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Are there any compelling, original, fan-created super hero settings available online (for any RPG system)? I may have been tapped to run a supers campaign sometime in the next few months, and I'm loathe to do it in any setting weighted down by 30+ years of canon and contradictions (e.g., Marvel Universe, DC Universe, etc). Likewise, I'm not particularly hot on using any 'default' setting that comes packaged with a game. So. . . are you aware of any compelling, original, fan-created super hero settings that are available online?
Note: I did post a similar query elsewhere, though this one has been narrowed to specifically target fan-created settings.
Are there any compelling, original, fan-created super hero settings available online (for any RPG system)? I may have been tapped to run a supers campaign sometime in the next few months, and I'm loathe to do it in any setting weighted down by 30+ years of canon and contradictions (e.g., Marvel Universe, DC Universe, etc). Likewise, I'm not particularly hot on using any 'default' setting that comes packaged with a game. So. . . are you aware of any compelling, original, fan-created super hero settings that are available online?
Note: I did post a similar query elsewhere, though this one has been narrowed to specifically target fan-created settings.
Not aware of any. In fact the only supers games I've ever played have been Marvel for one campaign lasting a number of months and high-level D&D. The thing about Marvel was that we DIDN'T use the Marvel Universe setting. We borrowed a few things, a few notable characters as NPC's, SOME of the history, but otherwise the game was characters that WE generated, and plots, story lines, NPC's, and locations that the GM came up with himself. Our characters were based in the city where we were IRL (Seattle) and just went from there.
I've always had an itch to do that again with Marvel - have the players generate their own characters, start with the PC's based in a nearby, real-world city (or in any case one that they would all be reasonably familiar with) and make the rest up as I went along. Only real hitches are, A) getting players on board with a supers game as opposed to another D&D game, B) characters that are hopelessly imbalanced in power levels as happened in that one campaign, and C) not being familiar enough with MSH to feel at all comfortable with running a game of it on the fly.
__________________ Old School: It ain't what you play - it's how you play it.
"Other than the matter of me doing a good deal of extemperaneous creation in play sessions, I am not a paricularly notable Game Master " E.G.G.
I could recommend Godlike and Freedom City as settings. I will admit the second has a number of similarities with the others. I think that Astro City is getting a write up as a setting, and given the limited continuity it would be good.
Again I don't know if these are up on the internet in terms of what you need.
What type of supers setting? Silver Age? Iron Age? Modern?
Anything, really -- so long as it's fairly unique and/or original. I am not adverse to any time period or genre mashing (see above). I keep thinking that true superheroes in fantasy (like Providence) might be fun, though.
I can't say I've found one online that's been compelling enough to adopt.
I would suggest looking at the Freedom City setting for M&M; it's a nice homage-filled setting that hits most of the high points without really nailing you down.
I almost went with a Marvel or DC universe, but it would have been my own take on it. Most X-men continuity after the death of Dark Phoenix would niot have happened, no Civil War, etc. Streamline the continuity and you might find it more palatable.
Another interesting take I read once was Aaron Allston's Strike Force campaign. The original basis of the campaign was a world where all the superheroes from any company had existed at some time. They appeared when they appeared in the real world, then aged in normal time. We'd now be probably on our fourth Batman, Mary Marvel and Superman had a kid who became the new Captain Marvel, etc. Mix, match, shake well and homage away.
I did do a 'Heroes'-like thing where the first superheroes and villains on Earth were created via a Cthulhian ritual. 12 people (6 pcs, 6 npcs) were going to be sacrificed and the ritual went wrong. They were spared the sight of the god Shub-Niggurath, but were bathed in her mutagenic Milk which gave them various powers. All the captives were from a local university (they'd been lured to a party and drugged). They quickly found out that, true to the fecund nature of Shub-Niggurath, that exchange of body fluids could gift random powers to others; sex, blood transfusions, etc would all cause transformations. Things began to balloon out of control, especially since four of the other six belonged to a notorious fraternity, and eventually it came to a confrontation with the US goverment when they basically declared Northern California as a soveriegn nation for the newly powered.
Anything, really -- so long as it's fairly unique and/or original. I am not adverse to any time period or genre mashing (see above). I keep thinking that true superheroes in fantasy (like Providence) might be fun, though.
From Mutants & Masterminds, Worlds of Freedom has a fantasy setting based on Freedom City (along with other alternate-universe comic staples), Paragons covers modern-style supers-as-a-recent-phenomenon (ala the Heroes TV show), and Wild Cards (based on the series of the same name) was just released recently.
I'm partial to more modern settings with unified origins (the "kitchen-sink" style from the Silver Age where magic and super-technology and mutants and aliens and hundreds of people in freak accidents and mythological beings and... isn't my cup of tea, usually), so both Paragons and Wild Cards appeal to me quite a bit.
EDIT: Fan created? My bad. Nothing comes immediately to mind. The settings we've used in our M&M games have been pretty comprehensive, but we don't have everything available online, unfortunately, so they're not really "complete". You're welcome to browse our wiki for ideas. You might be able to look for ideas on the Atomic Think Tank's M&M setting forum.
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Last edited by Jackelope King; 26th August 2008 at 03:42 AM..
I did do a 'Heroes'-like thing where the first superheroes and villains on Earth were created via a Cthulhian ritual. 12 people (6 pcs, 6 npcs) were going to be sacrificed and the ritual went wrong. They were spared the sight of the god Shub-Niggurath, but were bathed in her mutagenic Milk which gave them various powers. All the captives were from a local university (they'd been lured to a party and drugged). They quickly found out that, true to the fecund nature of Shub-Niggurath, that exchange of body fluids could gift random powers to others; sex, blood transfusions, etc would all cause transformations. Things began to balloon out of control, especially since four of the other six belonged to a notorious fraternity, and eventually it came to a confrontation with the US goverment when they basically declared Northern California as a soveriegn nation for the newly powered.
That sounds neat, but a little darker than what I aimed for.
My setting was initially inspired by heroes like The Shadow, Doc Savage, Captain Midnight, etc -- though I ended up incorporating sources as diverse as "Who Goes There?" (the short story, to which Doc Savage is linked to in canon via the character of MacReady) and, later, Cthulhu Mythos stuff.
The idea was that the various pulp novels, radio shows, and funny paper strips based on the exploits of these hereos were, in fact, based on the actual missions of a special OSS group founded to thwart domestic and foreign threats of an unnatural or 'sensitive' nature.
The various media outlets were government owned operations, functioning both as propaganda mills and revenue streams for this secret group. And, of course, with the exploits of the group being fictionalized and offered in a very public market, no sane person would believe them to be true (and if they did, nobody would believe them).
The group was based in a sub-basement of the Empire State building (it was this group for which the zeppelin/gyro dock at the top of the tower was built) and had been involved with a number of 'doomsday' scenarios, from the rising of sunken R'lyeh to the incident at Outpost 31 as fictionalized in Who Goes There.
Originally, the intent was to play modern day government agents recruited by these now elderly heroes, as the group decides to reactivate after a panicked email from a collegue in Europe. Basically, the original group is in no shape to undertake field operations, despite their enhancments and powers. . . old age has simply caught up to them.
In retrospect, I think that rather than a 'continuing legacy' angle, it might be more fun to dedicate actual play to the group's heyday, with PCs creating the original group's members. Though I will have to remove or otherwise alter a lot of the setting, I think it might be worth it.
We had a game that involved silly heroes that was part "Whose Line is it Anyway?" and part "The Tick" silliness. My hero was a child actor who had all of the properties of light, brightness, speed, etc. His archenemies were his twin sisters modeled after the Olsen twins. Because, well, they're evil, in a Wal-Mart kind of way. We ended up developing our own system derived partly by Mutants and Masterminds, but it had some Gurps stuff thrown in.
Go to atomic think tank... they have scads and scads and scads of different settings and mashups and re-imaginings...
Just buckets...
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...disquieting...
There was no end to his patience and endurance. He played day and night, his obsession was somewhat disquieting. It was less as if he were playing to dispel gloom or beguile tedium than as if he were giving himself up to the fangs of gaming devils."
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You could look online at RPG.Net, as the boards there seem to be going though a supers phase at the moment. As I recall, there have recently been threads about supers who get their powers from Elder gods and become eldritch, twisted, things of horror... Soviet supers... superpowered Dr. Manhattan or Superman types as conquerors... I think WWII supers... and even pulpy types like Doc Savage or the Shadow. There have also been some interesting discussions about what the world would be like, so if you've got the time and the inclination to do some worldbuilding that would work. However, none of the ideas were fully fleshed out, so all of those would require the aforementioned time and inclination. Of the previous ideas, I personally think the Mythos-origin and Soviet-origin supers threads were generally the best for me in terms of inspiration.
If you're not at all interested in doing the pre-campaign work or at the moment simply find it something you don't have time for, I don't believe you're in luck. A reasonably detailed "fan-made" pre-built setting is not something I've seen out there, which is a shame, because I think the Mythos and Soviet ideas, for example, have some interesting aspects to them that aren't generally covered by more mainstream supers settings, and have sufficient depth and breadth to have what I suspect would be a non-trivial design headspace. However, I think they failed for several reasons which lead me to suspect most fan-made projects will fail similarly. In the event you DO find one, please post it here, as I'd be interested in it.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack of Shadows
No one has suggested sentient magic items yet. It's one thing when your sword talks to you, it's quite another when it calls you "Dad".
You could look online at RPG.Net, as the boards there seem to be going though a supers phase at the moment. As I recall, there have recently been threads about supers who get their powers from Elder gods and become eldritch, twisted, things of horror... Soviet supers... superpowered Dr. Manhattan or Superman types as conquerors... I think WWII supers... and even pulpy types like Doc Savage or the Shadow. There have also been some interesting discussions about what the world would be like, so if you've got the time and the inclination to do some worldbuilding that would work. However, none of the ideas were fully fleshed out, so all of those would require the aforementioned time and inclination. Of the previous ideas, I personally think the Mythos-origin and Soviet-origin supers threads were generally the best for me in terms of inspiration.
If you're not at all interested in doing the pre-campaign work or at the moment simply find it something you don't have time for, I don't believe you're in luck. A reasonably detailed "fan-made" pre-built setting is not something I've seen out there, which is a shame, because I think the Mythos and Soviet ideas, for example, have some interesting aspects to them that aren't generally covered by more mainstream supers settings, and have sufficient depth and breadth to have what I suspect would be a non-trivial design headspace. However, I think they failed for several reasons which lead me to suspect most fan-made projects will fail similarly. In the event you DO find one, please post it here, as I'd be interested in it.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack of Shadows
No one has suggested sentient magic items yet. It's one thing when your sword talks to you, it's quite another when it calls you "Dad".
It's not online, but the best campaign I ever ran personally was a supers game set in 1900.
The way I did it:
1) Use the setting for Space:1889 as the main default.
2) Add those additional Wellsian and Vernesian elements you want.
3) Crib liberally from pulp fiction, especially sci-fi/fantasy pulp like John Carter or Leigh Brackett's Skaith stories, tales of Atlantis, etc.
4) Find some other sources: Wild, Wild West (TV show and movie), Kung Fu (original series), League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Gotham by Gaslight, William Gibson's Difference Engine, Sherlock Holmes stories... Even things that aren't strictly period can get incorporated with some clever rewriting- Hellboy, Wu Shu martial arts flicks and James Bond movies can be rewritten to make fine period adventures.
5) Put your own spin on it: in mine, the Martians were addicted to opium...and it made them into psychotic workhorses (think Alien Nation). I also stole stuff from Michael Moorcock's Bastable books (large colonial air-navies, a mysterious warlord from the East, etc.).
6) Listen to your players. If they get inspired- and almost anyone knows about this era to get stoked about this- their imaginations will spur a lot of your campaign. I was trying to figure out how to work in Atlantis, and one of my players turned in a PC background based on an anime character who was an adolescent amnesiac Atlantean with a whip. Before long, they were caught up in the struggles between Atlanteans and Lemurians (and the surface world besides- thank you Namor, the Sub-Mariner stories).
The thing about Marvel was that we DIDN'T use the Marvel Universe setting. We borrowed a few things, a few notable characters as NPC's, SOME of the history, but otherwise the game was characters that WE generated, and plots, story lines, NPC's, and locations that the GM came up with himself. Our characters were based in the city where we were IRL (Seattle) and just went from there.
" E.G.G.
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