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robotnik2004"We entered macrospace. Splintered across the endless, infinite worlds of the superspectrum: the immense rainbow of realities where everything you ever imagined is just as real as everything else and all at once."
"Big deal. Then what?"
—Marvel Boy & Oubliette, Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy
My freakish tear of game-related writing continues, with thoughts towards running a straight-up uber-powered superhero game. The notes are all hidden away behind an LJ-cut because these are fragmentary, stream of consciousness jottings, and because I have no idea when or if I would ever run this. Certainly not before Unknown USA ends.
I'd like to play a game with big time world-famous heroes on the order of the Justice League, the Authority, Planetary's the Four. The PCs are the biggest, baddest, most famous hero team on earth. If you're going to put on the shiny rubber and spandex fetish suits, why bother with anything less?
That's not especially original, I know. The key to this game would not be originality but intensity. There are lots of great "strange superhero" ideas out there, or ideas for "supers-mixed-with-X", but this isn't one of them. Inspired by The Authority, The Ultimates, and especially Grant Morrison's all too brief run on Marvel Boy, I'm drawn to playing an all out no apologies superhero game. Now that doesn't mean a stupid superhero game. The best superhero comics (including the ones listed above) are not only filled with rippling sinews and bif! krak! pow! They're also a tornado of wonderful mad ideas, stolen without shame from every other genre you can think of.
So. A globe-hopping game about high-powered superheroes, chaos theory, alternate histories, 21st century pseudoscience, and whatever else we can throw into the blender.
Two probably conflicting story goals:
1. Players, not the GM, are the primary authors. Story is generated in play through player decisions and out of play through player interests. The GM creates the world, facilitates the players, but is in not to be thought of as the "author" or "storyteller." The standard sticks, carrots, and railroad tracks are not going to work on characters who can dropkick an aircraft carrier into orbit.
2. Things happen FAST. I mean seizure-inducing fast. The GM throws a lot at these characters. The world changes every session. A lot of action, a lot of peril, but also a lot of mad ideas. Grant Morrison on benzedrine. No brakes hyper-action at a neck-snapping 180 premises per minute. I want to be fucking sweating from exertion when a session ends.
Hero creation:
The crucial task, not to be taken lightly. Heroes are not only powerful, they must also be iconic, bigger than life. The game will live or die based on how cool the heroes are. Don't start playing, don't even start planning the story in detail, until each and every PC hero inspires genuine drooling fanboy/fangirl glee in all of the players, including the GM. (Often overlooked measure of a good game: the extent to which the players are interested in the stories of each other's characters even when they have no bearing on their own storylines.)
Philosophy:
Start huge, go hard, quit while you're ahead. This game is NOT meant to run indefinitely. Think of it like Morrison's Marvel Boy (just 6 issues) or Ellis' Authority (12 issues). Six sessions would be great—if they were jam packed sessions.
Three possible settings / approaches:
1. Earth 2013. Hyper-technicolor version of our world, ten years into the future. So shiny and futuristic you can eat off it. Like the very last issue of The Invisibles. The future as we imagined it way back in 1999. Global capitalism runs rampant. The Dow at 50,000 and climbing fast. Huge gulf between the haves and have nots. Steal lots of futurist / transhumanist ideas and cutting edge goodies from Bruce Sterling and his ilk. Rave lights and throbbing electronica and maybe flying cars, but only for the ultra-rich. Heroes (and villains) are celebrities, and the PCs are the biggest celebrities on the planet. Not unlike the world of Aberrant, but with nearly a century of crazed superhero history and weirdness a la the Marvel or DC universes. Could be a serious investigation of the conflict between heroism and fame and wealth, or it could be Hey! We're Flying Rock Stars! Either works for me.
2. The Planetary/Tom Strong Option. As above, but our playground is that whole crazed century. Players make up versions of their hero for the Golden Age of comics, the Silver Age, maybe the 80s "Dark Age," and the near future described above. (Heroes are either un-aging, Jenny Sparks style, slow aging, Superman style, or a player can play a hero with different incarnations like the various Flashes or Green Lanterns.) Here's the fun part. We play entirely out of sequence. So we might have an adventure in 2013 one night, then jump back to the pulp 1930s, then up to the badass 1970s, and so on. Through play, not elaborate back story, we generate the wild and crazy history of the superpowered century.
3. Crisis on Infinite Alternate Earths. Instead of jaunting through time, we jaunt through times. Wildly alternate histories. DC's Elseworlds meets Ken Hite's Reality Quakes. Uber-Mounties from a fascist super-Canada. Masked luchadores battle in the blood-stained Temples of Tezcatlipoca. Wu xia world. The US Civil War fought with giant mecha. And everywhere the advance of the history-devouring Qlippoth.
Two sub-options to this:
3a. The Sliders Option. Our heroes hop from one reality to another, but they themselves do not change.
3b. The Elseworlds Option. Players run different versions of their heroes in each and every alternate reality we visit—as in the DC Elseworlds books. The name and the color might be different but the iconic center of the hero is the same.
Game System:
I have no freaking idea.
...
I think it must be the cold weather that's turning my imagination towards meat-headed, testosterone-fueled genres. Compare the mystical, elegaic Unknown USA game I imagined last summer with the "Guy Ritchie roughs up Tim Powers" road movie we're turning it into now. Or consider the other hoary old gaming idea that's been muscling into my normally placid subconscious: Conan-style bad-asses in a screaming Iron Maiden / Boris Vallejo / Heavy Metal Hell. I really thought I'd outgrown that stuff, but apparently no.
"Big deal. Then what?"
—Marvel Boy & Oubliette, Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy
My freakish tear of game-related writing continues, with thoughts towards running a straight-up uber-powered superhero game. The notes are all hidden away behind an LJ-cut because these are fragmentary, stream of consciousness jottings, and because I have no idea when or if I would ever run this. Certainly not before Unknown USA ends.
I'd like to play a game with big time world-famous heroes on the order of the Justice League, the Authority, Planetary's the Four. The PCs are the biggest, baddest, most famous hero team on earth. If you're going to put on the shiny rubber and spandex fetish suits, why bother with anything less?
That's not especially original, I know. The key to this game would not be originality but intensity. There are lots of great "strange superhero" ideas out there, or ideas for "supers-mixed-with-X", but this isn't one of them. Inspired by The Authority, The Ultimates, and especially Grant Morrison's all too brief run on Marvel Boy, I'm drawn to playing an all out no apologies superhero game. Now that doesn't mean a stupid superhero game. The best superhero comics (including the ones listed above) are not only filled with rippling sinews and bif! krak! pow! They're also a tornado of wonderful mad ideas, stolen without shame from every other genre you can think of.
So. A globe-hopping game about high-powered superheroes, chaos theory, alternate histories, 21st century pseudoscience, and whatever else we can throw into the blender.
Two probably conflicting story goals:
1. Players, not the GM, are the primary authors. Story is generated in play through player decisions and out of play through player interests. The GM creates the world, facilitates the players, but is in not to be thought of as the "author" or "storyteller." The standard sticks, carrots, and railroad tracks are not going to work on characters who can dropkick an aircraft carrier into orbit.
2. Things happen FAST. I mean seizure-inducing fast. The GM throws a lot at these characters. The world changes every session. A lot of action, a lot of peril, but also a lot of mad ideas. Grant Morrison on benzedrine. No brakes hyper-action at a neck-snapping 180 premises per minute. I want to be fucking sweating from exertion when a session ends.
Hero creation:
The crucial task, not to be taken lightly. Heroes are not only powerful, they must also be iconic, bigger than life. The game will live or die based on how cool the heroes are. Don't start playing, don't even start planning the story in detail, until each and every PC hero inspires genuine drooling fanboy/fangirl glee in all of the players, including the GM. (Often overlooked measure of a good game: the extent to which the players are interested in the stories of each other's characters even when they have no bearing on their own storylines.)
Philosophy:
Start huge, go hard, quit while you're ahead. This game is NOT meant to run indefinitely. Think of it like Morrison's Marvel Boy (just 6 issues) or Ellis' Authority (12 issues). Six sessions would be great—if they were jam packed sessions.
Three possible settings / approaches:
1. Earth 2013. Hyper-technicolor version of our world, ten years into the future. So shiny and futuristic you can eat off it. Like the very last issue of The Invisibles. The future as we imagined it way back in 1999. Global capitalism runs rampant. The Dow at 50,000 and climbing fast. Huge gulf between the haves and have nots. Steal lots of futurist / transhumanist ideas and cutting edge goodies from Bruce Sterling and his ilk. Rave lights and throbbing electronica and maybe flying cars, but only for the ultra-rich. Heroes (and villains) are celebrities, and the PCs are the biggest celebrities on the planet. Not unlike the world of Aberrant, but with nearly a century of crazed superhero history and weirdness a la the Marvel or DC universes. Could be a serious investigation of the conflict between heroism and fame and wealth, or it could be Hey! We're Flying Rock Stars! Either works for me.
2. The Planetary/Tom Strong Option. As above, but our playground is that whole crazed century. Players make up versions of their hero for the Golden Age of comics, the Silver Age, maybe the 80s "Dark Age," and the near future described above. (Heroes are either un-aging, Jenny Sparks style, slow aging, Superman style, or a player can play a hero with different incarnations like the various Flashes or Green Lanterns.) Here's the fun part. We play entirely out of sequence. So we might have an adventure in 2013 one night, then jump back to the pulp 1930s, then up to the badass 1970s, and so on. Through play, not elaborate back story, we generate the wild and crazy history of the superpowered century.
3. Crisis on Infinite Alternate Earths. Instead of jaunting through time, we jaunt through times. Wildly alternate histories. DC's Elseworlds meets Ken Hite's Reality Quakes. Uber-Mounties from a fascist super-Canada. Masked luchadores battle in the blood-stained Temples of Tezcatlipoca. Wu xia world. The US Civil War fought with giant mecha. And everywhere the advance of the history-devouring Qlippoth.
Two sub-options to this:
3a. The Sliders Option. Our heroes hop from one reality to another, but they themselves do not change.
3b. The Elseworlds Option. Players run different versions of their heroes in each and every alternate reality we visit—as in the DC Elseworlds books. The name and the color might be different but the iconic center of the hero is the same.
Game System:
I have no freaking idea.
...
I think it must be the cold weather that's turning my imagination towards meat-headed, testosterone-fueled genres. Compare the mystical, elegaic Unknown USA game I imagined last summer with the "Guy Ritchie roughs up Tim Powers" road movie we're turning it into now. Or consider the other hoary old gaming idea that's been muscling into my normally placid subconscious: Conan-style bad-asses in a screaming Iron Maiden / Boris Vallejo / Heavy Metal Hell. I really thought I'd outgrown that stuff, but apparently no.
no subject
Date: 2003-02-04 01:16 pm (UTC)The Gentleman from Hopkinton would even be interested in running such a game, and would be interested in sharing/discussing world creation notes with any interested parties. I've been developing a very suitable amalgam/homage universe setting for a number of years that would work very nicely.
The Gentleman from Hopkinton, with all he has on his plate right now, cannot believe he is even suggesting such an idea.
Since I cannot hold back the floodwaters of my brain until Eden releases Beyond Human, I would likely use either Mutants & Masterminds for this endeavor, or my old beloved DC Heroes/MEGS - a system that simply doesn't work for characters who cannot throw around trucks like they were matchbox cars!
Chris, not registered, just slummin
no subject
Date: 2003-02-04 01:56 pm (UTC)I'm not familiar at all with DC or Beyond Human, so I can't comment.
And, you realize of course that you now stand at one mention of this game. Mind your tongue, or Jere will go nuts on you... that man speaks softly and carries a big stick...