Hermit Posted November 1, 2012 Report Share Posted November 1, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Astro City: Local Heroes TPB Roustabout QM Astro City is great material for any Champions game master imo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted November 1, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 1, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Astro City is great material for any Champions game master imo I agree heartily. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ranxerox Posted November 2, 2012 Report Share Posted November 2, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Astro City: Local Heroes TPB Roustabout QM Great story. It was the first thing I thought of when I read this threads title. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
psyber624 Posted November 2, 2012 Report Share Posted November 2, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? What is it from? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheQuestionMan Posted November 2, 2012 Report Share Posted November 2, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Astro City: Local Heroes TPB - Roustabout http://www.astrocity.us/cgi-bin/index.cgi?page=features/collections/localheroes.html Cheers QM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hawknight Posted November 2, 2012 Report Share Posted November 2, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? When did they move from Vermont? DOH! Been so long I forgot where they were located. Geography not my KS:11- Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sinanju Posted November 2, 2012 Report Share Posted November 2, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Pick up most any comic book involving superheroes and supervillains, and they all seem to take place in a city, often New York or the like. What about the suburbs and rural communities? Could a successful Champions campaign be run that was centered in a suburb like Irvine, California or a rural town like Oxford, Nebraska? Have you ever been involved in a campaign that was not set in a big city? I proposed such a game once on Jack Butler's Global Guardians site, though ultimately I decided not to pursue it. But it may yet turn up in my fiction. The Prineville campaign (based in Prineville, in central Oregon) would have been a Teen Champions game. All the PCs would have been locals who were discovering that they all had superpowers. There was a reason for that. Decades earlier, a supervillain with almost complete control of his own body (down to the genetic level) had "retired" there after one too many thumpings by superheroes. He could manipulate his own DNA to give himself superpowers, and could, with time and close contact, do the same to others. But doing so was--unsurprisingly--extremely dangerous. Unlike your classic mad scientist who eagerly tries out his nifty new scheme on himself, he took a different route. Posing as a local doctor, he manipulated the DNA of children in the wombs of many patients during "exams". He also sometimes masqueraded as different womens' husbands/lovers and impregnated them, doing the same. Prineville developed a reputation for having an unnaturally high number of stillbirths and birth defects. Local, state and federal investigators have studied the place extensively, but have been unable to pinpoint any cause. Not chemical contamination, not radiation, nothing--recurring rumors of "radioactive meteorites" to the contrary notwithstanding. Still, the town has a relatively large number of teens and young adults with genetic maladies ranging from mild to severe, as well a lot of kids who died at birth or of complications later in life. But it was not in vain--the supervillain learned a lot from these experiments. The newest crop of kids (the PCs and their peers) have a much lower rate of bad mutations, and many are beginning to evidence actual superpowers. The supervillain is starting to find excuses to examine these kids and learn exactly what traits they possess, and how to duplicate them. The kids, meanwhile, are dealing all the normal issues of adolescence PLUS superpowers and all the problems they can entail. (This was, essentially, the Smallville concept, only with a group of heroes not just one.) Eventually they were going to get enough clue to piece together their common origin and have to deal with him. For extra bonus angst, some of the PCs with romantic feelings toward one another might discover that they were half-siblings, who shared a supervillainous father despite what they--and their parents--had believed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clonus Posted November 2, 2012 Report Share Posted November 2, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? The heroes themselves can be a magnet for many villains and, for that matter, neutrals. . Meaning of course that the heroes are solving a problem that they themselves create. Just like Wesley Crusher. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Laundry Knight Posted November 2, 2012 Report Share Posted November 2, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? I have thought about using a hyped up version my native city of Bartlesville, OK though in the campaign I am now developing I using a made up coastal city. One reason is that I want to use certain archetypes and tropes that wouldn't work in my town, and I wanted a coast, darn it. I can't have a coast in Oklahoma unless I wanted to do a post-apocalyptic story, and I don't. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmjalund Posted November 3, 2012 Report Share Posted November 3, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Meaning of course that the heroes are solving a problem that they themselves create. Just like Wesley Crusher.Okay - which hero created Wesley Crusher? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin2 Posted November 3, 2012 Report Share Posted November 3, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? I was thinking about setting a supers campaign in Oxford' date=' England. It's not a small town compared to an English village, but it's tiny compared to London, or Birmingham. And I could just picture the ruckus caused if Eurostar showed u and decided to tear up the Bodleian Library, or VIPER nicked something from a lab in one of the science or business parks.[/quote'] That is where I based my campaign. But I did it mostly as we live near it. As you say it is not big compared to London or NY etc (165,000 people) but as you say it is very varied and has the University and lots of history and industry etc. But with a campaign game you can base it anywhere. It just happens to be the place the group is based. It could be because the group is all teens and they live there. The main reason may be the group base, it being a Government supported base or a rich player. Or some other reason. I see very few PC's being "lets patrol a city and catch crime as it happens". That is usually the thing for single characters like Spiderman or Daredevil etc. As in my mind very few super villain crimes are "lets knock over a bank and get the money". Its more of a we need a certain item that is in the bank and it is needed for some villanous scheme etc (the players can stop bank robbers but as something as of this is what happened last week but took up no game time). And in my game the players have had a few adventures in the Oxford area but have travelled to America and further into the UK. So they follow the villains and not the villains follow them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clonus Posted November 4, 2012 Report Share Posted November 4, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? I considered running a Smallville game, I'd call "Perfectly Normal". The PCs would be adolescents in a town named Normal that, 16 years ago had been the vicinity of the mysterious deaths of a reclusive former rock star and his house guests in Normal's equivalent of the Luthor manor. Several years before the start of the campaign things got worse when a serial killer started killing the children of the town, who were, not at all coincidentally in the same age range as the PCs. The BIG SECRET would have been that that the rock star had been trying to immanentize the eschaton with a magical ritual, and as a result there was a baby boom of kids each of whom would eventually develop superpowers. But he'd built his hideaway there because it was already a magical place, so it also had vampires, werewolves, a mad scientist experimenting on people, a coven of witches... And of course there would be an undercover government operation attempting to investigate and exploit the weirdness Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheQuestionMan Posted November 5, 2012 Report Share Posted November 5, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? So more of a modern day version of Cthulhu-ish campaign than Superhero? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted November 18, 2012 Report Share Posted November 18, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Well' date=' being that Champions was written by SF Bay people, not surprising. Write what you know... And yea, San Francisco isn't that big, but the entire metro area is pretty large, plus covers a lot of different terrain.[/quote'] Well, California is full of wierd people. Grimlock alluded to such Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lemming Posted November 19, 2012 Report Share Posted November 19, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Well' date=' THE WORLD is full of weird people. Grimlock alluded to such [/quote'] fixed that for you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sinanju Posted November 19, 2012 Report Share Posted November 19, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? "Well' date=' the WORLD is full of weird people....[/quote'] Correction: the world is full of STUPID people (as explained in the song "Banditos" by the Refreshments). From the chorus: Everybody knows That the world is full of stupid people So meet me at the mission at midnight We'll divvy up there Everybody knows That the world is full of stupid people Well I got the pistol so I'll keep the Pesos Yeah and that seems fair Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
assault Posted November 19, 2012 Report Share Posted November 19, 2012 Re: Small Town Superhumans? Well' date=' California is full of wierd people. Grimlock alluded to such [/quote'] . Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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