Campaign Toybox
The Story: The stadia (or the ris in Hebrew) is an odd ancient measurement of unknown Persian origin, although the Greeks believed it was 500 times the length of the demigod Hercules’ foot – or around about 150 metres. And after the plane crash, that’s the maximum distance the five survivors can be apart from each other before the headache starts. Double that and the blood pressure begins to skyrocket. Get out to a mile and the organs start shutting down one by one. But on the upside, as long as one of the five survivors is within a stadia of another, they are highly resistant to being hurt any other way. They are, in fact, somewhat superhuman. In a few similar ways, and a few very different ways.
Superpowers often have a point source, here that source is each other. Of course, the players can’t be the only people in history to ever be like this. Can they? Should they go public? Do they dare? Who might come after them if they do? And who already knows where they are? Was it really a coincidence they were all on that plane?
Style and Structure: It’s a little bit Lost, a little bit Heroes, and why not? You want to steal from the successful and familiar, and those both fit the bill. The other fun here is taking the formal structure that RPGs demand and turning them into in-setting realities. The game begins when the PCs meet, and from then on they must stay together. And just like at the gaming table, that makes private conversations difficult, even with a hundred metres to spare. No more saying “you’re not there” or “you don’t know that”. (You also get a reason why the bad guys always attack in appropriate numbers too...)
Meanwhile there are a whole bunch of new rules to live by, and that is one of the big things that can make roleplaying fun. Space is fun because you have to remember you need oxygen tanks and artificial gravity. Fantasy is fun because you have to remember there are no phones. Now you’ve got a world just like ours except with a whole new set of rules to remember, in everything they do. Give them a bit of space so it’s not annoying (and don’t jerk them around by punishing mis-steps, remind them before one of them gets on an elevator) and the rules can make the campaign.
You’ll need mechanical rules as well, of course, but that shouldn’t be too hard. It isn’t too hard in most systems to find points where penalties become annoying, then harmful, then dangerous, then deadly. Just move them out along the distance apart and don’t force your players to find the distances out by experimentation. A bit of that can be fun in-character, but it can also be a really annoying puzzle nobody wants to spend hours solving.
PCs and NPCs: The great thing about supers games is the powers can be anything and they alone can make your PC interesting and fun to play. Anything else is either a bonus cool thing or a dull thing that provides a fun conflict with the powers you have. You can be a suburban housewife or retired goat-herder because a suburban housewife who can shoot fire from her eyes is going to be awesome, as is a retired goat-herder who can stop time. You can be too flippant about that though, because you want to make sure there’s enough for you to do when your powers aren’t on, so make sure your goat-herder has some angst to deal with – and not just the angst of “what do I do with my powers”. That only goes so far and again, you need more grist for the non-smackdown mill. But that said, with a free-form concept like this, your PCs can literally be anyone at all, no matter how poorly suited or un-related to each other they are. Indeed, the more they have trouble fitting together, the more drama your campaign will have. You might even want to take steps to ensure that none of the players know anything about the other characters before the first session.
NPCs will depend on how you frame your background world. Is the government aware of it? What about other groups? If you want to keep them confused and afraid, keep the super-powered allies as close to zero as possible, but they are going to need some kind of support, someone who can arrange for them to escape the hospital and find a place they can all live. Such a person or persons are their door into the conspiracy as well, your classic clue-dropper and mission-starter. He knows too little to keep them out of trouble, but just enough to make them deeply suspicious.
Plots and Villains: Finding out the world is different now is exciting but it’s even better when that mystery extends into the past as well. So this should have happened before. It may have even happened since, or at the same time, in different places. And not every group of victims will react the same way. These kind of “what-if” scenarios generate plots pretty quickly, as every different reaction to the same scenario leads to enemies and scenarios. As soon as people get superpowers somebody is going to do something immoral, illegal, stupid, dangerous or all of the above. And where there is power, there are countless people who want to control that power. Some may have power now and want to keep it, others might have none and want to get it. You know the drill. Keep it fresh by mixing up your tropes – make the corporate guys the secret supers and the underground secret society have no super powers, for example. Give the mad group dedicated to destroying the world a really subtle power like dream control, and give the guys who just want to be rich the explosive powers.
Sources: Lost and Heroes have already been mentioned, but let’s mention them again, because there are many lessons in both about how to develop a rich, complicated campaign world built on mystery and slow reveals (see also Twin Peaks, Carnivale, The X-Files, Millennium, 24, Prison Break etc). Note the don’ts as well as the do’s. Real-world supers also appear in the excellent films Unbreakable and Hancock (the latter featuring supers with the opposite relationship with distance), and the less excellent but still fun films Jumper and Push. (Kick-Ass isn’t quite what we’re talking about but hey, it’s fun too.) You could also watch actual superhero films, like X-Men one and two, and There are other good films and TV shows without super powers that make good models however: the kids of Roswell were bound together by their secret powers, the guys of 4400 by a matched origin and the guy from Nowhere Man had a secret worth killing for, and none of them were the first. Espionage action films in general will also be useful - there’s usually somebody running from the government somehow, start with Jason Bourne. There’s also a whole sub-genre of films about mismatched people being forced to work together, usually to hold off zombies or serial killers or escape horrific death traps (Cube, the Saw films).
RPGs: The Mutants and Masterminds supplement Paragons provides options for more realistic superheroes (as does Aberrant and Wild Talents, but there the whole world has changed). For powered types working on the QT you usually have to look for more occult origins – Werewolf: The Apocalypse always had the best hunters of the old World of Darkness, and they really like staying in packs, so perhaps some reskinning is possible. A mid-nineties game of psychics called The 23rd Letter was also up this alley, but as mentioned previously, being hunted is rare in RPGs. Don’t Rest Your Head is one exception but is very specific to its setting. The other exceptions tend to be in space, with being on the run being relatively integral to both Serenity and Battlestar Galactica. Neither do supers very well, however. GURPS doesn’t do supers much better, but it does have a gritty mundanity to it that is hard to beat for a real-world feel.
