Ebberon as a Superheroes Campaign

[Darkness]

not sure why you have no responses yet.

Weekends can often be kind of slow. *shrug*

 

[R_kajdi]

Will you be allowing classes other than core? It would be interesting to make a superhero out of the Warlock class from Complete arcane. A couple levels of sorcerer would also be a neat way to add a few superhero-like poweres to another class.

Are you enforcing the multiclassing restrictions? Might be a good idea to allow more multiclassing, so PCs can dip into classes such as sorcerer to create unique characters.

My group already drops the very dumb monk/paladin mulitclassing straightjacket, so at the very least that's no issue. I am thinking about dropping al the multiclass restrictions, but I'm still worried that it may lead to some of the stupid builds you see on the min/max boards (though most of that is based on prestiege class abuse, which I may stop by only allowing a max of 1-2 of them per character)

As far as non-core, it's almost all good. By consensus, the CW samurai is non-existent, and if someone wants to play a sam, we'd use the old PrC from S&F or the class from OA. All of the rest of them are fine, but I still worry if some crazy combo will break the whole thing (scout dervish comes pretty close IMHO) A level or two of sorc defining powers is a great idea, and one I'll have to bounce off people to see if it's interesting to them.

Ray

 

[the Jester]

I've heard alot of people mention that mid to high level D&D sort of pushes away from the strict old-school fantasy genre, and more towards what has been described to me as "super heroes with swords". My idea sort of expounds on this concept: What if I set out to make a campaign that plays this metaphor to the hilt, meaning that the characters may literally be superheores in their own right, with all the genre conventions that go along with it? (costumes, odd plot twists, constant character revivals, ect) .... Anybody out there tried anything similar and have any advice on the subject?

Ray

Yeah, I had a superhero dnd game back in 2e... there was Iron Dwarf, a dwarven priest of technology, who by the end of the campaign had a suit of intelligent magic technilogical armor called Adam... there was Dr. Magic, who would tweak his spell components to change his spells... the Shadow, who had used a wish to gain the ability to turn into a shadow, and his sidekick Shade.... etc.

It was a fun, wacky game in a fun, wacky setting.

Expect your pcs to earn fame/notoriety. Expect them to become movers and shakers in the political scene. With superheroic types it's sometimes fun to throw a foil at them- a J. Jonah Jameson to their Spider-Man.

And you will need good villains. A hero is mostly defined by his enemies.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Why stick to D&D, and not simply switch over to Mutants & Masterminds?

Personally, I'd recommend avoiding silly costumes - they just wouldn't fit, IMO. But if you look, there are plenty of thematically appropriate archetypes for superheroes...

Gifted sorcerers & wizards, insanely competent "normal humans" (like Doc Savage), warforged prototypes, powerful psionic kalashtar, and so on. The "superheros" should be mostly large-than-life members of the normal races, and not mutants, extraterrestrials, and so on.

I hope I am making any sense here...

 

[R_kajdi]

Why stick to D&D, and not simply switch over to Mutants & Masterminds?

Personally, I'd recommend avoiding silly costumes - they just wouldn't fit, IMO. But if you look, there are plenty of thematically appropriate archetypes for superheroes...

Gifted sorcerers & wizards, insanely competent "normal humans" (like Doc Savage), warforged prototypes, powerful psionic kalashtar, and so on. The "superheros" should be mostly large-than-life members of the normal races, and not mutants, extraterrestrials, and so on.

I hope I am making any sense here...

Well, the main reason I'm sticking to D&D instead fo doing something else is I have one of 'those groups'. They are so insular as far as gaming goes that they won't even play non-D&D d20. Not surprisingly, they are also hardcore rules sticklers, which drives me up the wall sometimes. However, they seem more than willing to play D&D with different fronts on it, so that's sort of my restriction here.

The archetypes you brought up seem pretty good. Sticking towards standard races is also a good idea, though the genre certainly makes the oddball character make alot more sense (Couldn't you do the Things as an Incarnate Golem (from SS) ruleswise and have it work out pretty good?) Alot of my plans as far as adding the wierd stuff to the campaign involves templating existing stuff (ex: Boomers are going to be Warforged Barbarians with the Feral template from SS. Illegal sort of, but I think it reflects the savage nature of the creatures, esp in BCG 2040) The whole thing seems to be ruleswise to "strip off the serial numbers" and just put stuff together that works.

I'm actually thinking about blogging out this campaign. Would livejournal/blogger links be appropriate for an Actual Play/Story Corner thread? I may just leave comments resticted to the players in the campaign, so that I can keep the content consistent.

Ray

Ray

 

[LoneWolf23]

Both Marvel and DC have come up with "Fantasy Versions" of their classic characters. DC's had a few Elseworlds including one with the Batman characters as Pirates, and Marvel had the "Avatars" mini-series featuring the Avengers as an Arthurian-style group of fantasy knights with other Marvel characters in interesting cameos (such as X-Men being Changelings). Those would be good sources of inspiration.

Another excellent inspiration would be White Wolf's Exalted rpg, with it's demigod-like Exalted, humans imbued with great power, the mightiest of them capable of challenging even the gods..

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

A thought on your campaign set-up:

One of the big tensions of "Bubblegum Crisis" was that the boomers were touted as useful workers by GENOM corporation, and that all incidents that pointed to their aggressiveness were hushed up - and that was the main reason why the Knight Sabers were labeled vigilanted, because their attacks were threatening their dirty little secret.

If you want to keep this, I suggest letting the Sharn branch of House Cannith mass-produce Warforged V2.0 - this time, they have no free will of their own, honest! They should be generally placid, but go berserk under rare conditions... And of course, there should be some nasty secrets behind their construction. Perhaps they are recycling the souls of the dead to make those new warforged?

(Of course, one of your party should be a renegade member of House Cannith...)

Another thing: The Knights Saber are superheroes that define themselves through their gadgets - their suits. But most superheroes rely more on their innate powers and capabilities, so you should limit major magic items to characters who rely on them for their powers - such as artificers. All others should only have minor stuff. This is realistic for Eberron - low-power magic items are very common, but the better ones are very rare...

 

[R_kajdi]

That may be a very interesting way to turn things. My original plan was based more out of BCG 2040, where Boomerism was sort of a disease for the robot servents brought on by an old experimental Boomer model. Having the 'forged be sort of victims in the schemes of some outside force feeds into a whole moral triangle I was trying to set up, which of course included the Lord of Blades as one of the points. The whole 'enemy of my enemy" is genre appropriate, and also plays off the whole moral ambiguity of the setting (is the Lord of Blades the setting's terrorist or its prime liberator and freedom fighter?) which seems to be the theme of the more "serious" of comics (if you can use that word for a comic) However, a faction of subservient, yet easily influenced 'forged will only help to add an extra issue to the whole thing, if only to give the PCs something to sympathize with the Lord of Blades on.

The item restriction seems like an interesting idea also. However, I think that most of the characters I have heard something from already are sort of gadget based (One is a Green Arrow/Hawkeye style hero, so he definately needs magic arrows to simulate all the various special arrows that he has) so it might not be appropriate to really limit these characters. The nice thing about the twist of not having direct loot is that the payers don't get to go on huge fantasy shopping trips for gear, which is one of the things I've found that really detracts from the game as a whole.

Ray