Campaign Toybox
The Story: When the 47-sided alien silicate crystal crashed into Times Square on a busy New Year’s Eve, it released a ray of light from each of its 47 different facets, and 47 New Yorkers got a unique superpower. It turns out the crystal was a kind of crisis preparation kit, sent by some advanced civilisation to create the leaders of tomorrow, and the rays were the infection vector for 47 tiny alien symbiotic intelligences able to grant incredible powers to a human body. Gifted with their godlike abilities (ahem) the empowered people would guide humanity to a brighter future.
Of course the aliens aren’t stupid – 47 gods is hardly enough to go around, especially given humanity’s short life-span and tendency for misadventure. So the moment the alien-light-ray-symbiote believes the host is going to die, it leaps to someone else. Should it happen to leap to somebody who already has a symbiote, the current occupant also ejects and looks for a new host. Thus, the quota is maintained. The problem is, humans are fragile creatures, in mind and body, and given to theatrical peaks and valleys. The symbiote – designed by aliens, for aliens - can’t easily tell the difference between death and various death-like states like passing out, panic attacks, heart palpiations or concussion. Even a good rush of fight-or-flight adrenaline from falling off a ladder might do it. A solid beating around the face will too. You know, the kind of thing seen in the climax of most comic supers stories.
Superheroes and supervillains arise – and all start playing musical chairs.
Style and Structure: Some things are important with doing this one. First of all, players almost always prefer their character to be killed than be punked, so don’t render them powerless unless it is both logistically inescapable and seriously awesome (and temporary, but luckily, it’s always temporary in this setting). Of course, some players will hate suddenly having a new set of powers regardless of how cool and new they are or how balanced they were with their old powers; this set-up is not for them. This is for the easily bored player who likes to get new toys as often as possible. The kind who will get his ranger killed just because he wants to try being a thief.
Second, let your players choose their powers before working out the rest of the roster of 47. You don’t want to limit their creativity unless you have to, and it will in fact be much more fun if their ideas set the feel. If they choose very abstract or unconventional powers, or some weird power combinations, have fun thinking up some more along those lines. This ensures the players set the tone and the power level, but still get surprised (not to mention hoist on their own petards) when they get switched to something new, yet very much along the lines they established.
Then all you have to do is set up a few simple rules conditions for the power swap – character is stunned, or drops to zero hit points, or takes more than X damage in a single hit – most systems have various equivalent of king hits or shocks to the system. Make sure to write up the powers in advance though – nothing kills an awesome fight scene more than breaking for two hours to do chargen in the middle.
PCs and NPCs: This set up has some limitations compared to your standard superhero setting. No legacy heroes (or are there? How many crystals have fallen before? When’s the next one due?). No tech-only heroes, unless they are super-geniuses or something. Single power source – no mutants, alien messiah-analogues or magicians. More importantly, everyone has power thrust upon them, so no training your whole life for the process. On the other hand, fate is twisted and it just might happen that the guy who has spent his whole life training as a ninja suddenly can become invisible.
The typical dramatic arcs of power-thrust-upon-you are at your disposal, and they also apply to all your powered NPCs. That kind of shared experience is a great way to bind characters together, especially if it also has wider setting effects, like government agencies chasing you down or recruiting you with smiles. Either version leads to shared accommodation and resources as well as background, which also helps party unity.
How the world reacts to supers is up to you – and your players. Feel free to start from the moment the powers arrive so you don’t have to work out too much in advance. You are going to have to do a lot of other things in advance, like have a good idea about what the other power sets are because you never know when your players are going to punch a villain into a coma and do the power-shuffle. And you’ll want all the powers on index cards, because even if the knocked-down new bad guy gives his powers up to whomever knocked him down, the power in said hitter has to go somewhere and if there are other heroes and villains nearby (Manhattan isn’t that big, really), everyone could be shuffled one chair to the left. Note that this may totally screw up your immensely comlex villain backstory (imagine if Doctor Doom suddenly became The Blob mid-scheme?) At the very least, the last party member is going to throw his awesome time travel schtick onto the butler everyone ignored when they went crashing through the badguys French doors hungry for combat. Which brings us to...
Plots and Villains: Studies show that about 4% of people are borderline or actual sociopaths. So any time the power jumps, there’s a one in twenty chance the person who gets it will immediately abuse it. Then there’s the fact that after the initial dose, everyone who gets a power does it by being around some kind of violence or death, which could mess them up even if it was a villain who bought it. Also, there is now no need to wait for young Doctor Subjugator, Jr to grow into his death suit or find his father’s magic crystal – just by being in the room Junior can inherit everything that made his dad a super pain in the neck. Alternatively he can gain the power a PC just used to kill his father, while said murderer gains the power that just failed to block said killing blow. Reversal of fortune was never quite so literal. Indeed, given a large enough battle and sufficient henchmen, this kind of thing could swing back and forth for days.
And it’s not like the bad guys won’t see it coming either. As soon as word gets out that a clonk on the head might leave you powerless, everyone is going to be hunting for ways to ensure their powers go to someone they can rely on. This might be possible through technological trickery, but in the meantime, hanging around with hundreds of mooks is now a fantastically good idea as well as excellent video game stylings. Of course, once other people figure out that their ticket to real ultimate power is taking it from someone else, everybody with a hint of a power fantasy will be grabbing a baseball bat and heading to the nearest battlezone. Many New Yorkers don’t like Spiderman, but very few of them chase him down the street trying to steal his mojo (or have a chance of that working).
Of course, stealing people’s powers after defeating them is such a powerful idea whole cultural memes have grown from the concept. Your stories will gain power from that.
Sources: The world of Marvel comics has a few situations like this, most notably the power-rotating Power Pack. The more obscure Filipino heroes of Triumph Division pass their powers on when they die, and several other superheroes end up working this way too – new Green Lanterns, for example, are called when the old ones die and the powers never quite work the same way. J. M. Straczynski (of Babylon 5 fame) wrote a comic series called Rising Stars which involved a limited amount of super “juice” to go around, and there’s also a limited number of the Islamic superheroes known as The 99. Outside of supers, The Doctor changes powers and abilities (not to mention mannerisms) with each new regeneration. “Imprintable” heroes, able to gain abilities for a short time, have been a rare but constant feature in television, such as Jarod in The Pretender, the dolls in Joss Whedon’s The Dollhouse, or Monica in Heroes. Speaking of Heroes... it really is a fantastic resource for any superhero game.
RPGs: White Wolf springs to mind, because they seem completely unable to publish a setting that doesn’t feature normal people having power thrust upon them – and because as part of that they often have chargen that separates the normal and the super nicely. Scion is probably the best example currently around, Aberrant is also good. Few if any other supers games do such a nice split, preferring to be more generic in their design. For power-swapping, simpler is going to be better, but simple supers games are very common right now. We also have the random-chargen wonder of Icons (good if you need a quick power change when you weren’t expecting it), the slick BASH! the charming Supercrew, the straighforward Truth and Justice and the tres indie Capes, which even has interlocking character sheets so you can pull off your powers and toss them across the table to another player. Which is not to say complicated games can’t be used, particularly if they have lots of templates or archetypes provided, doubly so if these can be laid on top of the rest of chargen. Indeed, any system with strong power templates will be perfectly suitable. And if you write them all down on cards you can hand them around too. Power ping pong!
