Campaign Ideas for Mutants and Masterminds?

Hey folks, I was just thinking about how much i want to run a mutants and masterminds game, but then i started thinking...I dont have a great idea for a campaign yet!! So, while i brainstorm, i was wondering if anyone had any suggestions? Campaign ideas for Mutants and Masterminds!! Please help, thanks in advance.

-RB Gnome

One: Go out and read some comics. Archetypes worthy of investigation (through libraries, preferably) include X-men, X-statix (tricky, but really gut-wrenchingly compelling if you can pull it off), Justice League, Powers (which has supers but is mostly about cops), Avengers, and bits of Batman (the Batfamily-oriented stuff). This should give you a good idea of just how different superteams can be. (And superteams are what you need to be studying here; Spiderman can be cool, but he's a loner, and loners aren't a group activity.)

Two: Heroes are defined by the villains they face. This is important for setting tone. Work with players to design villains and nemeses. There's a great deal of difference between fighting Juggernaught, the Green Goblin, Doctor Doom, or Galactus - they all require a completely different approach.

Three: You don't have to do supers, in which case disregard everything above and go wild. Comicbooks are about everything, and a supers system such as M&M can do just about everything without much effort...

Mine revolved around a group of heroes going off to college and strangely finding themselves all in the same set of dorm rooms. As tragedy after tragedy happened at the Faculty of Meta-human studies, they formed a university sponsored superteam.

There's also the looming meta-game knowledge that something planned for the team to come together like this, but they don't know why or for what purpose...

Thanks for the great advice guys! I am actually a very avid comic book reader, I love the New X-Men, if you havent read it yet, check it out, but seriously, I have never run much of anything but DnD. While Im a good DM, it is hard for me to convert my thinking from fantasy to comic book stories, I have a hard time coming up with original powers and really cool villains. At any rate, I think I want something that is compelling but not necessarily overdone. I am a big fan of the teenager/mutants coping with their powers while coping with growing up, but its a bit over-used. Any other ideas out there? All of your feedback is much appreciated, thanks a lot guys.

-RB Gnome

I've always thought a group of superheroes who travels disguised as a rock band would be awfully fun in a very cheesy sort of way. Depends on what you are going for.

You're not the only one who'd love to play or run a Mutants & Masterminds game. I've had a bunch of ideas for running a game, myself, but doubt I'd ever get the chance. Anyway, here're the ideas I've had.

1) Super-Heroes/GURPS IST - I actually don't like the GURPS IST world. It annoys me to hell. But then I looked at rec.games.frp.gurps and I saw a poster there by the name of Joseph Justice and the things he'd done with his campaign, and I was suddenly inspired to take the GURPS IST world and, using the base setting, add things on to it to make it into a world that I could like. Think of it like this: Part of the challenge was creating a world which I could enjoy while using the foundation of the IST world (Of course, that may not be for everyone, but I like that sort of thing. I purposefully sabotage myself for the first couple of minutes when playing Tetris, for instance, just to see if I can get out of the mess I made). I came up with some pretty good ideas, in the end, and liked how the IST world would have looked like had I been able to run it.

2) Super-Heroes/Homebrew - Also came up with ideas for my own world. I've got something in the area of 30-40 super characters of various types made up to one degree or the other for the purpose of using them in a homebrew world.

3) Super-Heroes/DC Universe - I also considered a campaign set in the DC Universe. The plus side to this is I could order the DC HeroClix figures, rebase them, and then all I'd have to do is write up the stats for them in M&M terms. I like the DCU, so it seemed like an appealing thought to me.

4) Sci-Fi/Fantasy World - Ever watch He-Man and the Masters of the Universe? I had an idea for a fantasy world with orcs, vampires, dragons, and magic, but which also had elements of higher technology.

5) Transformers - My own version of the Transformers universe. Every player plays an Autobot, and they fight against the Decepticons as well as other enemies.

Just some ideas I had.

The two games I'm running at the moment (both Pbp's) are both M&M. One is a Batman-style-urban kind of game. All the characters are PL8, and I limited the powers quite a lot. This means the characters are relying more on trained abilities and gadgets rather than being mutants, or aliens, or whatever.

The second game is PL18, just starting out. It's hopefully going to be somewhere between Planetary and the Authority and the JLA. We'll see.

Depending on how interesting your locale is (if it's even a Real Life place), you might want to invent a bunch of villains (or heroes, I guess) based on some of the stereotypical subcultures found in the community.

I don't play supers, but I've come up with a bunch of great ideas for supervillains with a real Sydney flavour, all based on subcultures, ethnic groups, social classes, etc.

Obviously I can't print any of them in the presence of Eric's grandma, but I assure you they're funny as all Heck.

But then I am quite the ignorant bigot...

Anyone remember the comic DNAgents? It was like 20 years ago. Eclipse Comics put it out I think. The heros (Players) were completely genetically engeniered and grown from this big biotech comapany. The real villian was the CEO of the company. Good stuff.

A campaign of Supers I ran a few years ago went over rather well. The premise was that the characters were government sponsored agents working in New York. After a few adventures and analyzing the kinds of turly perverse and dangerous criminals they dealt with the story began to slowly unravel as to the origins of what was going on - the government agency that was in charge of the heroes (as well as the supers in several other locations across the country) were actually creating the bad guys in a lab, setting them free in the community in order to be a serious meance and to get confronted by the heroes.

The reason, the characters later found out, was so that the government agency could justify their ever increasing budget to Congress and the population. They could merely point out that the streets are filled with these maniacs and people like the heroes were the only ones stopping them from running ramshod over the population.

The players enjoyed it as they found out what was going on as they were in the unenviable position of exposing their bosses (and this took a couple of years game-time for the players to slowly unravel the mystery) and risk being lumped into the same position as the crooks that were their bosses.

As far as the GM is concerned, it is an easy and rewarding campaign to set up: government sponsorship meaning that the characters can get handed assignments instead of 'being in the right place at the right time' to stop crime and with the government creating the bad guys, you have free reign to come up with whatever villians you want, justifying their powers, spookiness and eccentricities by saying they were made that way (and had their memories wiped so that when caught they could not sell out the guys that made them).