A recent bit of thread necromancy has reminded me I had planned an installment based on a campaign I ran a few years ago. And since a new Marvel RPG was released on February, I thought this would be a suitable occasion for this particular column.

It all started when I read Patrick Goodman’s article on how to introduce super-heroes in the Shadowrun setting -- The Good Fight. The idea of having supers running around in a dystopian future filled with megacorporations and street black ops grabbed my attention immediately and I decided to run a campaign with that concept.

I would keep the Shadowrun setting as it was, because it was easily recognizable to my players (we had played countless adventures in it) and minimized my prep work. I did take out a few elements, like metahumanity, that are core to the game in order not to have them overshadow the supers theme.

I also wanted the cyberpunk metahumans to have some connection to true super-heroes, so I thought of making that setting the future of the Marvel universe (another familiar thing to my players) after a civilization-wrecking cataclysm.

The idea was to begin the campaign as a regular Shadowrun one with the exception of the supers and gradually reveal to the players they were in the Marvel universe (or at least, one of them). It worked.

The first adventures had them performing runs like a cyberpunk campaign, but by the end they were traveling in time to steal the cosmic cube and fight a Celestial!

Let me explain how I did that.

Pitch

Superpowered shadowrunners get involved in a fight for the future – and past – of the world.

Premise

The Celestials are cosmic entities that travel the universe seeding and manipulating life in countless worlds. This they did on Earth, where they birthed three humanoid species: the Deviants, the Eternals and the humans. Millions of years later, they came back to judge if their creations were worthy of continued existence.

On Earth 616 (the main Marvel universe), Arishem, the Celestial sent to pass judgment, decided that our planet was fit to go on existing. In another Earth, however, Arishem wasn’t so nice. He gave a thumb down to Earth and prepared to destroy it.

Obviously, the heroes and villains didn’t take that well. They battled the Celestial in a conflict that shadowed all the other battles in human history. The collateral damage was enough to reduce civilization to rubble. Almost all of Earth’s defenders perished and those that survived were near death.

But their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. Arishem had been defeated. The Earth had survived. Now humankind had to rebuild the world. It was then that the first megacorporations appeared – companies that had survived the apocalypse in a better state than their peers.

Together with what had been left of national governments, they led the reconstruction process and 100 years later had established themselves as the true movers and shakers of the planet, the overlords of a dystopian society of materialistic oppression.

The Age of Heroes is now a distant past that is vaguely acknowledged by the general populace. Since records of that time have been lost, many find it hard to believe it even existed. The only living mementos of that period are the Awakened: people with wondrous abilities.

Or so they think. There are other relics of the Age of Heroes. Evil relics…

Shhhhhhhhh!

Remember: part of the fun of this campaign is in the players not knowing they are in the Marvel universe. Run it as a straight Shadowrun campaign with the modifications listed below and slowly introduce recognizable elements, but never flat out confirm their suspicions.

Resist the urge to call the Age of Heroes the Age of Marvels. If you want to introduce elements in character creation or in the setting that are shout-outs to Marvel do so in the most discreet manner possible – don’t use buzzwords like supersoldier serum or gamma radiation that will get your players’ spider-sense a-tingling.

And never pitch this campaign to your players as Marvelrun! Call it something bland, like Metarun.

Who are the PCs?

The default assumption is that they are shadowrunners. The difference is that they can have access to superpowers – they are Awakened. If you are using the Shadowrun RPG itself to run this campaign, The Good Fight has some suggestions on how to handle these abilities in that system.

Power selection and origin can be as diverse as in the original Marvel universe. You can have telepathic mutants, formula-enhanced soldiers, electricity-manipulating individuals who were struck by lightning, gamma-irradiated scientists that turn into rampaging monsters.

Of course, cybernetics and biotech can make someone a superbeing without convoluted secret origins and the supernormal character is a staple of the super-hero genre. So you can have a character with no “regular” superpowers, but still effective.

Certain powers can also complement other abilities. Someone who can psionically interface with computers will have a leg up on all other deckers. A machine-controlling Awakened can be a superb rigger. Another advantage is that not needing hardware to do these, they may not draw attention to themselves if things go wrong.

Let’s not forget gadgeteers. In a setting like Shadowrun, they would have a field day coming up with devices on the fly to solve a problem on the run.

Finally, a player may want to create a character that was around in the Age of Heroes. That’s not difficult, considering immortality is not uncommon among superpowered people. You can allow that, but I recommend requiring the PC to have amnesia so he doesn’t spoil the big reveal of the setting.

You can even try to fit the character into the pre-cataclysm Marvel universe. Maybe he was an Eternal who was gravely wounded in the fight and so lost his memory and most of his powers.

One other detail: try to have the players create characters who are good guys. For all the talk in Shadowrun’s published adventures, that seem to expect the PCs to act like noble-hearted heroes, the game kind of reinforces the idea that runners are cold and/or violent criminals.

That’s fine for a regular game, but in Marvelrun they do need to have some good in their hearts. That doesn’t mean they have to be supercute unicorn-lovers. As Patrick Goodman says in The Good Fight, the PCs don’t need t be nice guys to be good guys.

The Sixth World

The future of this Marvel universe -- circa 2080s -- is for all intents and purposes the Shadowrun setting minus a few details. For example, there never was an Unexplained Genetic Expression or a Goblinization Day, so there are no elves, dwarves, orks or trolls.

There isn’t a return of magic either. Mystical abilities are considered just another superpower that also happens to have a few extra operational parameters. In Marvelrun, the special place mages and shamans occupy in the setting are taken over by the Awakened. They are the unique resource megacorporations are after.

Things like the VITAS epidemic or the Crash of 2029 can also be ignored. The world has already passed through the grinder. Having other cataclysms in its ascension path may stretch credibility as to how humankind rebuilt it to Shadowrun levels in 100 years.

Just because these milestones don’t exist, it doesn’t mean you can’t create your own. Maybe December 12th, 2011, marks the public appearance of the first post-Age of Heroes Awakened.

Techwise, we are talking Shadowrun second edition here. The Matrix is a cornerstone of society, BTL is all the rage, and chrome-plated is the default look for cybernetics.

OK, so, no human variants, no dragons, no immortal elves. All the rest -- technology, megacorporations, geopolitics – stays the same, giving you an ample supply of material to work with. You can plunder your Shadowrun books for seeds, plots etc.

AAA evil

As I stated earlier, megacorporations were at the forefront of civilization reconstruction. They had resources nobody else had. But there was a reason for that: see, they were created and headed by beings of incredible power. And evil disposition.

In the aftermath of the battle with Arishem, some of the archvillains who had refrained from joining the fight or just survived in a better state than the others realized now they had a chance to accomplish their goals of world domination.

Subtly, they acquired control of the major companies still standing after the cataclysm and used their considerable resources to shore them up and transform them into powerful business and political entities.

These archvillains were aware of each other’s efforts and without the heroes to keep them occupied, they correctly surmised it was just a question of time until they were at each other’s throats. Not wanting to have to deal with that before consolidating their power base on Earth, they scheduled a meeting.

This once in a lifetime meeting brought together such epitomes of evil as Apocalypse, mutant mastermind; Ares, Greek God of War; Loki, Norse God of Trickery; and Mephisto, Lord of Hell, among others.

In order to prevent strife, they established a truce that would last 100 years. During this time, direct attacks were forbidden and no attempt at global domination should be conducted. Each entity would use this conflict-free century to see their plan for humankind come to fruition.

Some, like Mephisto, guided his earthly possessions from afar, using proxies in the mortal realm to found a megacorporation that focused on magic and blood sacrifice: Aztechnology.

Others, such as Ares and Loki, assumed human personas and took a more hands-on approach. And so was born Damien Knight and Lofwyr Laufeyson, CEOs of Ares Macrotechnology and Saeder-Krupp, respectively.

These beings molded the world into what it is today and now that the truce is over, are starting to make the final moves in their master plans.

Renegades

Not all the heroes perished in the fight against Arishem. Like the villains, some survived and tried to carry on with their lives. They realized what was happening, how ancient enemies had taken the opportunity to sink their claws into a fragile world.

They also concluded that a direct confrontation would not end well, given their weakened state. So they took to he shadows, hitting the megacorporations where they could and running away. They were the original shadowrunners.

In time, the more long-lived heroes (and those that were not caught) individually came to the conclusion that these strikes were merely an annoyance to the evil CEOs. If they wanted to have a real impact, they needed to coordinate their attacks – they needed to become a team.

And so the survivors of the Age of Heroes came together in a group called the Renegades. There were whispers of them in the underworld. People believed they were an elite group of shadowrunners that only sold their services to the highest bidder.

The heroes fueled this belief, conducting supposedly “normal” runs that had, in fact, ulterior motives designed to attack the villain’s true goals. They also subverted other operations by hiring or recruiting operatives to conduct a run within another run.

Finally, they kept a close watch on Awakened and normal runners. When they identified someone with the characteristics of a hero, they approached him or her and tried to bring them into the group. Today, the Renegades are more a resistance movement than a single team.

The Renegades have noticed that the megacorps have geared up for something. The heroes know the endgame is approaching and so have stepped up their operations and recruiting. They know the fate of the planet depends on what they do now.

Next month, I go into more detail about the campaign, give a possible line-up for the Renegades and provide some adventure seeds.