Campaign Toybox
The Story: I was slightly disappointed that Scion didn’t include the idea that being the son of a God has a heavy issue of genetic inheritance. To wit: surely being the son of Thor should mean that in addition to getting the powers of thunder and lightning you also stand a chance of growing into a big fat drunken moron whose wife constantly cheats on him with his worst enemy? Surely living a legend should involve every part of that legend? Am I obsessed with stories imposing on reality? Yes.
We talked about this a bit in previous instalments. The twist here is to choose a more modern mythology to impose upon our reality, a different kind of mythology altogether but a mythology nevertheless still indelibly imprinted on most of your players’ minds. The mythology of comic books.
Herein lies the dilemma: everybody wants to be Batman, but would you want to if it meant having your parents gunned down in a mugging, having your best friend’s daughter shot in the spine and of course, ensuring you will never be able to stop fighting a legion of insane clowns in their pyjamas who keep killing innocent people just to get your attention. How’s the Batman package now?
But this is exactly what’s happening. Life has always imitated art, and in times of crisis in the past, this has come true on a massive scale. There really was a Ulysses, an Arthur and a Robin Hood, long after those stories had been first written, forced into life when people believed in them enough and desperately needed help. Now the world cries out for heroes and it will take them from the biggest well in the collective conscious. So it is that all around the world people find themselves putting on capes and masks and wondering why they not only have powers, but their lives are spinning out of control…into very familiar patterns.
Style and Structure: I’m kind of obsessed with stories taking control and players/characters discovering they are bound up by a narrative beyond their control, and it does make for some excellent stories. But the same rules apply every time: don’t railroad your players. Sounds contradictory but to paraphrase Joss Whedon, you control what’s coming, make sure you let the players decide what they do with it. Maybe they can change fate and stop their home town being destroyed while their parents put them in a taxi that rockets them to the nearest metropolis. Maybe this time their girlfriend Gwyneth Stately won’t be killed by the Grey Gremlin. That’s what makes these stories interesting: trying to defy fate, no matter how pre-written it appears. If you take that chance away from the players with out sufficient justification, they lose any chance of fun. That doesn’t mean, of course, that you have to make it easy.
Nor should it be predictable – that’s another thing that kills games very quickly. Again, the other draw of these kinds of stories is searching for the patterns. Once you drop a few obvious hints about who each character is turning into, hide the other details as much as you can. The players will be looking as hard as they can for the next blindside story element and they’ll also be trying as hard as they can to get every inch of power out of their hero, so don’t be afraid to meet them with as much force in both obfuscation and cruelty. Dig up every bad thing that ever happened to Iron Man and bury it where they least expect it or switch it around on them, and then turn the knife. Everyone who wakes up to find they are a billionaire weapons manufacturer with an interest in armoured suits is expecting to become an alcoholic. He might not be expecting his wife to become one, or to have his friend Steve become one while he starts having schizophrenic delusions about being able to talk to Hephaestus. After all, if all of comic continuum is coming through, there’s no reason why it needs to come through without convolution.
PCs and NPCs: The best thing about these kinds of games is that the players’ minds will do a lot of the work for you. Canon – even comic canon – is ingrained in our brains and thus when they fight against it they’ll create their own dramatic tension. Which is why you might as well play up on that and have the players play themselves, or people much like themselves if they prefer a bit more narrative distance. This way they also get the big fun wish fulfilment which is a bit part of the appeal of supers games, and they also get to play up the other angle of this story, which is the weirdness of these larger-than-life, four-colour ideas intruding on a real reality. If you do become an awesome crime fighter, even if reality bends to accommodate that, you may still have to deal with things Batman never or rarely does, like finding a cape repairer or finding a bathroom when you’re in your full suit.
The other benefit of creating characters very close to the players is it suggests NPCs that the players will find very familiar from the get-go. And that’s important when you’re going to hurt those NPCs. It may take many months of play for a player to really care about a completely fictional Betty Ross or Lois Lane, but if they make an analogue of someone they care about in real life, you can start putting them in refrigerators from the get-go. Don’t rush it though – the snap-back of the cost of being a hero is best delivered the moment they get used to the power and start to forget their might ever be consequences.
Plots and Villains: If a game like this is going to work, you have to leaven all of the above angst and character development with huge amounts of fun, interesting plots. Luckily, this isn’t that hard because the reality warping force that is pulling heroes into reality is also producing plots. There are supervillains and their minions attempting dramatic crimes. So you can pull out all the usual plots and villains you would use in any superhero game. The thing that stops it just short from just being a superhero game is the idea that it’s being forced upon real people in a real-ish world without a huge amount of choice – but with a great deal of warning. In classic roleplaying tradition, you get to be Batman, but you get to try to make different choices to try and do it even better than he does. To avoid his losses and sufferings because this time, you know they’re coming. To be, in essence, the ultimate meta-gamer.
Sources: You don’t need me to tell you where to get sources for this. If you’re anything like me, you probably talk about comic canon all the freaking time. But if you’re new to stories imposing on reality, and our minds, try and track down the excellent original Star Trek episode “Spectre of the Gun” where Kirk and co find themselves trapped as the bad guys at the OK Corral. What I like about that episode is the heroes realise they can’t win because in their minds they cannot conceive of the Clanton’s winning that particular fight. Along similar lines is the scene in the great Galaxy Quest, where Guy thinks he’s going to die because he doesn’t have a last name, and the scene in the flawed-but-clever Last Action Hero where the sidekick tries to use his implicit immortality to defy the laws of physics, charging a speeding car on a bicycle. He fails when he realises comic relief characters can never defeat bad guys. Star Trek has also gone back in time and had to convince heroes of the past to be the heroes of legend they are “supposed” to be – complete with the tragic consequences, if it must be so - and several TV shows and films have followed similar lines. “Higher” culture has not shied away from the concept: check out Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound.
RPGs: Any supers RPG that includes scales for real humans (and most worth their salt do) and aren’t drowning in so much narrative simulation they lose the sim edge will serve you well here. Silver Lion Studios’ Heart and Souls really plays up the value of having things to care about, and so does Truth and Justice, the supers game where you can get punched in the girlfriend. Savage World’s Necessary Evil is already about rewriting stories, with villains suddenly finding themselves cast as heroes when all the heroes die. Games set up to encourage template addition will also help, allowing you to impose the superhero mechanically as well as narratively onto the normal human; Aberrant did this very well, being all about normal humans “evolving”, whereas point-buy games like M&M, Champions and GURPS will be less easy to adapt – but will, as always, reward the diligent. Speaking of imposing, also worth adapting are indie games where this a mechanical outside force driving the characters’ actions: the force of narrative continuity could be the Master in My Life With Master, or the storm in Poison’d. Those games tend to make the PCs do horrible things rather than suffer horrible things but that opens up a whole other kind of potential game or adventures for this game: what about the people who find themselves incarnating as villains? If the world demands you to be a monster, is there not some morality in taking on that role as well as you can, to make the heroes greater by your presence? Would Batman really benefit from a Joker who stopped short because his heart wasn’t in it?
Think. Run. Game.
