I can't really say I'm a fan of the anime Dragonball Z. I've only watched a couple of episodes and I thought they were a bit boring. However, the concept of superhuman warriors who manipulate vast amounts of energy to battle each other in planet-destroying confrontations does have its appeal for super-heroic, or just superpowered, gaming.

Adapting Dragonball Z's setting would make no sense for this column, since it's already established and there's even a roleplaying game for it. Plus, since I don't like the show, it would be a real chore for me. Instead, I came up with a setting seed where you can have your Saiyan types without the baggage of the anime.

Pitch

In a post-apocalyptic world, the characters control vast amounts of psychic energy and use it to battle other warriors, either to ascertain their power or to protect other survivors.

Premise

The Drogen are an advanced alien species that has conquered a sizeable chunk of the galaxy. Though they have massively armed starships and high tech weapons, the Drogen's main assurance of superiority comes from their monarchy.

Two thousands years ago, an ancestor of the Alurans, the Drogen's royal family, learned how to harness and manipulate the free-flowing psychic energy of the universe. She used it to conquer the Drogen homeworld and then forge a star empire that has lasted to this day.

Ilyra, the Aluran ancestor, taught the secret of her power to her close relatives, creating a superpowered dynasty that has never been successfully challenged. But despite the power, both physical and political, that they share, the Alurans are not the most stable family unit in the galaxy.

They realized that family feuds involving relatives capable of shattering planets would destroy the Drogen empire if left unchecked, so early on it was decided these disputes would be settled in trials by combat carried out away from the empire, in backwater planets populated by savages.

The Aluran contenders arrive in one of their warships and use psionic relocation chambers to transfer their consciousness into the bodies of the locals. They slug it out with no care for the landscape or the people. The last Aluran standing is declared the winner.

The Alurans came to Earth to settle the succession for the throne. When they left, a few days later, the survivors were back in the stone age.

Who are the PCs?

The PCs are among the surviving Aluran vessels - each one was possessed by a Drogen royal family member that yielded before having his Earthling shell disintegrated (this sends the Aluran mind back to his original body without any harm, but it's very painful).

After the shock of waking up from a blackout to find the world as they knew has come to an end, they realize they can perform amazing feats of power thanks to this strange energy they can now perceive and manipulate. They will have to decide what to do with their newfound abilities.

Prana

Prana (or chi, ki, essence, quantum etc.) is a powerful form of psychic energy that can be harnessed by sentient beings across the universe and used to enhance their bodies and manipulate reality in a very specialized way (read superpowers).

Basic abilities (those that can be used without any training) accessible through prana are: energy projection, enhancing physical attributes to superhuman levels, force field, flight, personal healing and superspeed. Other uses can be learned through intensive training and meditation, but aren't obvious.

All of these cost prana to be used and those that have continuing effects, like flight, must be paid for each round or minute (you choose). All characters have a pool of points that represent their store of prana. Depending on your system of choice, the cost of the powers and the size of the prana pool (it can vary from high tens to low or medium hundreds) will vary.

Prana recharge can be tweaked as liked, but if it takes too long to regain a high amount of energy, warriors will be leery of spending their energy and instead of high action anime-like battles, you will end up with cautious highly strategized bean counting fights. Prana warriors also become more vulnerable to attacks from regular people if recharging is a long process.

Prana is stored in the body of the user, but in order to be spent it must be accessed or called up. In game terms, it means that a PC has, besides the prana pool, an access rate that represents the amount of energy he can invoke per round. Accessed energy can be accumulated for several rounds before being used.

The access rate should be a percentage of the prana pool and can be as low as 2% or as high as 10%. It exists more as mechanical limitation to avoid someone dumping 600 points into an energy blast in the first round of combat and wiping out their opposition. If you don't think that's a problem or you like that possibility, just discard it.

Campaign phases

Although one of the main appeals of this campaign is battling it out with other prana-powered characters, it certainly is not the only one. The way I see it, there are three phases in which you can run the Prana Warriors: Rebuilding the world, Path of advancement and War in the skies.

Of course, you don't have to choose one to play, you can run all of them as one campaign. You would just need to use downtime to advance it chronologically, since each phase should probably last from a few months to a few years in game time.

Rebuilding the world

So the PCs have superpowers and civilization has collapsed. What should they do? Well, rebuilding seems like a good option. But how do they go about it? There are many ways, ranging from helping to form an anarchic commune to setting themselves up as gods, either benevolent or malefic ones.

Whatever the choice of the PCs, two things are clear: there is strength in numbers and it is necessary to protect regular people. With other prana-powered individuals out there, many of which may want to be gods as well (especially of the malefic persuasion), having others to back you up is a good idea.

And with such conveniences as power plants, transmissions lines and fuel pumps blown up, muscle power is the only thing left to get things done, but there aren't a lot of people left either. If regular folk are killed, who is going to dig wells, build temples, farm the land and harvest the crop?

Sure, the PCs can use prana to keep their bodies going, but even gods need worshippers and companionship. And if the characters are good guys, they will not want to abandon apocalypse survivors or let them get murdered.

In this phase, the PCs will be involved with establishing a population center and creating the basis of a new civilization. They will have to kick the asses of would-be conquerors and find innovative ways to use their powers in assisting the rebuilding efforts.

Path of advancement

This phase starts with the arrival of Checzach, the last survivor of an insectoid species that was used as vessels by the Alurans 500 years ago. Like the PCs, Checzach is also prana-powered, but, unlike them, he has had five centuries in which to accumulate power and gain experience in wielding it.

Although prana does extend your lifespan a few centuries, Checzach is from a naturally long-lived species. His long existence has changed his thirst for vengeance into a desire to help other victims of the Drogen.

He has spent the past centuries traveling between the worlds ravaged by the Alurans and helping the survivors create a new civilization for themselves and the prana warriors specifically to understand their abilities.

Checzach has come to Earth to do the same. Besides these goals, he also serves to finally explain in-game to the PCs what happened to them and the world. Checzach will tell them about the Drogen empire, the Aluran royal family, the psionic relocation chamber, everything.

He will invite all living prana wielders to become his students. Checzach frowns upon using powers to subjugate regular folk, but he will accept these warriors as well, because he believes his teachings can change their ways. He won't force them to become pupils though.

If the PCs have the great idea of attacking Checzach, there might be a small chance of them being able to overpower him, if you want, but make it really tough. Remember he has great fighting skills, a prana pool in the thousands and an access rate that is close to 10%. Checzach won't kill the PCs. He will trash them and then offer a new chance for the characters to join him as students.

Besides teaching philosophy and knowledge about the galaxy and its inhabitants, Checzach will reveal the sutras to the prana warriors. The sutras, or the lessons of power, are an excuse to introduce all the superpowers you have in your system core book in the campaign: intangibility, teleportation, duplication, prana drain, you name it.

Even powers that might seem cheesy in this setting, like shrinking, can be allowed if you want. For some extra color, don't let your players simply state they now know how to mimic teleportation, for example. Make them create effects (that can combine different abilities) and give these dramatic names, such as Cry of a Thousand Thunders (autofire sonic attack), Kiss of the Thrice-Thirsty Lamia (armor-piercing constitution drain), Unlimited Celestial Step (long range teleportation) or Soothing Subsuming of the Self (reflexive intangibility to avoid attack).

Like the basic uses, these last for one round (or one minute, depending on the effect) and cost prana points - the sum of all the powers involved. However, to reflect the more efficient use of prana of the sutras, you should give a discount. Something like 10% or 20% should be more than enough incentive to have your players creating personal suites of powers.

This phase will be characterized by the training under Checzach. There will be lots of tests (quests, enigmas, koans), tournament fights to test the students' martial advancement and real battles as the PCs must deal with prana warriors who didn't join Checzach's school and think this is a perfect opportunity to attack the characters' community. They will also need to bring down fellow pupils who fell from the virtuous path and want to use their new abilities to rule the world.

War in the skies

This phase starts when a small group of Alurans decides to settle a quibble about the borders of their noble estates on Earth. They arrive on their corvette and proceed to relocate to (not so) random people on the planet. Make some of the vessels be individuals that are important to the PCs, giving them a personal stake in the upcoming battle.

Checzach will realize immediately what is going on and ask the characters to help him. They must stop the Alurans or they will destroy human civilization again. While he and a few other students contain them on the surface, the PCs must fly to the Drogen ship and destroy the relocation chamber, capturing the ship and possibly an Aluran.

At first, surprised by the appearance of other prana warriors (usually no native life survives their coming and they never go to the same planet twice), the Alurans quickly regain their composure. They will notice Checzach's tactic (if not, the ship captain will inform them of the approach of the PCs) and part of the group will break off to intercept the characters (obviously, it will be the ones possessing their friends and/or loved ones).

Checzach will die holding off the Alurans, so if the PCs succeed, they are on their own. This phase will develop based on the choices they make after the battle. If they captured an Aluran, they can interrogate him (remember Drogen royalty can use prana in their natural forms as well, so that may be dangerous).

If the ship is still functional, they can use it on a revenge mission, trying to stealthily infiltrate Drogen space to deliver a killing blow to the empress herself. Or they could go to the worlds visited by Checzach to convince the alien prana warriors to join in a rebellion, like space Spartacuses.

If the ship was destroyed or it escaped with missing Alurans, the PCs will know that they are living on borrowed time. The empire will not take kindly to the first successful challenge to its authority in two thousand years. They will need to prepare for war.

This will mean establishing alliances with their prana-powered enemies and even trying to create more prana warriors. Checzach might have insinuated that there was a way for the characters to simulate the same unlocking effect of Aluran possession. Now they have to find out how.

When the Aluran force arrives, it will be the last battle of the campaign.

Some Prana Warriors seeds

There's one for each phase.

The Prana Angel: A kid in the PCs' community discreetly starts talking to the people about peace and enlightenment .Whatever the PCs' relationship with the community, the kid will poison it, throwing people against them until a revolt begins. If confronted by the PCs, the kid will manifest prana powers and display abilities beyond the basic ones (which the PCs only learn in the second phase). He will claim he's an angel of God that came back for his people and use that to usurp power from the characters. In reality, the kid was a vessel for Jeki Aluran during the succession battle. Due to a glitch in the relocation chamber, when Jeki left the kid's body, a copy of his consciousness was left behind. The double Jeki does not know it's a copy and believes it's trapped inside the kid's body. Having only a small portion of its original power, Jeki spent the time since the battle learning about this new world and increasing his power. Aware that no human would support one of the aliens that destroyed their world, Jeki came up with the angel plan. Now, confident in his abilities, Jeki has decided to challenge the PCs - the first to fall in his conquest of Earth.

A Test of Character: Checzach tells his pupils that a wandering prana warrior will arrive the next day to challenge each student for a tournament fight to prove who's a superior combatant. Checzach makes it clear that this warrior has no honor and has caused great pain to many innocents, so he wishes him to be defeated in any way possible. However, physical attacks can only be made during the challenges. Outside them, other ways must be found to defeat him. Checzach also makes it clear that he will be deeply disappointed with whomever loses a challenge. The wandering prana warrior, Samiya, is actually a shapeshifted duplicate of Checzach. His appearance at the school is a test of character, not combat skill. Checzach wants to know what lengths his students are willing to go to accomplish their goals. The first few challenges with NPC pupils should demonstrate Samiya's skill and ruthlessness, with Checzach playing the part of disappointed master. A fellow student will suggest to the PCs that they poison Samiya during dinner, preventing him from fighting at peak efficiency. Will the characters agree? Can they think of other ways to stop the wandering warrior? If they stoop really low, will Checzach expel them from the school?

A Champion of Many: The PCs arrive on a planet and try to recruit its only prana warrior for their revolt. He proposes a deal: if they can win a best-of-three tournament against him, he will go. However, if they lose, they will remain and serve his people. The PCs will probably agree, since the odds of them all together winning against one guy are excellent. The first combat proves them wrong, as the champion seems to have inexhaustible stores of prana and an extremely high access rate. Glimpsing a life of servitude and community service on their future, the PCs must find out the champion's secret before the second fight. The truth is that besides his own energy, the champion is also fed by small amounts of prana from all of his people. The PCs need to cut this connection or face another defeat - the final one.

A final word on combat

You might be asking yourself why warriors capable of launching devastating energy blasts from miles away would ever choose to engage in close combat. That's a fair question. If you want close combat to be a common fixture of your game, you could borrow a page from the Dragonball Z rpg and state that force fields only protect against energy attacks.

Alternatively (or even additionally), the cost to raise strength to superhuman levels might be considerably cheaper than that of generating an energy blast of the same power. So, causing damage to an opponent of equal or superior power will be easier with hand-to-hand attacks than offensive powers.

Whatever you do, though, remember the source material for this installment. Battles should be epic affairs where missed attacks open humongous gorges on plains and certain power uses leave mile-wide craters. Even training combats should have grand effects.

Inspiration

Here are some sources of inspiration for this campaign.

Dragonball Z RPG: there is a RPG for the show. It is powered by a modified Fuzion system and includes rules for powers and sheets for the main characters.

Aberrant & Exalted: these games deal with superhuman characters that use energy to power their abilities. Besides tips for conducting your campaign and ideas for adventures, you can use their system to run Prana Warriors.

I hope you liked it. Feel free to share any comments, suggestion and criticisms on the forum. If you ever run this, let me know too.