinct and different heroes, but ones that all come from the same root and the same orgin that links them all together.

 

====

 

I don't know why I came up with this ides, maybe it was reading all the posts about how people always want their characters powers to be distinct, unusual, stand out from the others, etc... where what really makes a character different is how he is played and what the player using him is like (just like in comics where a different writer can make the same character very different).

 

So what are your thoughts? WOuld you GM a game like this? Play a game like this? How would you solve the problems? Would they be clones? Alternate versions?

 

And what are other strange or different campaign ideas that you have come up with in the past that you would never run (or have never gotten the right players together to run)?

[Superskrull]

Re: Unusual Campaign Ideas

 

Pretty neat idea, there. Yoink!

[Supreme Serpent]

Re: Unusual Campaign Ideas

 

I've long considered something similar:

 

"Hey, you look familiar..."

- Set in a 2099-like world. The future is here, and it's not a nice place. Evil megacorps, evil bandit lords, evil this, evil that. Characters all wake up together in big test-tube vats, as armed men are breaking in, trying to kill them. All the PC's look alike, and gradually all discover that they're all defective attempts to clone the world's former Superman-type guy. All have some strength and invulnerability, and each has one area of additional power - one has more strength/invuln, one has superspeed/flight, one has various vision powers, etc. They've been in storage for decades, hidden by party or parties unknown, until someone found out and sent people to kill them. Campaign to see if this group of half-supermen can live up to the legacy of the original and clean up the world.

 

 

Neat thread of campaign ideas here: http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36471&highlight=campaign