Scenario locations

[assault]

I've been playing around with campaign settings, focusing on the wheres and whys of scenarios.

 

I decided to do some "research" in the source material. Interesting results.

 

So far, I've looked at Silver Age Avengers and JLA stories. These are team books, and thus more relevant to games than solo books.

 

There are some distinct themes.

 

The Avengers tend to do a lot of their stuff in bases - their own, or those of villains - and on spaceships (which are pretty much mobile bases anyway). They also do caves.

 

The JLA does those as well, but have more "wilderness" type encounters. These tend to be in remote, and sometimes exotic, locations.

 

Neither group does their thing in cities very often. The main exception seems to be the kind of parks UFOs land in.

 

Aside from their own bases, locations are rarely repeated.

 

I'll look at more modern stuff later. I'll also do a comparison with solo books, but it's pretty clear that Batman and Spider-Man, for example, do most of their solo stuff in their home cities. Early Golden Age books often strung a lot of solo stories into a loose overall narrative, and their settings would reflect that.

 

Anyway, my tentative conclusions are that it's not particularly necessary to hyper-detail 'Campaign City', if the heroes are going to spend their time chasing around the world, or inside bases.

 

The actual mapping required has more in common with D&D than anything else!

 

Of course this relies on simulating a certain subset of material.

 

I've always tended to think of things in terms of a game based in a single city, which thus needed to be developed in some depth. I may ditch that idea, and instead focus on detailing villains and their bases.

[death tribble]

I always found that the team would either fight on the streets or in bases, their own or the villains. The team ones would reflect an Avengers sensibility with the solos sticking to a Batman or Spiderman sensibility. Bearing in mind one of the GMs was into Wolverine pre his own title and after the first limited series, this seems right.

[BoloOfEarth]

I agree that a disproportionate number of adventures seem to center around either the hero or villain base.  (My players won't even have a public base any more, because it's just a "danger magnet," though they do have a PR agent working out of a strip mall office.)  However, keep in mind that games can run different than comics.

 

I can't speak for all Champions games, but mine do also tend to have a fair amount of street battles, as well as in-city building locations, with warehouses and research labs probably getting the most use.  (I got a chuckle out of Flash making a comment, I think during his crossover with Supergirl last season, about bad guys liking to use abandoned warehouses in every dimension.)

 

The locations for the last ten adventures in my Champions campaign have been:

• Street fight outside apartment buildings, with incidental stuff at city hall
• Waterfront (on/around docks and boats), with investigations at an R&D company
• Aligen-X Pharmaceutical labs
• Aboard a ship at sea (stopping a villain team from sinking a research vessel)
• Street fight
• Deathstroke base under a self-storage unit
• Crypts under a cemetery (a vampire villain's former base, turned into a series of death traps for the heroes)
• Theater on a college campus (during the vice-presidential debates)
• The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, with incidental locations at five places scattered across Boston
• Eco-Op Clean Energy Labs, with the heroes stopping a villain team from destroying a fusion reactor prototype

So, two bases as the primary locations.  Three labs or lab-type locations.  Three street / outdoor in-city locations.  Two at what could be classified as "landmark" locations.

 

All of that said, I find setting my game in an existing city and using Google Maps (love the satellite view!) to pick locations does save me from having to create a Campaign City from scratch.

[BoloOfEarth]

Regarding bases, I discovered these:  http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/112361/SciFi-Floor-Tiles?cPath=8221_25332

 

Basically, 6x6 interchangeable tiles for various rooms, hallways, or open areas to create a kind of instant base.  I printed (way too many) on cardstock, to use whenever I need a quick villain base.

 

I even turned it into a game plot element -- when the heroes attacked the Deathstroke base, they found a set of brochures by the entryway, touting modular bases available from Setec Construction (a division of Setec Services, with "Setec" actually standing for Superpowered and Enhanced Technologies).  They use revolutionary teleportation technology to instantly replace 30' x 30' x 10' pieces of bedrock with selected modules underground.  It was an easy explanation for how villains seem to have so many underground bases.  The heroes would dearly love to get Setec's client list.

[bigdamnhero]

The Avengers tend to do a lot of their stuff in bases - their own, or those of villains - and on spaceships (which are pretty much mobile bases anyway). They also do caves.

 

The JLA does those as well, but have more "wilderness" type encounters. These tend to be in remote, and sometimes exotic, locations.

 

Neither group does their thing in cities very often. The main exception seems to be the kind of parks UFOs land in.

Interesting. Going off my memory of Bronze-Age Avengers comics, I can definitely think of a few city & wilderness fights, but yeah a lot of bases & caves. The Defenders always seemed to operate out of the public's eye, so either bases, caves or extra-dimensional weirdspots. "Tearing up downtown" seems to be more common in modern comics, tho again that's not based on a scientific sampling.

 

That said because solo books vastly outnumber team books, our memories of "superhero fights" are going to be shaped more heavily by those, where as you point out street fights are much more common.

 

Anyway, my tentative conclusions are that it's not particularly necessary to hyper-detail 'Campaign City', if the heroes are going to spend their time chasing around the world, or inside bases.

Agreed. I've always found it works better to make the city up as you go, beyond broad strokes; most of the players aren't going to study it in detail anyway, so you'll be feeding them "you character would know..." stuff anyway.

[Nothere]

On that subject I find that a lot of players don't really study it at all. I tend to do home brewed cities, and don't really feel like typing up 50 pages of notes I've scrawled all over while working on different aspects. So I give a general overview, a few more details to a specific player about the tech industry in town if their making an electronics genius, and then ask that if anyone is interested in an other aspect of city life just mention it. They never do.

 

As for locations I tend to go business or home where crime occurred. Street/warehouse/park/seedy bar as the heroes look into things. ending in villain base.

[Cassandra]

It the team has a base, it will be attacked.  This has been proven over and over again in The Avengers, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and especially The X-Men.

 

"Which benefits?  The Matching Unitards?  The House that blows up every few years?"  Negasonic Teenage Warhead in "Deadpool"

[BoloOfEarth]

In my current campaign, I gave one of the PCs a house as a team "base".  (He actually inherited it from a guy who disappeared decades before the PC was even born.  Sometimes you have to feed player paranoia with appropriate weirdness.)  The house is magical, one effect of which is that only he, and anybody he specifically invites to the house, can find it.  (Like Sirius Black's house in the Harry Potter books.)  The player figured this out when his character ordered a pizza and the delivery driver couldn't find the house.  Once he flagged the driver down and pointed out the house, the guy could see it. 

 

So currently the only people who can find the house are the PC heroes, a mage they consulted about the house's enchantments, the lawyer who handled the estate... and some random pizza delivery guy.

[DShomshak]

Yep, the adventure I ran this weekend centered on raiding a base belonging to the villainous organization CROWN. (The PCs were after a bit of alien tech, tipped off by a third-string villain who wanted them to rescue one of her team partners in the process.)

 

And an awful lot of the previous adventures involved villain bases as well, or base-type locations a villain had taken over. It sort of arises from the dynamics of the stories: Villain does badness, but the PCs are not immediately on scene. By the time the PCs can respond, the bad guys have done their thing and returned to their base. Or in the case of the megavillains who form the principal foes of Avant Guard, the evil scheme is implemented from a base -- the mad biologist Helix growing another kaiju, Professor Proton building a Gravitron to pull a comet onto a collision course with Earth, Doctor Thane conducting an experiment to destroy the universe, etc. -- so that's where the heroes need to go.

 

The premise of the team just doesn't lend itself to "Patrol the city looking for crime to thwart." (Though I can use that for a solo vignette.)

 

Dean Shomshak

[assault]

There is the issue of finding the villain's base, of course. That can require hitting the streets, interrogating informants and so on. But that doesn't necessarily require massive pre-design either.

 

Solo vignettes are a good thing too.

[bluesguy]

In my campaign I have used:

• Villain bases
• Parks
• Science Musuem
• Mall of America
• The new Vikings Stadium while it was still under construction
• A local nuclear power plant
• Streets
• Downtown skyscraper (a'la Die Hard 1)
• Mansion
• Street festival
• State Fair Grounds during the State Fair
• Governor's Fishing Opener (players fighting from boats with limited movement options vs. minions who could fly - that was fun)
• Rural MN / Wilderness

The advantage of running a game in a real life city which the entire group lives in.

[TheDarkness]

In my campaign I have used:

• Villain bases
• Parks
• Science Musuem
• Mall of America
• The new Vikings Stadium while it was still under construction
• A local nuclear power plant
• Streets
• Downtown skyscraper (a'la Die Hard 1)
• Mansion
• Street festival
• State Fair Grounds during the State Fair
• Governor's Fishing Opener (players fighting from boats with limited movement options vs. minions who could fly - that was fun)
• Rural MN / Wilderness

The advantage of running a game in a real life city which the entire group lives in.

Does the Ediner still exist at Calhoun Square?

[BoloOfEarth]

• Governor's Fishing Opener (players fighting from boats with limited movement options vs. minions who could fly - that was fun)

 

I know what you mean.  When I ran the battle on the research ship, there were several PCs (including the two heavy hitters) who don't have flight or appreciable amounts of swimming.  An all-aquatic supervillain team did have a distinct advantage.

[bluesguy]

Does the Ediner still exist at Calhoun Square?

 

Don't know.  I only go to Calhoun Square for Famous Dave's BBQ so I can see live blues shows (go figure - see nickname).....

[bluesguy]

I know what you mean.  When I ran the battle on the research ship, there were several PCs (including the two heavy hitters) who don't have flight or appreciable amounts of swimming.  An all-aquatic supervillain team did have a distinct advantage.

 

Yea they threw a lot of things at the minions.  One character has a lasso that came in handy when the minions got to close.

[TheDarkness]

Don't know.  I only go to Calhoun Square for Famous Dave's BBQ so I can see live blues shows (go figure - see nickname).....

I'd be surprised if it was. Used to live near there in high school, often went to a comic book store near there as well, but that was, oh, 1985. Ediner was a 50s style diner, had good malts. There was also a place near there, I want to say on Hennepin(I think the comic book store was also there) that had fantastic croissants.

 

Anyway, I like the idea for the boat scenario, that sounds like it would have been a fun challenge.

[BoloOfEarth]

I'd be surprised if it was. Used to live near there in high school, often went to a comic book store near there as well, but that was, oh, 1985. Ediner was a 50s style diner, had good malts. There was also a place near there, I want to say on Hennepin(I think the comic book store was also there) that had fantastic croissants.

 

According to this site, the Ediner in Calhoun Square closed down in 1992.  (On the bonus side, though, that site has a recipe for Ediner brownies that look pretty yummy.)

[Cassandra]

The Headquarters of the International Super Agency after it's been infiltrated by a decades long conspiracy.

 

What, too soon?

[BoloOfEarth]

Relating back to the OP, while I agree that there isn't much point in hyper-detailing the campaign city, I do think there's a benefit to listing a handful of iconic or interesting locations.  They don't even need much detail -- I'm thinking of stuff like the "Big Belly Burger" mentioned in the DC universe.  Just something to give the city some character.  And maybe a handful of unique places that might spark some interest from the players.  If there's one or two about which they ask for more info, you can write those up in more detail. 

 

For example, in my past Millennium City campaign I introduced the "Boblo Blimp" -- not actually a blimp, but a dirigible giving aerial tours of the city, the flying cousin to the now-long-gone "Boblo Boat" that used to run between Detroit and Boblo Island.  My players immediately said, "We HAVE to have a fight on that thing!"  (Because, apparently, shooting plasma blasts and throwing foes through walls is a really good idea in an airship.)

 

IMO, a good fictional city should have it's own character.  Look at Gotham City, vs. Metropolis, vs. Star City, vs. Central City, etc. in the DC universe.  Or Hudson City vs. Millennium City vs. Vibora Bay in the HERO Universe.  Each has its own feel.  Even if you don't go into a lot of detail, I'd still put some thought into fostering that feel for your own campaign city.

[Scott Baker]

The Headquarters of the International Super Agency after it's been infiltrated by a decades long conspiracy.

 

What, too soon?

Only because it makes me think of Gary Shandling passing away this year.

[steriaca]

Speaking of cities, I wish Champions could have a nice western fealing city. You know, everyone normally wears cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats. Country music and the like are more popular than rock n roll. The city takes pride in it's western past. Lets call it Fort Starr City, which now sits on the site of Fort Starr, a fort durring the Indian Wars.

[DShomshak]

Back in my old Seattle Sentinels and Keystone Konjurors campaigns, I used quite a few real locations from Seattle, Tacoma and thereabouts. Fighting the Mystery Meat Monster by Drumheller Fountain at the University of Washington; the Devil's Advocates using the Columbia Center (a.k.a. the Black Tower of Madness) as the focus of a rite to summon Vulshoth; secrets buried in Underground Seattle; and the like.

 

In Avant Guard, there was recently a fight against the super-strong and super-tough villain Downfall in Rockefeller Center, and one of the PCs; occasional allies is the Bird Lady, resident druid of Central Park. But for the reasons mentioned earlier, the climax of the4 adventure often happens in the bad guy's base.

 

Dean Shomshak